Graduation Year
2016
Document Type
Thesis
Degree
M.A.
Degree Name
Master of Arts (M.A.)
Degree Granting Department
Government and International Affairs
Major Professor
Steven Roach, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Earl Conteh-Morgan, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Darrell Slider, Ph.D.
Keywords
Government, Middle East, Realist Critique
Abstract
After World War II the United States, faced with the new Soviet threat of Communism, instituted the foreign policy known as “containment” in order to mitigate the threat to Western European states of Soviet expansionism. After the fall of Communism in the USSR in 1991 that policy was deemed, at once, a success and an anachronism. The power vacuum that the subsequent abandonment of that policy created was most notable in the Islamic states that had served as proxies in the Cold War against Communism. Both the backdrop of containment as well as the withdrawal of that policy served to lay the foundation for the rise of Islamic fundamentalism throughout the Muslim world as a function of American hegemony after 1991.
Scholar Commons Citation
Gerber, Christopher Jonathan, "Containment: A Failed American Foreign Policy and How the Truman Doctrine Led to the Rise in Islamic Extremism in the Muslim World" (2016). USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/6087
