Containment: U.S. Foreign Policy during the Cold War featuring Punk Songs

How was the policy of containment initiated and enacted by the United States during the Cold War, and how was this policy critiqued in Punk Rock lyrics?

Know (Knowledge):

• How the Cold War became a global issue, with ramifications for many countries outside the United States and the Soviet Union
• The origin and impact of the Truman Doctrine
• The origin of the United States’s “Containment” policy towards the Soviet Union (George Frost Kennan’s “X” Article)
• The establishment of the CIA through the National Security Act of 1947
• Nuclear buildup and the threat of nuclear war during the Cold War
• The definition of the First, Second, and Third World
• The ways the the U.S. policy of containment affected historical developments in Chile, Cuba, Germany, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, and the Korean peninsula
• Historical events including the Korean War, The Bay of Pigs, and the Cuban Missile Crisis

Mastery Objective:

• Students will be able to describe the U.S. policy of containment and make critiques on the ways it was enacted by examining Punk Rock lyrics and interviews from diplomats who worked during the Cold War.

In this lesson, students will examine the U.S. policy of containment during the Cold War, and analyze how the policy was put into practice in Europe, South America, Central America, the Caribbean, and East Asia. Students will be exploring these policies and their implications by annotating lyrics to songs by The Clash, Sex Pistols, Anti-Flag, and Gang of Four and examining interviews from diplomats from the Library of Congress’ Frontline Diplomacy: The Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training collection. At the end of the lesson, students will compare and contrast the lyrics with the primary sources to develop a summary that weighs the pros and cons of the U.S.’s containment policy.

By the end of the Potsdam conference—the final of three between the heads of Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States—there was little optimism that the post-World War II landscape would be one of cooperation and trust. Rather, what would emerge was a global landscape defined by emerging and competing spheres of influence. Particularly, the international landscape was divided into roughly three regions: the “First World” made up of capitalist United States and Western Europe; the “Second World,” made up of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and (to a degree) China; and the “Third World,” consisting of practically everywhere else.

How the United States would operate in such a landscape was an open question. It was feared that the Soviet Union would further expand its influence both in Europe and Asia, thereby weakening the West in a growing global economic landscape. Yet, as Europe began removing the rubble and rebuilding, there was little appetite to orchestrate another global war through direct confrontation with the Soviet Union.

The first trial in this new “Cold War” occurred in Greece and Turkey. In February, 1947, the White House learned that the British Government would no longer be providing financial assistance to these countries, which were facing pressure from either the Soviets or internal leftist groups. In March of that year, Truman successfully petitioned Congress to fund these governments. The position later became known as the Truman Doctrine, which vowed U.S. support to governments facing Soviet pressure.

The summer of that same year, the United States enacted the National Security Act of 1947, restructuring military agencies and creating the Central Intelligence Agency. Along with the United States’ diplomats and ambassadors, the CIA would primarily task itself with helping to enact the Truman Doctrine by monitoring and then preventing Soviet influence around the world.

A day after the National Security Act was passed, an article written by an anonymous author labeling themselves simply “X” was published in the magazine Foreign Affairs. This “X Article,” as it became known, formed a blueprint of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War. In the article, the author (later identified as American diplomat George F. Keenan) argues that because the Soviets see the global adoption of Communism as inevitable, they are in no particular rush to spread their influence across the globe, and they are certainly in no rush to start another global war. What the United States is facing, then, is not a war between armies, but rather a war of influence. The goal, Keenan argues, is that the United States contains the spread of communism, and in so doing shows the globe the benefits of Democracy and capitalism.

When put into action, the Truman Doctrine and the containment policy faced a serious hurdle: communism, like democracy or capitalism, is an idea, and ideas can be spread with or without foreign assistance. Some instances of U.S. intervention were more clearly cut than others. After the war, for instance, Berlin and the Korean Peninsula were literally cut between two spheres of influence. But in other cases, a fight against communism meant not a fight against the U.S.S.R. per se, but against another country’s right to self-determination: the very thing that the U.S. supported according to the Truman Doctrine.

Throughout the Cold War, the United States thus found itself subverting the very thing it claimed to be trying to uphold across the globe: democracy. This is perhaps no more clearly seen than in the U.S.’s foreign policy with much of Latin America. In places like Chile, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Panama, the United States actively supported dismantling democratically elected governments for fear that their policies were too leftist or sympathetic to the Soviets. More often than not, the United States found itself involved in military coups which overturned democratically elected governments and left these countries in the hands of American-friendly authoritarian governments. In other cases, such as in Cuba, the United States continued to support dictators for fear that otherwise the country would become communist if people were given the right to vote.

The seeming hypocrisy of the United States’ foreign policy during the Cold War expectedly led to criticism. Within music, such criticism has perhaps been taken up most by Punk bands, as the genre lends itself to more political subject matter. At the same time, the genre also tends to be emotionally charged and anti-authoritarian, leading to some claims within Punk lyrics that lack nuance. A more nuanced approach might come from diplomats who worked in these regions. In their accounts, one truth certainly becomes clear: “Third World” countries such as those in Latin America were never simply locations for a proxy war between the West and the U.S.S.R. Each country had its own colonized histories, perspectives, and internal politics which, more often than not, both the West and the U.S.S.R attempted to disrupt for largely their own interests.