This semester as I am teaching a class on the Cold War, it seems as if the major comparison we are discussing is the war in Ukraine. I am grateful this war is still on students’ minds, as often with tragedies like Ukraine there is a great deal of emotion at first that wanes over time. I assume that is what Putin was hoping for, waiting until the world stopped caring. Yet instead, we have recently learned the U.S. and others are sending the Ukraine tanks but stopped short of sending jets. The question my students have asked is would we have handled this differently during the Cold War? It’s a good question and one without a simple answer as each president is different, yet during the Cold War we did have the foreign policy of containment to help guide our decisions.
