Cold War And Global Containment, 1946-75 Essay

Throughout the Cold War, from period of the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan in 1947 through National Security Memorandum 68 in 1950, the U.S. was attempting to expand its system worldwide, at least outside the Soviet Bloc and China, wherever such expansion was possible. George Kennan’s doctrine of containment, formulated in the 1940s when he was head of the Policy Planning Staff at the State Department, was based on this analysis of a police state with insecure and paranoid leadership that expanded opportunistically rather than by a design for world conquest. As a realist, Kennan believed that the industrialized Western powers like Germany, Britain, France and Japan were the most vital political, military and economic allies, and also bulwarks against Soviet expansionism, so he believed the U.S. should make their economic and security needs the primary goal in foreign policy. Based on this analysis, the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) were created in 1947-49 to contain the Soviets in Europe, and this alliance remained in place until the end of the Cold War—and beyond.
After the Soviets successfully tested their first atomic bomb in 1949, followed by the communist revolution in China in 1949, the National Security Council again revised and expanded its Cold War strategy, as outlined the NSC 68 of 1950. Contrary to Kennan’s limited, realist policy of containment, this document called for an all-out effort against global communism, including a large expansion in the military budget, more economic assistance for U.S. allies, construction of the hydrogen bomb, and for rollback of communism around the periphery of the Soviet Union. Most of these recommendations were not actually implemented until the beginning of the Korean War in June 1950, however. NSC 68 called for all methods short of war to contain and roll back communism, as well as for policies to strengthen the economy of the U.S. and its allies, and a more thoroughgoing campaign against internal subversion and sabotage. It also asserted that the U.S. should build the H-bomb before the Soviets, and reaffirmed that the U.S. would not go to war except against a clear cut act of aggression, which is how the Truman administration regarded the North Korean attack on South Korea.
During the globalized phase of the Cold War, in the Third World (as the periphery or developing world was then termed) the U.S. did attempt to ensure the existence of anti-Communist regimes in Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and, to a much lesser extent, Africa. Latin American was always a lesser priority, unless covert or overt action was required against leftist governments such as Guatemala in 1954, Cuba in 1960-62 (where the CIA failed to dislodge Fidel Castro), Brazil in 1964, Chile in 1973 and Nicaragua in the 1980s. In this region, however, the standard American foreign policy was to support friendly dictators and local oligarchs, and given the mass poverty and discontent in most of Latin American, it preferred authoritarian, anti-Communist regimes to democratic ones. Africa for the most part remained peripheral to U.S. foreign policy throughout the Cold War, given that it remained mostly a British and French sphere of influence. One notable exception was the Congo in 1960, in which the U.S. cooperated with Belgium in overthrowing as assassinating the leftist nationalist Patrice Lumumba and installing Robert Mobutu as a friendly dictator. Iran was a vital American interest during the Cold War because of its strategic location and vast oil reserves. For this reason, the CIA overthrew the government of Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 when he nationalized the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (British Petroleum), and then supported the Shah until the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Certainly a case could be made that Iran opted out of the Cold War at that point, since its new government was hostile to both the West and the Soviet Union, and has often found itself economically and militarily isolated for the last thirty years.
At times, of course, the friendly authoritarian regimes simply failed and no amount of American support could prop them up. South Vietnam was the most dramatic American failure of the Cold War, where not even 555,000 ground troops, massive bombing with everything in the arsenal short of nuclear weapons—more tonnage dropped on Indochina than during the entire Second World War—and unlimited economic aid, were able to salvage the client regime the U/S. had established there after the French withdrawal in 1954. Another major failure occurred in Iran, where the friendly dictator that the U.S. and Britain had first installed in 1941, and then preserved in power through covert action against a left-wing nationalist government in 1953, was finally overthrown in an Islamic revolution in 1979. On other occasions, the U.S. even supported Third World nationalists against its European allies, most famously when Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956 and Britain, France and Israel occupied Suez. To a surprising extent, the U.S. hegemony was able to accommodate non-Communist nationalism of the Nasserite variety, even when it proclaimed itself to be socialistic or corporatist. When Third World countries attempted to ally with the Soviets, however, the U.S. response was harsh, including covert and overt warfare.
In the developing world, the U.S. government has often regarded democracy as a grave danger to its economic, political and military interests, and the historical record shows conclusively that it has intervened repeatedly against it. So it did in Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s when reformist governments appeared to be a threat to American investments and business interests. This is not to idealize all the nationalist or radical leaders of the developing world, since they can also be quite corrupt and repressive, but these numerous examples of regime change do indeed reveal the motivations and priorities of American foreign policy in these regions over the last 110 years. In globalizing containment to all these areas that Kennan and the other ‘realists’ regarded as peripheral to the conflict with the Soviet Union, particularly in the seemingly endless debacle of Vietnam, the U.S. government militarized and expanded his doctrine far beyond any level he considered practical—or even rational.