Containment: Rebuilding a Strategy Against Global Terror

Ian Shapiro
Princeton University Press
2007
ISBN:978-0-691-12928-0
Chapter 1: The Idea Vacuum Pages 1 to 9

Power expands to fill a vacuum. This holds for ideas no less than for military campaigns, as the George W Bush administration’s national security doctrine has so dramatically underscored. (1) Announced in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, it ranks as one of the most dramatic sea changes in U.S. national security policy ever. The Bush Doctrine has also turned traditional Republican Party foreign policy inside out and upside down. The congenital skeptics of foreign entanglements, whose leader heaped scorn on “nation building” in his 2000 presidential campaign, were transformed overnight into the world’s self-appointed internationalists and policemen. The Bush administration committed itself to exporting American-style freedom and democracy worldwide, to confronting an “Axis of Evil” that was said to reach from to Tehran to Pyongyang, and to waging unilateral preemptive war by coalitions “of the willing” so as to achieve regime change as was undertaken in Iraq in March of 2003.

A good part of the Bush Doctrine’s easy ascendancy can be explained by the shock, scale, and sheer drama of the 9/11 attacks that unfolded in excruciating detail on live television on that beautiful September morning, killing more civilians than had the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor sixty years earlier. It created an opening for Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and his influential neoconservative deputy Paul Wolfowitz to rewrite American national security policy almost overnight, without any serious debate on Capitol Hill or any significant opposition from the Democrats….

The first rule of electoral politics is that you can’t beat something with nothing. Particularly when one is confronting an administration that is as explicitly and dramatically ideologically driven as the George W Bush administration, it is essential to formulate an alternative and demonstrate its superiority and attractiveness.

My goal here is to do just that. I begin with an account of the ideological vacuum created by the 9/11 attacks, which obliterated the possibility of thinking about counterterrorism through the lens of the criminal justice system. In chapter 3, I chronicle how the Bush administration filled this vacuum with the Bush Doctrine and its “war on terror,” illustrating how radical a departure this has been not only from traditional Republican and conservative ideas in recent American politics, but also from U.S. national security practices at least since the days of Woodrow Wilson. In chapters 4-6, my attention shifts to defending a credible alternative to the Bush Doctrine.

My argument depends centrally on adapting the doctrine of containment developed by George Kennan, a career foreign service diplomat and then director of the Policy Planning Staff for President Truman, in response to the emerging Soviet threat after World War II. Kerman’s argument was laid out in “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” published in Foreign Affairs in 1947, signed by “X,” but widely known to have been his work .(6) It provided the basis for the Truman administration’s early postwar approach to the Soviet Union. Although it was modified in a variety of ways by Truman and his successors, the core ideas structured U.S. national security policy for much of the Cold War. The architects of the Bush Doctrine have declared containment to be obsolete in the post-9/11 era. I show that they are wrong. Refashioning containment in light of the realities of the twenty-first century offers the best bet for securing Americans from violent attack while preserving democracy at home and diffusing it abroad.

Kennan believed two things about the Soviets: that appeasement of their ambitions would be disastrous for America’s vital interests, and that a direct assault on the USSR or its client states was unnecessary and would be counterproductive. The dangers of appeasement required no extended defense in the aftermath of World War II. Containment was intended to prevent Soviet expansion without saddling the United States with unsustainable global military obligations. It committed the United States to war only when its vital interests are at stake. Otherwise, the Soviet threat was to be contained by our relying on economic sticks and carrots, fostering competition within the world communist movement, engaging in diplomacy, promoting the health and vitality of the capitalist democracies, and ensuring that our attempts to combat the Soviets would not make us become more like them. As the Soviets became overextended internationally and the dysfunctional features of their economic system played themselves out, patient application of these tools would be sufficient to guarantee America’s national security.

The Soviet adversary that concerned Kennan posed different challenges from those faced by the United States in the post-9/11 world, but there are important similarities as well. Kerman’s article, initially known as the “Long Telegram,” began as a February 1946 State Department cable from Moscow. It was designed to convince his superiors that the USSR’s political outlook was so antithetical to ours that the United States had to find a basis for dealing with the Soviets other than argument and persuasion. Sometimes they might go through the motions of talking, but Kennan insisted that they saw the arguments of Western governments as mere ideological rationalizations for a system they utterly rejected as exploitative, decadent, and subversive of the world they sought to create.

The parallels with the architects of 9/11 and their supporters do not end there. Kennan had no doubt that the Soviets had regional, if not global, ambitions, that they were constitutionally hostile to democracy as Americans understood it, and that they expected much of the ideological contest between their system and ours to be played out in the Third World. And just as defenders of containment had to face down critics who sought to equate it with appeasement during the Cold War, so I argue here that today containment offers better and more powerful tools than does the Bush Doctrine for protecting Americans and their democracy.

Moreover, though this was not Kerman’s focus, Islamic fundamentalists share in common with the old Soviets the lack of a viable economic model or a success story to which they can point. Where they have come to power, in countries like Afghanistan and Iran, the economic results have been disastrous because authoritarian regimes are not good at running market economies. In Saudi Arabia, a more complex example, success depends entirely on a nonrenewable resource. This makes it doubtful that in the medium term they can pose a serious challenge to democratic capitalism. For these reasons, among others, I make the case here that Kerman’s arguments for containment have continuing relevance to our present circumstances.

There are, nonetheless, significant differences between the world the United States and its allies faced during the Cold War and the adversaries we confront today. The most obvious concerns the object of containment. The Soviet Union was a single “it,” whereas today we face dangerous threats from a variety of hostile regimes and transnational terrorist groups. In one respect, as I argue, this situation lends itself to containment. It creates tensions among our adversaries’ agendas, as well as openings for competition among them. But containing threats to America’s survival as a democracy also confronts us with less predictable, more fluid and open-ended challenges than we faced in the Cold War. This reality is compounded by the proliferation of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction. The world is less stable than it was for much of the Cold War.

Recognizing this does not give us good reasons to abandon containment, but it does make it more complicated. It also suggests the importance of international instruments for which Kennan had little time. Among these are international law and institutions. The challenges posed by weak states, transnational terrorist groups, and unpredictable alliances all suggest that we should buttress the institutions of international legitimacy - pressing them into the service of fostering democracy, and containing threats to it, as best we can. And, whereas Kennan opposed collective defense arrangements like NATO, we should recognize that they can sometimes be helpful tools of containment - so long as they remain subordinate to our vital interest in securing the American people and their democracy into the future. (7) It is ironic, as we will see, that the two areas where the Bush administration’s practice has come closest to Kerman’s views are the two areas where they stand in most need of modification.

One other parallel with the early Cold War years deserves mention. Since the collapse of the Soviet empire, Kerman and containment have deservedly been accorded great credit for the national security stance that contributed so much to that result without a superpower war. It is worth noting, however, that at the start of the Cold War it was no foregone conclusion that containment would be the dominant strategy. In the 1952 election campaign Dwight Eisenhower attacked containment. His future secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, called for “rollback” of the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe, and for aggressive confrontation with communism worldwide. That these views did not prevail, even in the Eisenhower administration, is due, in part at least, to the fact that they were vigorously contested by containment’s defenders.

This history makes the Democrats’ failure to contest the Bush Doctrine in the present climate, and to get behind an alternative like that proposed here, all the more troubling. This subject is taken up in chapter 7.The Democrats’ failure can be traced to several sources. One is fear of challenging a president in a time of national crisis. A second, on the left of the Democratic Party, stems from ideological discomfort with the very idea of national security policy. A third is rooted in the changes wrought in the party’s ideology by the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) since the 1980s and the resulting tactical political imperatives. Yet unless the DLC outlook is fundamentally rethought, the Democrats are unlikely to find an effective vehicle to challenge the Bush Doctrine in the medium term. Even if they win the White House in 2008, they will likely have been co-opted by much of the Bush administration’s self-defeating national security policy.

(1) The National Security Strategy of the United States of ‘America (Washington, DC: The White House, 2002), http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html [8/1/05].

(6) X, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs, July 1947.[10/12/05].

(7) Kennan opposed the formation of NATO on the grounds that it would militarize the confrontation with the USSR unnecessarily. Certainly it solidified the confrontation with COME-CON. Whether the Cold War would have been won by containment alone, without NATO and the concomitant rearmament of Europe, is an open question that we need not settle here, since my version of containment does not rule out such alliances.

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Copyright 2007 Princeton University Press