There are several major foreign policy events of the Cold War. One of them was the development of the policy of containment. Containment was a policy designed to stop the spread of communism. The policy of containment believed that communism was a flawed system that would eventually fail. Therefore we needed to keep communism where it was and not let it spread. With the Truman Doctrine, we gave economic aid to countries like Greece and Turkey. We believed that if a country had a strong economy, they would be less likely to become communist. We offered economic aid to other countries with the Marshall Plan. We used military action to keep communism from spreading to South Korea and threatened military action in northern Iran. Containment was a key part of our foreign policy while Truman was president.

Another key foreign policy event was the development of brinkmanship and massive retaliation. These policies believed that by threatening to go war and by threatening to use nuclear weapons, we could control the actions of communist governments. We used these policies to bring the Korean War to an end, to stop a war in the Middle East, and to keep Communist China out of Taiwan. To some degree, these policies were also used in the Cuban Missile Crisis. For the most part, these policies were used while Eisenhower was president. They play a part in some of the actions of President Kennedy also.