Truman Containment

The issue of containment has long been one that permeated the cold war. The idea behind the Truman Doctrine was to provide assistance to countries who were at risk of being taken by communism. It offered a new wave of American Foreign policy. In previous years we had only become involved in conflict when it directly impacted us as a country. But this changed with the Truman Doctrine. The Truman Doctrine essentially gave countries that had internal or external pressure to join the communist regime funding to fight it.
The Truman Doctrine essentially gave 13 billion dollars via the Marshall plan to various countries in Europe that were at risk of being compromised by communism (Historian, 2016). The Marshall Plan worked and helped stimulate the economy of Europe. The main issue the Marshall Plan ran into was that countries that rejected Marshall plan, were commonly controlled via the USSR whether it be monetarily or by fear of violent retaliation. These countries who were intimidated by the USSR were the ones most likely to fall to communism (Historian, 2016).
The best example of the United States containment is the Greek Civil War. The British …show more content…
After this Truman Doctrine America became heavily involved in ensuring everyone else’s freedom. The idea behind it being that if we keep everyone from succumbing to communist influence then we can keep ourselves safe. The problem with this policy shift is that we now know that decades later it has let the cat out of the bag per say. We the U.S are the cat and the bag protected us from the intense need to fix every problem every other nation has. We can see how short term the Truman Doctrine helped the economies of European nations and limited the spread of communism throughout Europe (Boundless, 2016). But unfortunately our need to attempt to make sure every country is as democratically sound and capitalistic is our own