Cold War: Containment Through 1963

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Containment During the Cold War |

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How successful was the containment strategy of the United States in the early Cold War (through 1963)? |

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Containment During the Cold War |

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How successful was the containment strategy of the United States in the early Cold War (through 1963)? |

20th centuRY aMERICAN hISTORY

20th centuRY aMERICAN hISTORY

The era of the Cold War is the closest the world has ever come to complete destruction. During this period of time, two world powers were in a stalemate economically and politically and were constantly competing to be superior. The Cold War began as a result of World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union had some differences on their perspectives of the world. Being the richest country in the world, the United States promoted democracy and capitalism. The newly formed Soviet Union thought that communism was a better political system because it transformed their economy from a declining empire to a super power once again. The Cold War was a long series of events in which the Soviet Union tried to spread their ideas of government in a socialist economy, known as expansionism, as the United States tried to contain it. Containment, a term introduced by George F. Kennan, was the foreign policy the United States practiced from 1946 to 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed. The United States saw the Soviet Union to be a direct threat to the free world. During President Truman and Eisenhower’s administration, the policy of containment evolved drastically yet the efforts of the Unites States to contain communism ultimately fell short. A new wave of nationalism swept through struggling nations as they began to conform to communist ideologies causing the United States to lose its grip on containment. The containment of Communism found great victory with the foreign aid programs such as the Marshall Plan, but it was overshadowed by the expansion of communism in several Asian and Eastern...