Discuss the issue of containment during the cold war. What was the idea surrounding this policy? Who were the major players? Was it successful?

Containtment is a doctrine that called for stopping and resolutely facing communist, Soviet expansion around the world through diplomatic, military and economic means. The author of the idea was a Moscow-based American diplomat named George Kennan, who published a mysterious Telegram X in the magazine Foreign Affairs in 1947. In it, Kennan - who wrote it anonymously - said that Soviet communism was an expansionist ideology that intended to get worldwide influence by exporting revolution around the world. The Cold War is a period (1947-1991) dominated by the rivalry - political, economic and ideological - between the capitalistic and democratic United States and the communist Soviet Union. In the end, Kennan and his theory were proved right, it could be said, as containment and Eastern Bloc stagnation led to the collapse of communism; Western scholars and commentators state that the US and the West won the Cold War.

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Containment was a United States policy using numerous strategies to prevent the spread of communism abroad. A component of the Cold War, this policy was a response to a series of moves by the Soviet Union to enlarge its communist sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, China, Korea, and Vietnam.