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: Containment: America's Plan to Curtail Communism
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Containment: America's Plan for Communism
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By
Robert Wilde
History Expert
M.A., Medieval Studies, Sheffield University
B.A., Medieval Studies, Sheffield University
Robert Wilde is a historian who writes about European history. He is the author of the History in an Afternoon textbook series. 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.