ABSTRACT
Containment is examined in terms of its utility and the extent to which it constituted a geopolitical praxis. The strategy of Containment was rooted in an interpretation of geography that Sir Rupert Smith has described as a relational concept of space. The chapter examines the new geopolitical challenges that policy makers had to address. It analyses the process by which the geographical scope was extended to Asia. The chapter explores the extent to which the United States involvement in the Vietnam War was predicated on the erroneous geopolitical and geostrategic assumptions of the Domino Theory that led to the abandonment of one of the lodestars of any strategy: that it has to be configured within limits. During the Cold War the operating American strategy – containment – had as its declared aim changing Soviet purposes, and the debate concerning it was generally about whether the expected change in Soviet purposes had already occurred.
