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A New Defense Strategy Signals the End of ContainmentContainment The US foreign policy doctrine articulated by diplomat George Kennan in 1946–47, holding that Soviet expansion should be blocked at every point rather than directly confronted. It defined American grand strategy throughout the Cold War. The doctrine of containment emerged from Kennan’s ‘Long Telegram’ of February 1946 and his anonymous ‘X Article’ in Foreign Affairs in July 1947, which argued that Soviet expansion was not driven by genuine security needs but by ideological imperatives — that the Soviet state required external enemies to justify its domestic repression, and that it would…