Containment, as everyone will recall, was a rough plan for stopping the Communists any time they crossed a certain line dividing our half of the world from theirs.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
After spending the 1980s building up Saddam's Iraq as a counterweight to Iran, U.S. policy abruptly reversed course with his invasion of Kuwait and has since tried to cut him down to size. The policy is called 'containment,' but the question is, containment of what?
It never occurred to me that we would have as grandiose a program as the Marshall Plan, but I felt that we had to do something to save Europe from economic disaster which would encourage the Communist takeover.
Twenty years ago, I said there was going to be something that would stop the Soviet Union from taking over the world. And now we see that the Soviet Union has been stopped, through its own disintegration.
But the most important thing about that story, which is not often told, is that as a result after the Cuban missile crisis, immediate steps were taken to correct our inability to collect on the movement of nuclear material out of the Soviet Union to other places.
I left 'Containment' for the first time understanding the exhaustion some people have after they've done a really demanding emotional and physical project. I wanted a break, to be honest with you, and I needed to recover.
The unthinkable occurred: two communist countries went to war with each other.
Vietnam was really an idealistic thing to stop the spread of communism, which, incidentally, it did. It was a pretty costly way to do it, but it achieved its goal.
They were terrified that we were going to become an anti-war kind of platform.
The Pacific had great hope that when the former President Mitered decided to halt nuclear testing, we had put behind us the issue of nuclear states testing their weapons in our Pacific region.
Communists are great capitalists, so there is no threat anymore.