As promulgated in 1947 by one of its chief architects, George Kennan, the policy of containment fashioned a strategy to deal with the implacable challenge posed by Soviet Communists (Kennan, 582). Because of their ideology and history, the Soviets were held to be dangerous and thus their expansion must be countered by the West. To deal with the Soviet threat, Kennan called for a long-term and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies (Kennan, 575). Although containment policy was …
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…Cold War suggests a curious paradox. Kennan and other early containment theorists were correct to conclude that Soviet Communism is a singularly undesirable and fundamentally flawed form of government, and they were right to anticipate that it would inevitably have to change when it could no longer avoid confronting its inherent contradictions. Soviet Communism, however, would probably have reached this point somewhat earlier if its natural propensity to expand had been tolerated rather than contained.