Strategies of Containment

"I see this book as in some ways the US companion to Kennedy’s Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery. I think it is the best synthetic treatment of American grand strategy during the Cold War. Gaddis doesn’t, as Kennedy does, deal with US strategy from soup to nuts. He really starts the book with the end of World War Two and the rise of American efforts to contain the Soviet Union. Gaddis does a very good job of telling the story and he packages it in a conceptual way that I think has shaped public debate about American strategy ever since. For me the lasting legacy of the book is really the treatment of the 40s and the 50s and the 60s where he delineates between two very different versions. One version was the brainchild of George Kennan and the other was the brainchild of Paul Nitze. Gaddis uses these two figures to paint a very interesting picture of the contending paradigms that inform strategy."

"Strategies of Containment is really a survey of various tactics applied in the larger strategy of containment that we relied on during the Cold War. The object of containment was to check the expansion of the Soviet Union. John Lewis Gaddis, an esteemed professor of history at Yale, brings us all the way from the origins of containment in the late 1940s through its variations: the original version of containment applied during the Truman administration; rollback during the Eisenhower administration; détente during the Nixon era; and all the way through to Ronald Reagan, who practiced a mix of rollback and détente. Despite the very different nature of these administrations they all hewed close to the strategy of containment. Changes in American foreign policy, when they happen, tend to happen at the margins. The reason for this is because the world will permit nothing else. When there is a major crisis, as we’re seeing right now in Libya, it was clear the president did not want to intervene, and yet the fact that no one else could intervene successfully has forced him to intervene. It really shows that the world has a way of forcing America’s hand. We really tried to hand off responsibility to the Europeans. The Europeans mustered the will to intervene but they could not muster the resources. So against our own will, we’re being dragged into this because of our overwhelming military capabilities. “Despite the very different nature of these administrations they all hewed close to the strategy of containment.” The world really doesn’t function very well without America’s participation. Consider Jimmy Carter, one of Gaddis’s subjects. During the first couple of years of the Carter administration, he declared the Cold War over and pursued a strenuous version of détente. But in the final years of the Carter administration, he ended up squarely back in the tradition of America’s post-war presidents, taking a firm line with the Soviet Union and engaging himself very deeply with the world. He began as a liberal isolationist; he ended up boosting the defence budget and funnelling aid to anti-communists in Afghanistan and Central America. So America is not entirely in control of its fortunes abroad; when America tries to hunker down in a shell, the world always comes calling. The Bush administration tried to treat the war on terror as an analogue to the war against Soviet communism. The Bush administration was focused on rollback, a variation of containment developed by the Eisenhower administration and embraced by the Reagan administration. Rollback went beyond containing the enemy to actually seeking to roll back their advances and defeating the enemy. During the Cold War, we tended to view the Soviets as mirror images of ourselves, who wouldn’t want to exercise the Armageddon scenario. Unlike with the Soviets, policymakers tend to view terrorists as irrational actors willing to do anything, including killing themselves, to advance their cause. I hate to beat this horse bloody, but the continuity between Bush and Obama is undeniable. Obama has launched a surge in Afghanistan, much as Bush launched a surge in Iraq. Obama escalated American involvement in Pakistan. And he’s launched a third war in Libya. There are ineluctable forces that force presidents’ hands. No matter who was president right now, we’d probably end up with similar foreign policies."