Commentators often cite theKorean Waras the first major act of the
containment policy, though it is unclear why aUnited Nationspolice action
against massive and direct military invasion from North Korea need be justified
under such a doctrine at all. If Korea was an example of containment, then it is
again evidence of the moderation of the policy, given the way both Presidents
Truman and Eisenhower avoided the temptation to push further in their
actions against communist China.
Containment became a more aggressive policy when, as a result of a belief
that communism had a natural tendency to spread over borders and infect
neighbouring countries (the domino theory), the Americans invested military
support in protecting South Vietnam from internal and external communist
pressure. TheVietnam Warindeed demonstrated one of the major logical
problems in containment, which was its inability to distinguish between
aggression by the existing communist societies of the early post-war world,
and the indigenous development of apparently similar movements elsewhere.
Vietnam apart, containment has mainly been a matter of foreign aid, especially
in theMarshall Plan, and indirect military aid in the form of weapons credits
and training help.
The policy ofde ́tenteof the late 1960s and 1970s might have been seen as
bringing an end to containment, or at least a recognition that there could never
be anything more than a struggle between the Soviet Union and the USA to
impart a world view on nations that might very well have ideas of their own.
However, the apparent weakening of de ́tente, as well as the increasing success
of Soviet propaganda and aid programmes in theThird World, and especially
in Latin America and Africa, saw the return of containment as a popular idea in
the USA during what has often been called the secondcold warin the early
1980s. With the collapse of Soviet domination in Eastern Europe, and of
communism virtually throughout the formerSoviet bloc, it is unclear
whether containment will have any policy relevance in the future. This is
partly because the doctrine never has been applied rigorously to Chinese
communism.
The USA, through a combination of bad luck, poor judgement and lack of
choice has too often tended to support regimes of extremely unpleasant
character against the populations of the countries in question under the name
of containment, thus bringing into disrepute a policy which, in general terms,
was probably the inevitable consequence of abandoningisolationism. With
hindsight, it was not inevitable that the USA’s ‘world policeman’ role should
have required the belief in a single centre of evil spreading its tentacles
everywhere, and whatever international enemies may be identified in the
future, no such simplistic building ofcordons sanitairesis likely to re-emerge.
However, there are always tendencies in US political thinking to oversimplify
international politics, and there are some signs that a similar process is at work
Containment