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.Considering it’s been 34 years since the fall of communism, it might be worth reviewing the concept of containment. It was, for good or bad, our foreign policy for the second half of the 20th century and influenced Americans in almost every aspect of their lives. The term and the concept came from a 1947 article in The Journal of Foreign Affairs, titled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” and written by someone calling himself Mr. X. George Kennan had written the “long telegram” to the State Department the year before, but it had not received much traction. The following year he wrote basically the same thing anonymously for the journal.Kennan was a career diplomat and a leading expert on the Soviet Union. He took a similar approach towards the Soviet Union as we take today, that the Russians are good people but are led by bad ones who cannot be trusted. While this sounds like common sense today, in 1945 we had just come off an alliance with Stalinist Russia in fighting WWII. During that time, we portrayed Stalin as a firm but fair leader and President Truman believed he could work with him. Kennan disagreed.Kennan put forth two key concepts that he believed drove the Soviet government, the need for a repressive dictatorship at home and a belief that the West/Capitalism would never accept a communist government. It was the second that justified the first. Stalin had previously argued that eventually the world would divide into two “centres,” the socialists centers and the capitalist centers, and that the ...
