Title: Why did the United States commit itself to containing communism between 1945 and 1960? - eNotes.com
Headings: Why did the United States commit itself to containing communism between 1945 and 1960?
The Cold War
Why did the United States commit itself to containing communism between 1945 and 1960?
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Content: Communism in both theory and practice was implacably hostile to the United States and its institutions. The USA was the world's largest economy, a capitalist economy no less, and therefore epitomized everything that Communism was fighting against. The further this ideology spread throughout the world, the more hostile the international environment would become for American strategic and economic interests. As both the United States and the Soviet Union were nuclear powers, direct confrontation was unthinkable. So successive American governments adopted the strategy of containment to deal with the Communist threat. In practice, this meant that the United States would not actively try to wrest back Eastern Europe from Soviet dominance and control as this could well lead to nuclear conflict. Instead, the spread of Communism beyond the Soviet sphere of influence would be held back by a number of other, more sophisticated measures. These included the provision of substantial economic and military aid to Western countries at serious risk of Communist subversion, such as France and Italy. In the developing world, the United States also backed a variety of dictatorships and resistance movements to crush the merest hint of Communist insurrection. American involvement in South Vietnam is a paradigm example of this approach.