Question

Part of my essay is to examine how cold war foreign policy led to the trampling of freedoms abroad. I have no idea what to say.

Answer 1

America's foreign policy during the Cold War was "containment". This policy was the idea of preventing communism from spreading to countries across the world.

The way that America did this was primarily by funding capitalist/democratic nations around the world (South Korea and South Vietnam specifically). America would fun these nations and their armies while supporting them in the war efforts. This led the the Vietnamese and Korean Wars.

The problem is that, in funding these nations, the opposing nations (North Vietnam and North Korea) suffered. They ended up having to take funding from large communist nations (USSR and China) in order to protect themselves. When smaller nations have to ally with large nations, they often times end up acting as tools for them, being used to spread their ideas.

America's foreign policy of containment during the Cold War led to the trampling of freedoms through their funding of the nations who supported their ideals. I think you should write about those facts and highlight the way that America used the smaller nations as their tools to convert the communist nations to capitalist/democratic nations.

(I only wrote about Vietnam and Korean because they are the largest examples of this and the examples that I am most familiar with, but I'm sure there are other examples in other parts of the world).