1 gen 1946 anni - U.S. containment policy outlined

Descrizione:

containment: The basic U.S. policy of the Cold War, which sought to contain communism within its existing geographic boundaries. Initially, containment focused on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, but in the 1950s it came to include China, Korea, and the postcolonial world.


In the late 1940s, American officials developed a strategy toward the Soviet Union that would become known as containment. Convinced that the USSR sought to methodically expand its reach, the United States would counter by limiting Soviet influence to Eastern Europe while reconstituting democratic governments in Western Europe. Three broad issues worried Truman and his advisors. First, the Soviet Union was pressing Iran for access to oil and Turkey for access to the Mediterranean. Second, a civil war roiled Greece, between monarchists backed by Great Britain and insurgents supported by the Greek and Yugoslavian Communist parties. Third, as European nations suffered through terrible privation in 1946 and 1947, Communist parties gained strength, particularly in France and Italy. All three developments, as seen from the United States, threatened to spread Soviet influence beyond Eastern Europe.

In this anxious context, the strategy of containment emerged gradually between 1946 and 1949. In February 1946, American diplomat George F. Kennan first proposed the idea in an 8,000-word cable — a confidential message within the U.S. State Department — sent from his post at the U.S. embassy in Moscow. Kennan argued that communism was merely a flimsy cover masking Soviet imperial aggression. A year after writing this cable (dubbed the Long Telegram), Kennan argued in an influential Foreign Affairs article that the West’s only recourse was to meet the Soviets “with unalterable counter-force at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world.” Kennan called for “long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.”

Kennan contended that the Soviet system was unstable and would eventually collapse. Containment would work, he reasoned, as long as the United States and its allies resisted Soviet expansion worldwide. Kennan’s attentive readers included Stalin himself, who quickly obtained a copy of the classified Long Telegram. Just as Kennan thought that the Soviet system was despotic and unsustainable, Stalin believed that the United States was an imperialist aggressor determined to replace Great Britain as the world’s dominant capitalist power. Neither side fully understood or trusted the other, and each projected its worst fears onto its rival.

It was true that Britain was fading as an international power. Exhausted by the war, faced with budget deficits and a collapsing economy at home, and confronted with growing independence movements throughout its empire, particularly in India led by Mohandas Gandhi, the sun was finally setting on British global influence. “The reins of world leadership are fast slipping from Britain’s competent but now very weak hands,” read a U.S. State Department report. “These reins will be picked up either by the United States or by Russia.” The United States was wedded to the notion — dating to the Wilson administration — that communism and capitalism were incompatible on the world stage. With Britain waning, American officials saw little choice but to fill its shoes as the leading capitalist nation worldwide.

Aggiunto al nastro di tempo:

Data: