ABSTRACT

For over forty years, the United States adhered to a foreign policy dominated by one overriding goal: the containment of Soviet power within the geographical borders established at the end of the Second World War. Although American statesmen frequently expressed the underpinnings of the containment policy in ideological terms—democracy and freedom vs. communism—the policy’s practical moorings were geopolitical. Thus, the U.S. fought Communist China (during the Korean War) when the latter was allied to Moscow, but cooperated with the same totalitarian regime after the Sino-Soviet split. Similarly, the U.S. cozied up to Yugoslavian and Romanian communists when their regimes distanced themselves from Moscow’s foreign policies.