Chapter 27:
After World War II, the United States, intent on spreading freedom and free trade, clashed with the Soviet Union, which wanted to ensure its own security by surrounding itself with a ring of sympathetic states. Americans viewed this as a threatening expansion of communism and developed a policy of containment to counter it, expressed in the Truman Doctrine and manifested in the Marshall Plan, NATO, and NSC-68. The containment policy precipitated numerous heated standoffs between the U.S. and USSR around the globe, most notably in the Middle East and Cuba, and to armed conflicts in Korea and Vietnam. But probably because of the massive nuclear-weapon stockpiles of each, the two powers never warred with each other. At home, the Cold War engendered another red scare, and as a result of the war in Vietnam, massive disagreement with and distrust of the government.
