In Strategies of Containment, John Lewis Gaddis looks to analyze the United States national security policy since World War II. Gaddis divides the postwar years into five distinct geopolitical codes, which he analyzes in depth. Gaddis' systematic analysis asks the following questions of each geopolitical code:

1. What conception did the administration in question have of American interests in the world?

2. How did it perceive threats to those interests

3. What responses did it choose to make, in light of those interests and threats?

4. How did it seek to justify those responses?

Gaddis' objective, as he quite humorously puts it, "is to throw out a large, but [he] hopes not too indigestible 'lump,' which should at least give the 'splitters,' who have been on a pretty lean diet lately, something to chew on." The word containment, as Gaddis puts it, is "the term generally used to characterize American policy toward the Soviet Union during the postwar era." The term comes from Gaddis' first topic: George F. Kennan, used the term "containment" in 1947, while acting as director of the Policy Planning Staff in the White House.

analyzes the effectiveness of this "flexible response" policy by looking at the war in Vietnam. Gaddis feels that the "flexible response" concept did not work because there was a lack of balance between ends and means. In the end Gaddis calls the result a "strategic vacuum" in that the complete opposite occurred as to what was planned. As Nixon enters the White House in 1969 he appoints Henry Kissinger as his national security advisor. Nixon and Kissinger's strategy for containment was called "detente" which would attempt to end the cold war with the Soviet Union. In July of 1969 Nixon set forth the Nixon Doctrine, part of the larger strategy which essentially phased down America's commitments in the world.

With Kennan's resignation from the Policy Planning Staff in 1949, an ad hoc committee of State and Defense Department officials created NSC-68, a document that was mean to "systematize containment, and to find the means to make it work." Among the things that NSC-68 did were: changed the policy from a strongpoint defense to perimeter defense, increased defense expenditures without war, and approved the decision to build the H-bomb. NSC-68 did not revolutionize the National Security Policy of the United States, but more so piggybacked on many of Kennan'

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Approximate Word count = 857
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)