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: 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. This resulted in a lot of political and indeed military turmoil for the years to come, with such extremes as the Berlin Wall being established to separate East and West Germany due to the opposition to communism. The United States wanted to prevent this from spreading further Europe and on to the rest of the world, so they developed a solution called containment to attempt to manipulate the socio-political future of these recovering nations. The U.S. Involvement in Border States: Containment 101
The concept of containment was first outlined in George Kennan's " Long Telegram ," which was sent to the U.S. Government from his position in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. It arrived in Washington on February 22, 1946, and circulated widely around the White House until Kennan made it public in an article called "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" — this became known as X Article because the authorship was attributed to X.
Containment was adopted by President Harry Truman as part of his Truman Doctrine in 1947, which redefined America's foreign policy as one that supports the "free people who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressures," according to Truman's speech to Congress that year.