After Polarity in International Relataions

... to assess concretely. The confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States thus had two different aspects--ideological and military, and these were typically confused and conflated. The Truman Doctrine, which became the foundation of U.S. foreign policy aimed to stop both Soviet expansion and the spread of communism in Europe and elsewhere, assuming that these were one and the same thing. Collapsing these two kinds of threat into one seemed to make sense, since both the Soviet military ...