Recipients would have to reduce trade barriers among themselves and adopt market principles. The European countries would need to build a unified and integrated economic strategy. And to prevent U. Although the economic assistance was meant as a substitute for U. France was also concerned about the long-term consequences of rebuilding German power.
Truman and Marshall were willing to adapt and agreed to a multilateral alliance under the North Atlantic Treaty, which was ratified by the U.
Containment enjoyed substantial support within the United States. The appeal to anti-communism resonated with isolationists and internationalists alike. With the United States once again facing down great-power foes, the idea of containment—that the United States can box out its foes well enough that they will stop directly challenging its power—is appealing.
But there are many key differences between today and the immediate post-World War II years that complicate the picture. During the Cold War, for example, the United States could use economic containment in the form of embargoes on the Soviet bloc and China to prevent its rivals from acquiring machinery and equipment that would strengthen their military power. But attempting something similar would make less sense today.
The United States would find it much harder to cut off trade, investment, and student exchanges with China, in particular, because the U. Washington would also struggle to prevent third countries from trading and investing in China, as it did during the Cold War. Something similar goes for Russia.
Although that country sells little to the United States, it does deal extensively in goods and gas with Europe. Short of an embargo, the United States could put more limits on the export of technologies that might endanger overall U. Such strict controls were used during the Cold War but then relaxed in the s—after all, China could by then obtain such technologies from plenty of third countries, and the United States wanted a piece of the trade pie.
It would be a very sad and hopeless situation if we were to convince ourselves that the peace of the world depended on the ability of the rest of us to prevent the Soviet Union indefinitely from acting like a great power. The great powers now have the opportunity to end, on terms that protect their common interests and European stability, the great confrontation that has divided the Continent. Now, with the vast, multiethnic Soviet state a shambles, many are wondering about the future of a post-imperial Russia.
Excerpts have been lightly edited for space and clarity. The military component of containment would also be complicated to apply today. During the Cold War, it took the form of the deterrence of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe through the mobilization of the NATO alliance and the threatened use of nuclear weapons to convince the Soviets that the costs of aggression would exceed any benefits.
And the question of whether Ukraine belongs, in a sense, to the West or to Russia has sparked seven years of tension and intermittent bloodshed with no resolution in sight.
Although the ground routes were never negotiated, the same was not true of the air. On November 30, , it was agreed in writing that there would be three mile-wide air corridors providing free access to Berlin. Additionally, unlike a force of tanks and trucks, the Soviets could not claim that cargo aircraft were some sort of military threat.
In the face of unarmed aircraft refusing to turn around, the only way to enforce the blockade would have been to shoot them down. An airlift would force the Soviet Union to either shoot down unarmed humanitarian aircraft, thus breaking their own agreements, or back down. Enforcing this would require an airlift that really worked. If the supplies could not be flown in fast enough, Soviet help would eventually be needed to prevent starvation. The American military government, based on a minimum daily ration of 1, calories, set a total of daily supplies at tons of flour and wheat, tons of cereal, 64 tons of fat, tons of meat and fish, tons of dehydrated potatoes, tons of sugar, 11 tons of coffee, 19 tons of powdered milk, 5 tons of whole milk for children, 3 tons of fresh yeast for baking, tons of dehydrated vegetables, 38 tons of salt, and 10 tons of cheese.
In all, 1, tons were required each day to sustain the more than two million people of Berlin. Additionally, for heat and power, 3, tons of coal and gasoline were also required daily. During the first week, the airlift averaged only ninety tons a day, but by the second week it reached 1, tons.
This likely would have sufficed had the effort lasted only a few weeks as originally believed. The Communist press in East Berlin ridiculed the project. But by the end of August, after two months, the Airlift was succeeding; daily operations flew more than 1, flights a day and delivered more than 4, tons of cargo, enough to keep West Berlin supplied. As the tempo of the Airlift grew, it became apparent that the Western powers might be able to pull off the impossible: indefinitely supplying an entire city by air alone.
In response, starting on August 1, the Soviets offered free food to anyone who crossed into East Berlin and registered their ration cards there, but West Berliners overwhelmingly rejected Soviet offers of food. The Soviets had an advantage in conventional military forces, but were preoccupied with rebuilding their war-torn economy and society.
The U. Neither side wanted a war; the Soviets did not disrupt the airlift. The next day the U. Soon afterwards, the four powers began serious negotiations, and a settlement was reached on Western terms. Berlin Airlift Monument in Berlin-Tempelhof displays the names of the 39 British and 31 American airmen who lost their lives during the operation. The Soviet blockade of Berlin was lifted at one minute after midnight on May 12,, A British convoy immediately drove through to Berlin, and the first train from West Germany reached Berlin at a.
Later that day an enormous crowd celebrated the end of the blockade. In , the Soviet Union responded by created the Warsaw Pact. The organization constitutes a system of collective defense whereby its member states agree to mutual defense in response to an attack by any external party.
The course of the Cold War led to a rivalry with nations of the Warsaw Pact, which formed in However, participation of the United States was thought necessary both to counter the military power of the USSR and prevent the revival of nationalist militarism. In , European leaders met with U. Secretary of State George C.
The members agreed that an armed attack against any one of them in Europe or North America would be considered an attack against them all. Consequently, they agreed that if an armed attack occurred, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defense, would assist the member being attacked, taking such action as it deemed necessary including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.
The treaty does not require members to respond with military action against an aggressor. Although obliged to respond, they maintain the freedom to choose the method by which they do so. The outbreak of the Korean War in June was crucial for NATO as it raised the apparent threat of all Communist countries working together and forced the alliance to develop concrete military plans.
Eisenhower in January One of its immediate results was the creation of the Warsaw Pact, signed on May 14, by the Soviet Union, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, and East Germany as a formal response to this event, thereby delineating the two opposing sides of the Cold War. The Warsaw Pact was created in reaction to the integration of West Germany into NATO in per the Paris Pacts of , but it is also considered to have been motivated by Soviet desires to maintain control over military forces in Central and Eastern Europe.
The Soviets wanted to keep their part of Europe and not let the Americans take it from them. Ideologically, the Soviet Union arrogated the right to define socialism and communism and act as the leader of the global socialist movement.
A corollary to this idea was the necessity of intervention if a country appeared to be violating core socialist ideas and Communist Party functions, which was explicitly stated in the Brezhnev Doctrine. Geostrategic principles also drove the Soviet Union to prevent invasion of its territory by Western European powers. The eight member countries of the Warsaw Pact pledged the mutual defense of any member who was attacked. Relations among the treaty signatories were based upon mutual non-intervention in the internal affairs of the member countries, respect for national sovereignty, and political independence.
However, almost all governments of those member states were indirectly controlled by the Soviet Union. While the Warsaw Pact was established as a balance of power or counterweight to NATO, there was no direct confrontation between them.
Instead, the conflict was fought on an ideological basis. Both NATO and the Warsaw Pact led to the expansion of military forces and their integration into the respective blocs. Its largest military engagement was the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia with the participation of all Pact nations except Romania.
Privacy Policy. Skip to main content. The Cold War. Search for:. Learning Objectives Paraphrase the Truman Doctrine. Key Takeaways Key Points In February , the British government announced that it could no longer afford to finance the Greek monarchical military regime in its civil war against communist-led insurgents. By the mid-fifties the U. The question remains how to explain this trend given the failure of the revisionist position which argues the Truman administration developed a strategy to expand and politically dominate states to hold.
Gier Lundestad provides some clue with his theory the U. Full understanding of this phenomenon requires an account of the crucial role played by ideology in motivating the perception of threat the Soviet Union inspired. His narrow ideological view saw military response as the key to contain communist expansionism, a failure of leadership that Offner argues developed the Cold War. However in order to demonstrate his responsibility for the militarisation of containment, Offner relies on an unbalanced and negative portrayal of Truman.
Like several recent accounts, [54] Offner depicts Truman as the initiator and director of policy when his consistent use of influential subcommittees like the P. During Truman initially capped the defence budget for the following year at fourteen point four billion dollars, revealing how like many of his influential Republicans critics in Congress he was a fiscal conservative, holding no pre-planned programme to militarily contain communist expansionism globally based on his ideological convictions.
Despite being a top secret document N. The timing of the emphasis can be explained by the changing context of international events that encouraged the idea international communism was expanding, enhancing the perception of threat.
During two major events occurred that proved for a majority of Americans the expansionist tendencies of the Soviet controlled communist ideology. Turkey was integrated in not because the U. The two were now considered one and the same China remained in the Soviet orbit until the beginnings of its divergence in the mid-fifties , resulting in a crucial change in occupation policy towards Japan.
Instead of demilitarising Japan through international agreements advocated by Kennan [67] , the U. Bohlen it was desirable. Over the course of just a few years the world had once again become massively unstable, with communist parties expanding globally and providing support to nationalist movements gaining momentum due to the rapid pace of decolonisation. The most convincing form of protection against what the administration viewed as the growing storm of international communism was a large increase military strength, resulting in this soon becoming the most significant aspect of containment.
Lippmann argued the strategy presented a blank cheque for a limitless expansion of military commitments due to its implicit sense war with the Soviet Union was inevitable. Whilst Kennan accepts his shortcomings in explaining his theory, he fails to recognize that this language may have played a primary role in the militarisation of containment from its inception.
Distinguished members of public like Lippmann were not aware of the intricacies of his strategy, however Kennan had ample opportunity to explain its means and ends to the administration, suggesting the relative weakness of the idea the early language of containment conditioned its eventual outcome. Ironically Kennan appears to have misinterpreted how psychology and the perception of threat might change.
His aversion to the establishment of military alliances suggests how his strategy could never properly recognize the crucial role played by military security that was required to alleviate fears, and ensure the administration remained politically credible. The global expansion of communism had a public psychological impact, encouraging the administration to view the struggle as a zero-sum game, whereby a loss of credibility in one territory was deemed to affect the global balance of world power.
To a large extent this can be accounted for by the influence of George Kennan on policy planning. Reflecting his realist understanding of the international system, Kennan conceived a strategic doctrine to guide U.
The idea that a comprehensive containment strategy provided a consistent direction is therefore, something of a historical myth. The militarisation of the U. Many of these ideas are credible; it seems likely military means of containment were expanded to secure power over and above the Soviet Union, whilst an ideological world view encouraged strong means of resistance where the U.
However the timing of the militarisation of containment can only be explained by a growth in the perceived power of the international communist movement from onwards, emphasized by traditional historians as the key factor in the development of the Cold War. Containment: Documents on American Policy and Strategy, , ed.
Etzold, Thomas H. Freeland, Richard M. Graebner, Norman A.
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