This article is undertaken as a research note aiming to reconsider realist accounts for American containment policy in East Asia during the Cold War period, and address opening discussions over some alternative explanations with the particular reference to the two battlefields of the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Four possible scenarios are suggested in the hope of revising the neorealist utility of the containment doctrine by adopting sociological and path-dependent revisionist explanations as alternative ways to tackle the neorealist orthodoxy. A central argument in this note is that the US containment policy in East Asia was not only a logical outgrowth of American grand strategy on the neorealist basis, but also a multiple interest complex which has been socially constructed by the mutual formation between internal and external factors. The tasks ahead, thus, converge on how to promote and reformulate the analytical combination between the traditional way of neorealist accounts and its alternative approaches in a more constructive fashion.