The Cold War & U.S. Diplomacy - the Kennedy Doctrine

The 35th President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, came into office at the height of the Cold War. The president decided to keep the foreign policy of his predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and expand upon that foreign policy doctrine. Roskin & Berry (2010) explains that President Kennedy wanted to be able to provide the United States with the flexibility to respond to communist expansion. The President believed that the expansion of communism was a direct threat to the United States and Europe. While Truman and Eisenhower created policies that were mainly based on containing communism in Europe and the Middle East, President Kennedy’s doctrine focused on Latin America, especially leading up and after the Cuban Revolution. President Kennedy believed that the United States should contain the spread of communism by using alternative means.

During President Kennedy’s term in office there were several diplomatic crises that challenged his foreign policy doctrine. The challenges included; The Bay of Pigs in 1961, The Vietnam War in 1962 and The Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Although The Bay of Pigs and the United States involvement in Vietnam were seen as major efforts that impacted the U.S. foreign policy, it was the Cuban Missile Crisis that almost brought the United States to the brink of a nuclear disaster and clearly solidified the president’s doctrine a success. According to Graham (2012), the chances of the conflict escalating to war was between 1 in 3. The entire conflict was brought on because the United States and the Soviet Union were entangled in an arms race with each other. Because the Soviet Union began to fall behind in the arms race and lacked the ability to strike the United States with their long range missiles, the Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev partnered with Cuba’s President Fidel Castro to place intermediate-range missiles in Cuba. The placement of the missiles in Cuba would give the Soviet Union a strategic advantage...