There were several successful anti-communist foreign policies implemented by the U.S. during the Cold War. From 1948 to 1951, the Marshall Plan provided roughly 13 billion dollars in financial assistance to war-torn Western Europe for the purchase of necessary commodities and economic rehabilitation projects (Tarnoff, 2018). By 1951, industrial production increased by 55% and agricultural production by 37%, which exceeded the expected goals of the Plan (Tarnoff, 2018). Communist strength declined by one-third from 1946 to 1951, and this has been directly linked to the success of the Marshall Plan (Tarnoff, 2018). The economic prosperity of free-market capitalism assured political stability, which obviated a communist uprising.
In 1948, the Soviets blocked all ground and water routes to West Berlin, so U.S. and U.K. forces used aircraft to deliver supplies in what has become known as the Berlin Airlift (Lange, 2018). Planes constantly flew into Berlin and delivered more than 2 million tons of food, fuel, and medicine (Lange, 2018). This allowed the U.S. to maintain a capitalist presence in Berlin and convinced Western Europe that the new enemy was the communist U.S.S.R.
It was a strategic and ideological win for anticommunism, which solidified the division between East and West. This political division was further formalized by establishing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949, an event most associated with the U.S. policy of containment (“NATO”, 2019). If the U.S.S.R. attacked member states in Western Europe, the U.S. would be obliged to intervene (“NATO”, 2019). This military alliance prevented communist expansion into the West after the seizure of Czechoslovakia and formalized Western European countries as anti-communist U.S. allies.
The success of the Marshall Plan, Berlin Airlift, and NATO prove their necessity and how right the United States was to fear international communist subversion. The hardships faced by postwar Western Europe could have easily led to a communist uprising without U.S. aid; Berlin and then Germany could have been completely overtaken by the Soviets after the blockade. Without the NATO pact, the U.S.S.R. could have continued its expansion into the West following Czechoslovakia. Although the Soviet Union ultimately collapsed under its weight, it could have overtaken all of Europe before it did. The fact that Western Europe remained a capitalist democracy is a direct result of effective American foreign policy.
References
Lange, K. (2018). The Berlin Airlift: What it was, its importance in the Cold War. U.S. Department of Defense. Web.
NATO. (2019). History. Web.
Tarnoff, C. (2018). The Marshall Plan: Design, accomplishments, and significance. Congressional Research Service. Web.