Political strategy used by Americans during the Cold War to stop the spread of communism. And a term that China is now using again.
In a remarkably sharp speech, China’s President Xi Jinping accused the US of “containment, encirclement and repression.” Above all, the noun containment was chosen very consciously – as an analogy to the high phase of the Cold War. The English term “containment” coined the US strategy from 1947 onwards. US President Harry Truman countered the brutal sovietization of Eastern Europe by the dictator Stalin with a policy to stop or curb the spread of communism in the world. The US foreign policy expert George F. Kennan drafted the strategy in 1947 with a fundamental article in Foreign affairs. The policy of containment provided for aid to rebuild Europe through the Marshall Plan, but also support for anti-communist forces such as in the Greek Civil War and even for France’s colonial wars; the catastrophic involvement of the USA in Vietnam up until 1975 also had its roots in containment. Containment succeeded in the Korean War of 1950-1953, when the United States and an international alliance saved South Korea from northern attack. In China, however, the strategy failed completely when the US failed to save the national conservative government from being overthrown by Mao’s communist rebel army in 1949.