Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses podcast.

I'm Jeremiah Regan.

And I'm Juan Davaloz.

We're back with American Foreign Policy.

Lecture number six today, the containment of communism.

Professor Anton starts with an explanation of

NSC 68, which is an order that President Truman signed in 1950, which laid out American policy with

regards to communism. America won with its allies, won World War II, but then it turned out not all

of our allies were actually our friends and the Soviets became our

great enemy for the remainder of the 20th century. Americans debated how to handle the threat

of communism. Do we try to roll back the Soviet gains during the war and after? Do we try to

isolate ourselves and allow the Soviets to expand? Or do we attempt to contain them, which means prevent the Soviet

Union from further expansions through reasonable means avoiding war when possible?

And this policy of containment manifests itself in embargoes, the space race, and then a few

breakouts of active conflict, though usually through proxies. You can see this in the Korean

War, the Vietnam War, which did have Americans engaged in actual combat, but generally not

against Soviet communists, against the Koreans and the Chinese and the Vietnamese and Viet Cong,

while at home continuing to strengthen the American military by continuing the draft, maintaining

high levels of military spending, and the creation of peacetime civilian intelligence

services that ran those clandestine operations in South Central America and in Afghanistan.

The subject of communism, it's a huge subject, and we cover it briefly here in a couple

of lectures, but we have a whole course dedicated to this ideology. The course is Marxism,

...