Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Containment: A Failed American Foreign Policy And How The Truman Doctrine Led To The Rise In Islamic Extremism In The Muslim World, Christopher Jonathan Gerber

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

After World War II the United States, faced with the new Soviet threat of Communism, instituted the foreign policy known as “containment” in order to mitigate the threat to Western European states of Soviet expansionism. After the fall of Communism in the USSR in 1991 that policy was deemed, at once, a success and an anachronism. The power vacuum that the subsequent abandonment of that policy created was most notable in the Islamic states that had served as proxies in the Cold War against Communism. Both the backdrop of containment as well as the withdrawal of that policy served to …