The Policy of Containment and East-West Exchanges, 1955-75

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Following the Geneva summit held in 1955, the Eisenhower Administration embarked on implementing East-West exchanges as an important means of containing Soviet expansionism The US-Soviet cultural agreement concluded in 1958 should be understood in this context. President Eisenhower assumed that America's cultural penetration of the Soviet society could promote evolution within the Soviet system toward a regime that would become less hostile and antagonistic against the US. The successive administrations followed this course.Although the major foreigu policy issues facing the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations in the 1960s were Cuba, Berlin, nuclear arms control, and Vietnam. they steadily executed the US-Soviet exchanges. The deepening military involvement of the US in Vietnam angered the Brezhnev Administration, casting a long shadow over the exchange programs. The Soviet government did suspend some of these programs. Still, President Johnson persisted. He had good reason to boast later of his impressive achievements in this field. The consular convention of 1964 and the civil air agreement of 1966 were especially significant. By the summer of 1968, the relationship between the two nations had become good enough to start the strategic arms limitation talks.While it is difficult to judge to what extent the exchanges attained the stated aim, they did play, a subordinate yet important part in moving the Soviets toward detente and gradual expansion of exchanges with the West. Nonetheless, without the Vietnam War, the Johnson Administmtion could have almost certainly channeled more resources to further the US-Soviet exchanges as a useful tool for containment. In this foreign policy area too, the US paid a price, for its terrible mistakes in Vietnam.