Cold War Policy Of Containment example essay topic

The Second World War destroyed the old diplomatic system of "great powers" and replaced it with a polarized world of two superpowers. Germany, Japan, and Italy were occupied and demilitarized. France, Britain, and China had all suffered heavy losses, and their economies were in shambles. Although the Soviets had suffered over 15 million casualties during WW II and witnessed the burning and bombing of much of European Russia, the USSR still possessed the most powerful infantry in the world.

The US undoubtedly emerged from the war as the world's most powerful nation. The US had the largest navy and air force, and its economy had grown massively during the war. Employment in the US for women had risen from about 20% in 1939 to 60% in 1945 (May 50). Perhaps most importantly, the US had a monopoly on the atom bomb. Both these countries, the US and the USSR, once allies had a different agenda on their mind. The United States was looking for stabilizing themselves and help out those countries that were destroyed after the war.

On the other hand, the USSR was seeking to spread communism around and wanted to become a force to reckon with. The United States had feared the global spread of communism and sought to fight it, the Cold War began. With the beginning of the Cold War in effect, a set of policies was established to "contain" the spread of communism, both internally and externally, in the United States. These policies would prove to contain foreign affairs more effectively than to help with domestic ones. In the home front all that could be seen is fear of what was happening around them. The idea that at any given moment nuclear and atomic warfare could occur lead many people to think differently about the way they should live.

Indeed, containment had its effect on shaping roles of women, how men should react to situations and brought about a sexual revolution to our nation, but they would have no real positive effect on the actual Cold War and their reactions were fired up by hostility. America's Policy of Containment was introduced by George Kennan in 1947. This policy had a few good points but many more bad points. Kennan's depiction of communism as a "malignant parasite" that had to be contained by all possible measures became the basis of the Truman Doctrine, Marshall Plan, and National Security Act in 1947. In his Inaugural Address of January 20, 1949, Truman made four points about his "program for peace and freedom": support the UN, the European Recovery Program, the collective defense of the North Atlantic, and a "bold new program" for technical aid to poor nations.

Because of his programs, "the future of mankind will be assured in a world of justice, harmony and peace" (Nash, 716-719). Containment was not just a policy. It was a way of life. In 1945 the United States saw the Soviet Union as its principal ally. By 1947, it saw the Soviet Union as its principal opponent. The United States misunderstood the Soviet regime.

Despite much pretense, national security had not been a major concern of US planners and elected officials. historical records reveal this clearly. Few serious analysts took issue with George Kennan's position that it is not Russian military power which is threatening us, it is Russian political power. With President Eisenhower's consistent view that the Russians intended no military conquest of Western Europe and that the major role of NATO was to convey a feeling of confidence to exposed populations, which was supposed to make them sturdier, politically, in their opposition to Communist inroads, the US dismissed possibilities for peaceful resolution of the Cold War conflict, which would have left the " political threat" intact. It was always the "political" threat of so-called "Communism" that was the primary concern. Of course, both the US and USSR would have preferred that the other simply disappear. But since this would obviously have involved mutual annihilation, the Cold War was established.

According to the conventional Western view, the Cold War was a conflict between two superpowers, caused by Soviet aggression, in which the U.S. tried to contain the Soviet Union and protect the world from it. If this view is a doctrine of theology, there's no need to discuss it. If it is intended to shed some light on history, we can easily put it to the test, bearing in mind a very simple point: if you want to understand the Cold War, you should look at the events. If you do so, a very different picture emerges. On the Soviet side, the events of the Cold War were repeated interventions in Eastern Europe: tanks in East Berlin and Budapest and Prague. These interventions took place along the route that was used to attack and virtually destroy Russia three times in this century alone.

On the US side, intervention was worldwide, reflecting the status attained by the US as the first truly global power in history. No matter how outlandish the idea that the Soviet Union and its tentacles were strangling the West, the "Evil Empire" was in fact evil, was an empire and was brutal. Each superpower controlled its primary enemy its own population by terrifying it with the crimes of the other. In crucial respects, then, the Cold War was a kind of tacit arrangement between the Soviet Union and the United States under which the US conducted its wars against the Third World and controlled its allies in Europe, while the Soviet rulers kept an iron grip on their own internal empire and their satellites in Eastern Europe -- each side using the other to justify repression and violence in its own domains. The "space race" was the direct result of the Policy of Containment. The Americans simply had to beat the Russians to the moon.

The Russians had beaten the Americans into space with Sputnik and put the first man, Yuri Gregorian. The Americans increased funding for research, education in science programs. Mr. Kennedy announced that they would put a man on the moon within ten years; they did it in eight years. Technology grew by leaps and bounds because of the Cold War.

Because of the Arms Race and the Space Race, the States amassed a huge debt. They had to pump lots of money into science and research. The Cold War also almost brought about the destruction of the world several times. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy was prepared to take the world into World War so he could get another term in office. The Russians claimed that they were attempting to install purely "defensive" missiles. A "defensive" missile was, in fact, a nuclear missile which would be used when the Russian felt that Cuban independence was threatened.

It should be noted that the Americans had missiles bases in Turkey, Britain, and Italy; all aimed at the Soviet Union. In 1950, Mccarthyism swept the country. McCarthy was a senator who frequently went to the senate drunk. One day, he stood up and claimed that he had a list of one hundred and fifty names of known communists operating in the United States. Although, when he was asked, he was never able to produce the list. He had his own House formed, the House of Un american Activities, in which he tried suspected communists.

The whole country went Communist crazy. His main idea was that " the real basic difference, however, lies in the religion of immoralist... ". (Gorn 214) People were paranoid and many people's lives were destroyed. This lasted until McCarthy died in the late fifties. On the domestic front, the Cold War helped the Soviet Union entrench its military-bureaucratic ruling class in power, and it gave the US a way to compel its population to subsidize high-tech industry and become new innovators of technology at the same time.

One primary example of this was when Nixon meet Khrushchev in an American Kitchen exhibition in Moscow and they both debated that the strength of a country should be based on the living comforts and appliances that the citizens own. The Russian responded to everything Nixon had to say with the statement that, "These things are not necessary for life... they are merely gadgets". (May 146). It wasn't easy to sell all that to the domestic populations because they felt comfort was power. The cold war also shaped the roles of families and individuals and how they should do their part to not allow the spread of communism.

During World War II, many women who had never worked outside the home before joined the labor force when male laborers went off to war. This created the perception that social relations between men and women had changed sharply after World War II. In the late 1940's and 1950's, American society attempted to address these "social disruptions", while at the same time they attempted to address the deepening Cold War. In "Explosive Issues: Sex, Women and the Bomb", Elaine Tyler May discusses the ways in which the Cold War policy of containment -- developed to deal with what U.S. policy makers believed to be Soviet "expansionism" -- influenced domestic affairs. May argues that Americans equated the atomic threat to American society with the perceived threat of female sexuality to the American family.

Thus, while the State Department tried to contain the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe, Americans at home moved to contain women within the domestic sphere. "The modern family would, presumably, tame fears of atomic holocaust, and tame women as well" (May 99). Throughout the novel May explains how the men that came back from the war deserved to be treated with open-arms and the women who were working in the factories should go back to the kitchen and do their responsibilities at home. The dynamics of a family, according from a male perspective, was that women had to keep the house on safe guard and the only real training they needed was to cook and raise the children. An article in Ladies Home Journal in 1949 quoted; "Many young men find that they can do much better work if they get the girl out of their dreams and into their kitchen" (May 69).

The idea of education was considered useless and once again women were being even more repressed, but with that in mind, according to the first appendix in May's novel, the education level in women had risen from 15% of women attending some college to nearly 25% in less than a decade in the war, but it was obviously not enough. With women having all these dilemmas of being tied down and fear from the whole population that the USSR was becoming a large threat with their political views of the world and their arsenal, a sexual revolution was born. This first began with the music that was sweeping the nation, doo-wop and rock and roll started to become a big factor and for the first time songs began to be more sexual and perverse and that is why people started saying the youth was becoming corrupt due to listening to the "devil's music". Then, at the same time at the end of the 1940's and early 1950's the baby boom came into full power, the population skyrocketed and forms of birth control began increasing as well. The number of birth control clinics went up from 55 in the 1930's to over 800 in 1942 (May 132). When it came to the social views many individuals were given the ethics to wait until you got married to have sex, but that was not the case.

Premarital sex had risen in drastic fashion and families began to disown young daughters that got pregnant before tying the knot. Many parents sent their daughters off to live with some distant relatives until the child was born and then put it up for adoption or the only other choice that was left was to marry the individual that impregnated you. This also caused the social flair of divorce that was also increasing with the amount of young citizens getting married with not knowing what they want or because they were forced into marriage. The final domestic problem that was ignited by the Cold War was how was a man supposed to act. The idea that we could be at war at any time, we needed our men to be strong and tough.

The idea of a momma's boy became very popular during this time and many people were trying to promote the idea that sissy boys do not make it far. With the idea that men could become way too effeminate, the notion of homosexuality was linked to that. If a person is a sissy, well then they are homosexual and that therefore makes them a sexual predator as May explains in Chapter 4 talking about people views in general. The rising amount of homophobia came into existence in this time, there was a need for real men not pansies or sexual deviance and programs began to make men more manly, these were just some of the chaos that was brought about with containment with in the nation.

There were also ideas of persecuting and executing those who had communists beliefs and were labeled as traitors and the fact that all blacks were communist because they felt that the USSR was at least treating their citizens equally no matter what. The principle idea of people taking the initiative to all these ideas was in fear, but at the same time it what was they had felt was necessary for this nation to avoid communism. Later, when Kennedy took into power and we were in the climax of the Cold War, he said it best, "And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you-ask what you can do for your country" (Gorn 219). In conclusion, the Containment Policy won out in the end and caused the collapse of the Soviet Union, this process would still go into the 1980's, but the US also prevented many countries from turning communist during the next couple of decades. Despite its many flaws with domestic policies, the Containment Policy eventually achieved its goal - the destruction of communism. Only three communist countries remain today, China, North Korea, and Cuba.

The stoppage that we had with our containment foreign policies can be considered victorious, but when it came to how our women were treated, homosexuals, blacks and young teens that got married we lost the battle and added more of a scare than was really needed. The irony you can say was that during all this time our country was trying to contain people and make them believe a certain way, one would think we were as communist as the USSR at the time.