America's greatest successes before 1989 had come in the Early Cold War, and it faced far more failures once the policy of containment was globalized to the Third World. Success in Western Europe and Japan, ironically, laid the groundwork for an expansion of the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s, for as the Great Industrial Powers recovered they required increased fuel, food and raw materials from the Global South. Before World War II, they had been able to obtain these by their own efforts, and indeed, part of the region for the German and Japanese rampages of the 1930s and 1940s was to secure empires in Europe and Asia that would allow them to rival Britain and France. None of the old imperial powers were in a position to do this after 1945, though, especially in the face of rising nationalist and communist movements in the Third World, yet these key American allies had far greater need of foreign markets and raw materials than the United States itself.
Some realists like George Kennan and George Ball strongly opposed this globalization of containment that ended in the jungles of Vietnam, and thought "Southeast Asia was peripheral to American interests" compared to Western Europe and Japan. Supporters of the New Look wished to achieve the same ends but at minimal cost and risk of direct use of American troops in the Third World, while others were prepared to run even that risk. For Dean Rusk and other globalizers, the United States had to fight a defensive war against a world revolutionary threat backed by Russia and China, and believed that "what happened in the Third World was important to our long-range interests." In the end, historical hindsight proved the globalizers wrong: whatever happened in countries like Cuba, Vietnam, Angola and Nicaragua did turn out to be peripheral to American interests. For them the Cold War began and ended in Europe.
Nevertheless, in the Middle Cold War, Kennedy and Johnson shared the consensus with the Republicans that the Third World dominos would collapse without continued American reassurance and intervention: these nations were so weak and vulnerable, and often so internally rotten, that revolutions could easily bring them down. Moreover, if the resource-producing areas fell, then Germany and Japan might be neutralized and forced to accommodate to the Soviet Union. Washington could not risk any threat to their economic well being which might lead to their 'loss' to the Western alliance, even if this meant taking on the workload of four or five of the pre-World War II empires. Middle class white Americans had little knowledge about the raw materials areas of the world and little experience with the kind of "hunger, privation, and social unrest" typically found there while upper class leaders in the U.S. were even further removed from such sources of discontent. As one Soviet expert put it: "Americans have been exclusively fortunate in their history, perhaps too fortunate, to be capable of fully understanding and harboring genuine sympathy toward nations with more difficult histories."
During the Middle Cold War, then, with Europe and North Asia relatively stable, conflict switched almost entirely to the "Third World"--or Global South-where containment became globalized and America suffered severe defeats in Cuba and Vietnam. Washington's goal was "to integrate the industrial core and the Third World periphery" and it got into the habit of opposing just about any revolution for fear that, if successful, it would be aligned with the Soviet Union. This led to bloody consequences in the Middle East, Latin America and Southeast Asia, where the United States opted to suppress revolutionary movements in these mineral-rice regions. If revolutions were successful, they would ally with the Soviet Union, which then "might grow strong enough to challenge the United States." Kolko found much of U.S. foreign policy confused, even incoherent, in dealing with the Third World, and that it "has not had the thinkers capable of giving theoretical and intellectual coherence to its role and practices." In the Global South the U.S. followed a purely negative, reactive and defensive policy of anti-Communism (or even old-fashioned Russophobia), often lacking any coherent program of economic development in many countries.
