The Cold War and U.S. Diplomacy - Essay Example20). Throughout the tenure of John F Kennedy, the nuclear arms race with the USSR and the Cold War remained his prime concerns. As a president and a statesman the spread of communism happened to be the point of focus for John F Kennedy and he considered the onus of wresting a containment of communism as the pivotal priority of the United States of America (Bose, 1998). What were the characteristics and ramifications of the containment strategy eschewed by Kennedy? Kennedy believed that Soviet Union was a potent and implacable enemy that aspired to spread its sway over the world in general and in the Western Hemisphere in particular. Thereby Kennedy laid emphatic stress on the need to maintain a balance of power against the Soviet Union even at the cost of curtailing other salient imperatives (Bose, 1998, p. 23).