Why did the US want to contain communism after ww2?

The Truman Doctrine, also known as the policy of containment, was President Harry Truman’s foreign policy that the US would provide political, military, and economic aid to democratic countries under the threat of communist influences in order to prevent the expansion of communism. The policy marked a step away from the US’s previous isolationist policies, which discouraged the US from becoming involved in foreign affairs.

The policy was introduced during a speech to Congress in 1947. President Truman urged Congress to grant financial aid to Greece and Turkey because Great Britain could no longer assist them. The Greek government needed help fighting against the Greek Communist Party, and the Soviets were threatening Turkey. President Truman successfully convinced Congress to provide $400 million in aid to support the two countries. The Marshall Plan, which was the American initiative to provide economic assistance to democratic countries in Western Europe, was also part of this policy. The US feared that desperate European countries would be more likely to turn to communism. About a year later, the US organized the creation of NATO, which consisted of 12 North American and European nations, as a defensive military bloc against any Soviet efforts to expand communism.

The Truman Doctrine was not limited to Europe. The US involvement in the Korean War was the first instance of the Truman policy in Asia. The Korean War began in 1950 with the North Korean army invading past the 38th parallel, a boundary that divided the country between the Soviet-backed North Koreans and the US-backed South Koreans. The US perceived this move as an attempt to expand communism and subsequently joined the war to defend South Korea. In 1953, the war ended in an armistice, which drew a new boundary near the 38th parallel and created the demilitarized zone between North Korea and South Korea.

The Vietnam War, which began shortly after the armistice, was another significant instance of the Truman Doctrine in Asia. The communist government of North Vietnam (backed by the Soviet Union) battled the South Vietnam government (backed by the US). While the US won several major military victories, due to lack of American popular support, the US pulled out of Vietnam though hostilities between the North and South had not ceased. The US failed its objective of preventing a communist takeover, as Vietnam ultimately unified under communist rule in 1975.

The Korean and Vietnam Wars are often referred to as proxy wars because the US and the Soviet Union did not directly fight each other. Each backed opposing forces in conflicts in Korea and Vietnam.

America’s involvement in Latin America mostly centered around Fidel Castro’s communist government of Cuba. In April 1961, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) attempted to overthrow Fidel Castro in the Bay of Pigs invasion to reinforce the American commitment to fighting communism in the Cold War. However, not only did the invasion fail, but it also fanned the flames of American-Cuban- Soviet tensions, which culminated in the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. In July 1962, the Soviet Union had secretly begun moving nuclear weapons into Cuba, which the US discovered by surveillance. After a series of communications between the US and the Soviet Union that lasted until late October, both countries eventually came to a resolution, narrowly avoiding war, in which the Soviets would agree to remove their missiles from Cuba if the US agreed to remove their missiles from Turkey.

Containment was a foreign policy of the United States of America, introduced at the start of the Cold War, aimed at stopping the spread of Communism and keeping it "contained" and isolated within its current borders of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR or the Soviet Union) instead of spreading to a war-ravaged Europe.

The United States feared specifically a domino effect, that the communism of the USSR would spread from one country to the next, destabilizing one nation which would, in turn, destabilize the next and allow for communist regimes to dominate the region. Their solution: cutting communist influence off at its source or enticing struggling nations with more funding than communist countries were providing.

Although containment may have specifically been meant as a term to describe the U.S. strategy for the curtailment of communism from spreading outward from the Soviet Union, the idea of containment as a strategy for cutting off nations such as China and North Korea still persist to this day.

The Cold War and America's Counter-Plan for Communism

The Cold War emerged after World War Two when nations formerly under Nazi rule ended up split between the conquests of the USSR (pretending to be liberators) and the newly freed states of France, Poland, and the rest of Nazi-occupied Europe. Since the United States had been a key ally in liberating western Europe, it found itself deeply involved in this newly divided continent: Eastern Europe wasn't being turned back into free states, but under the military and increasingly political control of the Soviet Union.

Further, western European countries appeared to be wobbling in their democracies because of socialist agitation and collapsing economies, and the United States began to suspect that the Soviet Union was using communism as a means to make western democracy fail by destabilizing these countries and bringing them into the folds of communism.

Even countries themselves were dividing in half over the ideas of how to move forward and recover from the last World War. This resulted in a lot of political and indeed military turmoil for the years to come, with such extremes as the Berlin Wall being established to separate East and West Germany due to the opposition to communism.

The United States wanted to prevent this from spreading further in Europe and on to the rest of the world, so they developed a solution called containment to attempt to manipulate the socio-political future of these recovering nations.

The U.S. Involvement in Border States: Containment 101

The concept of containment was first outlined in George Kennan's "Long Telegram," which was sent to the U.S. Government from his position in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. It arrived in Washington on February 22, 1946, and circulated widely around the White House until Kennan made it public in an article called "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" — this became known as X Article because the authorship was attributed to X.

Containment was adopted by President Harry Truman as part of his Truman Doctrine in 1947, which redefined America's foreign policy as one that supports the "free people who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressures," according to Truman's speech to Congress that year.

This came at the height of the Greek Civil War of 1946 - 1949 when much of the world was in conflict over which direction Greece and Turkey should and would go, and the United States agreed to help both equally to avoid the possibility that the Soviet Union could coerce these nations into communism.

Acting deliberately, at times aggressively, to involve itself in the border states of the world, to keep them from turning communist, the United States spearheaded a movement that would eventually lead to the creation of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization). These acts of arbitration could include sending funds, such as in 1947 when the CIA spent large amounts to influence the result of Italy's elections helping the Christian Democrats defeat the Communist party, but it also could mean wars, leading to US involvement in Korea, Vietnam and elsewhere.

As a policy, it has drawn a fair amount of praise and criticism. It can be seen to have directly affected the politics of many states, but it drew the west into supporting dictators and other people simply because they were enemies of communism, rather than by any broader sense of morality. Containment remained central to American foreign policy throughout the Cold War, officially ending with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Why did the US want to contain communism?

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