Title: Containment: America's Plan to Curtail Communism
Headings: Containment: America's Plan for Communism
Containment: America's Plan for Communism
The Cold War and America's Counter-Plan for Communism
The U.S. Involvement in Border States: Containment 101

Content: our editorial process
Robert Wilde
Updated October 29, 2018
Containment was a foreign policy of the United States of America, introduced at the start of the Cold War, aimed at stopping the spread of Communism and keeping it "contained" and isolated within its current borders of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR or the Soviet Union) instead of spreading to a war-ravaged Europe. The United States feared specifically a domino effect, that the communism of the USSR would spread from one country to the next, destabilizing one nation which would, in turn, destabilize the next and allow for communist regimes to dominate the region. Their solution: cutting communist influence off at its source or enticing struggling nations with more funding than communist countries were providing. Although containment may have specifically been meant as a term to describe the U.S. strategy for the curtailment of communism from spreading outward from the Soviet Union, the idea of containment as a strategy for cutting off nations such as China and North Korea still persist to this day. The Cold War and America's Counter-Plan for Communism
The Cold War emerged after World War Two when nations formerly under Nazi rule ended up split between the conquests of the USSR (pretending to be liberators) and the newly freed states of France, Poland, and the rest of Nazi-occupied Europe. Since the United States had been a key ally in liberating western Europe, it found itself deeply involved in this newly divided continent: Eastern Europe wasn't being turned back into free states, but under the military and increasingly political control of the Soviet Union. Further, western European countries appeared to be wobbling in their democracies because of socialist agitation and collapsing economies, and the United States began to suspect that the Soviet Union was using communism as a means to make western democracy fail by destabilizing these countries and bringing them into the folds of communism. Even countries themselves were dividing in half over the ideas of how to move forward and recover from the last World War.