Wisniewski 1

Andrea Wisniewski
U.S. Foreign Policy II
Professor Jacobs
4/18/2017
The Folly of Containment

After the fall of South Vietnam to communism in 1975, historian Gabriel Kolko gave his

verdict on the policy of containment, which was the policy behind American involvement in

Vietnam. He declared: No geopolitical initiative in American history has had more disastrous

consequences than the containment policy adopted by Washington roughly thirty years ago. If

any doubts remained as to the utter bankruptcy of that policy, the fall of Saigon ought to have

settled matters. Though the United States government accomplished some of their strategic

goals under the policy of containment, such as the preservation of the non-communist

government in South Korea and the prevention of a communist take-over of Greece, the policy of

containment was deeply flawed and had disastrous consequences for the American government

and the American people.

One of the failures of containment was that it forced the United States government to

sacrifice its commitment to democratic principles in the name of fighting communism. In order

to successfully fight communist insurgencies within foreign countries, the United States

government often allied itself with undemocratic factions and leaders, simply because they were

a better alternative than the country falling to communism. The policy of aligning with so-called

friendly dictators can be traced back to the Greek Civil War and the declaration of the Truman

Doctrine. After World War II, Greek communists sought to overthrow the Greek monarchy,

resulting in civil war. Though the monarchists were far from democratic, President Harry Truman

hoped to support them financially in order to prevent the country from falling into the hands of

the communists. In 1947, Truman addressed Congress, asking them for the necessary funds to
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support the Greek monarchists. In his speech to Congress, Truman stated: It must be the policy

of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed

minorities or by outside pressures (Merrill & Paterson 201). However, the Greek monarchists

were not the free people that Truman portrayed them as in his speech to Congress. Over the

next few decades, the term free peoples would be applied to a range of non-democratic, often

dictatorial factions and leaders that the United States government allied with in the fight against

communism. Despite this, Congress agreed to aid the Greek monarchists, giving them 400

million dollars. This policy of supporting friendly dictators in order to fight communism

continued in Iran in 1954. Mistaking the rising nationalist movement led by Mohammad

Mossedegh for a communist movement, the Eisenhower administrator allied with the deposed

Shah of Iran, eventually restoring him to the throne of Iran. The Shah, however, was a despot

who was despised by his own people, who resented his dictatorial power and saw him as a tool

of the West. Years later, the American governments support of the dictatorial Shah resulted in

grave consequences. In 1979, driven in part by anti-American sentiment that stemmed from the

American governments support of the brutal Shah, the Iranian people overthrew the Shah,

showing just how much resentment there was towards the United States governments policy of

allying with anti-democratic leaders in order to fight communism. In choosing to support

dictators like the Shah of Iran and, later, Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam, the United States

turned its back on the democratic principles it outwardly claimed to support as well as earned the

enmity of the local population for their support of their oppressive governments.

One of the inherent flaws in the policy of containment was that it required the United

States government to become involved in any country that faced a communist threat.

Containment was a gross over commitment of the United States government. Wherever
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communism threatened to spread, the United States government would need to respond. In a

1966 speech to Congress, Senator J. William Fulbright, an opponent of American involvement in

the Vietnam War, discussed the folly of getting involved in an unwinnable situation in the name

of containment: What I do question is the ability of the United Statesto go into a small, alien,

undeveloped Asian nation and create stability where there is chaos, the will to fight where there

is defeatism, democracy where there is no tradition of it and honest government where

corruption is almost a way of life (Merrill & Paterson 419). Containment forced the United

States government to become involved in conflicts around the globe, including the Korean and

Vietnam War, in the name of stopping the spread of communism. The policy of containment did

not specify that the United States government should get involved only if the war was winnable

or if the country in question was of particular strategic importance, but mandated that the United

States government needed to stop the spread of communism anywhere it tried to penetrate, even

if the country falling to communism presented no direct threat to the United States. In order to be

prepared to intervene anywhere in the world at any time, the military would need to be greatly

expanded and highly mobile, able to shift to resources to various points around the world. The

human cost of containment proved to be huge. The Korean War resulted in the deaths of 35,000

Americans, and over 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam (Merrill & Paterson 236, 406). Many

questioned why the American government was shipping American boys off to far away countries

to die for other countries sake. After witnessing the failure of the American military in stomping

out the communist insurgency in Vietnam and the deep hostility of the American people towards

continued intervention in Vietnam, President Richard Nixon seemed to realize the foolishness of

the American government in intervening in Asian nations, stating in 1969: the United States is

going to encourage and has a right to expect that this problem will be increasingly handled by,
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and the responsibility for it taken by, the Asian nations themselves (Merrill & Paterson 453).

Though the policy of containment called for the United States government to intervene anywhere

in the world that communism tried to spread, it simply was not feasible to successfully thwart the

spread of communism in every instance.

Financially, containment proved to be extremely costly. The United States military

required a large sum of money to be able to meet any threat, anywhere in the world, at any time.

The National Security Council Paper No. 68 (NSC-68), written in 1950, called for a great

expansion of the United States military budget in order to contain communism. The brainchild of

foreign policy expert Paul Nitze, NSC-68 was based upon the idea that the Soviet Union

possessed an extremely large amount of nuclear weapons and posed an incredibly dangerous

threat to world order. In order to match the combined power of the Soviets and their allies, the

United States government would have to vastly expand its nuclear power and the power of

conventional military forces. For Nitze, a strong military was the key to containment. As stated

in NSC-68, Without superior aggregate military strength, in being and readily mobilizable, a

policy of containmentwhich is in effect a policy of calculated and gradual coercionis no

more than a policy of bluff (Merrill & Paterson 204). Building up the strength of the United

States military and increasing its nuclear power would be extremely expensive. Though NSC-68

did not provide a specific cost estimate for this military buildup, the military budget would have

to at least quadruple in order to match the perceived Soviet threat. To meet the demands of

containment, the United States would have to spend billions of dollars. In fact, Trumans

Secretary of Defense was convinced that implementing the recommendations in NSC-68 would

bankrupt America. However, American military spending was only part of the cost of

containment. Deploying American troops to fight ground wars against communists, as the United
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States government did in Korea and Vietnam, only further added to the costs of containment. By

the end of the Korean War, American military spending had reached $53 billion dollars per year

(McCormick 105). Another cost was economic aid to third world countries in the hope that a

stable economy and government would prevent the rise of communist insurgencies in these

nations. Containment proved to be an extremely costly strategy of combating communism,

requiring the United States government to shell out huge sums of money in order to meet every

communist threat, and as proven by the Vietnam War, vast military expenditures did not

necessarily translate into battlefield success.

As stated by Gabriel Kolko, the policy of containment had disastrous consequences for

the United States, including forcing it to abandon its democratic principles, overcommitting the

United States government, and costing the United States government an extreme amount of

money. Considering that the policy of containment did not actually succeed in destroying

communism, but merely sought to prevent its spreading, none of these consequences were worth

the economic, human, and moral cost of pursuing the policy of containment.

Works Cited
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McCormick, Thomas J. America's Half-century: Unites States Foreign Policy in the Cold War

and after. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. Print.

Merrill, Dennis, and Thomas G. Paterson. Major Problems in American Foreign Relations:

Documents and Essays. Boston, MA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2010. Print.