Containment in the context of "United States involvement in regime change in Latin America"

The Cold War was a period of global geopolitical rivalry between the United States (US) and the Soviet Union (USSR) and their respective allies, the capitalist Western Bloc and communist Eastern Bloc, which began in the aftermath of the Second World War and ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The term cold war is used because there was no direct fighting between the two superpowers, though each supported opposing sides in regional conflicts known as proxy wars. In addition to the struggle for ideological and economic influence and an arms race in both conventional and nuclear weapons, the Cold War was expressed through technological rivalries such as the Space Race, espionage, propaganda campaigns, embargoes, and sports diplomacy.

After the end of the Second World War in 1945, during which the US and USSR had been allies, the USSR installed satellite governments in its occupied territories in Eastern Europe and North Korea by 1949, resulting in the political division of Europe (and Germany) by an "Iron Curtain". The USSR tested its first nuclear weapon in 1949, four years after their use by the US on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and allied with the People's Republic of China, founded in 1949. The US declared the Truman Doctrine of "containment" of communism in 1947, launched the Marshall Plan in 1948 to assist Western Europe's economic recovery, and founded the NATO military alliance in 1949 (matched by the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact in 1955). The Berlin Blockade of 1948 to 1949 was an early confrontation, as was the Korean War of 1950 to 1953, which ended in a stalemate.

The island chain strategy is a strategic maritime containment plan first conceived by American foreign policy statesman John Foster Dulles in 1951, during the Korean War. It proposed surrounding the Soviet Union and China with naval bases in the West Pacific to project power and restrict sea access.

The "island chain" concept did not become a major theme in American foreign policy during the Cold War, but after the dissolution of the Soviet Union has remained a major focus of both American and Chinese geopolitical and military analysts to this day. For the United States, the island chain strategy is a significant part of the force projection of the U.S. military in the Far East. For the People's Republic of China (PRC), the concept is integral to its maritime security and fears of strategic encirclement by the U.S. and its allies. For both the U.S. and the PRC, the island chain strategy emphasizes the geographical and strategic importance of Taiwan.

George Frost Kennan (February 16, 1904 – March 17, 2005) was an American diplomat and historian. He was best known as an advocate of a policy of containment of Soviet expansion during the Cold War. He lectured widely and wrote scholarly histories of the relations between the USSR and the United States. He was also one of the group of foreign policy elders known as "The Wise Men".

During the late 1940s, his writings confirmed the Truman Doctrine and inspired the U.S. foreign policy of containing the USSR. His "Long Telegram" from Moscow in 1946 and the subsequent 1947 article "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" argued that the Soviet regime was inherently expansionist and that its influence had to be "contained" in areas of vital strategic importance to the United States. These texts provided justification for the Truman administration's new anti-Soviet policy. Kennan played a major role in the development of definitive Cold War programs and institutions, notably the Marshall Plan.

"The Sources of Soviet Conduct", commonly "X Article", is an article written by George F. Kennan and published under the pseudonym "X" in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine. It introduced the term "containment" to widespread use and advocated the strategic use of that concept against the Soviet Union. It expanded on ideas expressed by Kennan in a confidential February 1946 telegram, formally identified by Kennan's State Department number, "511", but informally dubbed the "long telegram" for its size.

Kennan composed the long telegram in response to inquiries about the implications of a February 1946 speech by Joseph Stalin. Though the speech was in line with previous statements by Stalin, it provoked fear in the American press and public; Time magazine called it "the most warlike pronouncement uttered by any top-rank statesman since V-J Day". The long telegram explained Soviet motivations by recounting the history of Russian rulers as well as the ideology of Marxism–Leninism. It argued that the Soviet leaders used the ideology to characterize the external world as hostile, allowing them to justify their continued hold on power despite a lack of popular support. Washington bureaucrats quickly read the confidential message and accepted it as the best explanation of Soviet behavior. The reception elevated Kennan's reputation within the State Department as one of the government's foremost Soviet experts.

The seminal use of cordon sanitaire (French: [kɔʁdɔ̃ sanitɛʁ]; lit. 'sanitary cordon') as a metaphor for ideological containment referred to "the system of alliances instituted by France in interwar Europe that stretched from Finland to the Balkans" and which "completely ringed Germany and sealed off Russia from Western Europe, thereby isolating the two politically 'diseased' nations of Europe."

French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau is credited with coining the usage, when, in March 1919, he urged the newly independent border states (also called limitrophe states) that had formed in Eastern Europe after World War I to form a defensive union. Such a system would both isolate the Soviet Union from Western Europe, and thus quarantine the spread of communism, while simultaneously threatening Germany's eastern border in the event of war, guaranteeing French security. He called such an alliance a cordon sanitaire. France subsequently put this policy into practice by creating an alliance with Poland in 1921, followed by alliances with each member of the French-backed Little Entente alliance (Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Romania) starting in 1924. The alliance was further reinforced by bilateral treaties among Eastern European states such as the Polish–Romanian alliance. This is still probably the most famous use of the phrase, though it is sometimes used more generally to describe a set of buffer states that form a barrier against a larger, ideologically hostile state.

In political science, rollback is the strategy of forcing a change in the major policies of a state, usually by replacing its ruling regime. It contrasts with containment, which means preventing the expansion of that state; and with détente, which means developing a working relationship with that state. Most of the discussions of rollback in the scholarly literature deal with United States foreign policy toward communist countries during the Cold War. The rollback strategy was tried and was not successful in Korea in 1950 and in Cuba in 1961, but it was successful in Grenada in 1983. The United States discussed the use of rollback during the East German uprising of 1953 and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, which were ultimately crushed by the Soviet Army, but decided against it to avoid the risk of a major war.

Rollback of governments hostile to the U.S. took place during World War II (against Fascist Italy in 1943, Nazi Germany in 1945, and Imperial Japan in 1945), Afghanistan (against the Taliban in 2001, though this would fail in the long term with the Taliban returning to power in 2021), and Iraq (against Saddam Hussein in 2003). When directed against an established government, rollback is sometimes called "regime change".

The Mutual Security Act of 1951 launched a major American foreign aid program, 1951–61, of grants to numerous countries. It largely replaced the Marshall Plan. The main goal was to help underdeveloped US-allied countries develop and to contain the spread of communism. It was signed on October 10, 1951, by President Harry S. Truman. Annual authorizations were about $7.5 billion ($91 billion today), out of a GDP of $340 billion in 1951 ($4.1 trillion today), for military, economic, and technical foreign aid to American allies. The aid was aimed primarily at shoring up Western Europe as the Cold War developed. In 1961 it was replaced by a new foreign aid program, the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, which created the Agency for International Development (AID), and focused more on Latin America.

The Mutual Security Act also abolished the Economic Cooperation Administration, which had managed the Marshall Plan and transferred its functions to the newly established Mutual Security Agency (MSA). The Agency was established and continued by acts of October 10, 1951 (65 Stat. 373) and June 20, 1952 (66 Stat. 141) to provide military, economic, and technical assistance to friendly nations in the interest of international peace and security, but was abolished by Reorganization Plan No. 7 of 1953, effective August 1, 1953, and its functions were transferred to the Foreign Operations Administration. The act however, was extended by appropriators each fiscal year until the early 1960s.