Reopening the case for containment

Containment is back.

Over the last 12 months, commentators as varied as George Will, MIT political science professor Barry Posen and Thomas Friedman have all suggested that containing a nuclear-armed Iran might be preferable to attacking it.

Last month, Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution joined in with a study advocating a return to a policy of containment in Iraq -- even though he had been one of the most vocal supporters of the 2003 invasion on the grounds that containment was failing.

Even James Baker's Iraq Study Group proposed in its December report that the U.S. should work with Iran and Syria to contain the Iraqi conflict.

Containment is a Cold War idea, articulated by historian and diplomat George Kennan in the late 1940s in his famous Foreign Affairs magazine article "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," (which he published under the pseudonym "X"). Kennan, who had been stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, argued that as long as the Soviet Union did not attack us, we should not attack it -- but should rely instead on economic sticks and carrots, on intelligence and diplomacy and on promoting the health and vitality of the capitalist democracies to win the Cold War.

Yes, Kennan wrote, the Soviets were eager to increase their sphere of influence, but U.S. policy should nevertheless be built on "long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies." With time, he believed, the dysfunctional Soviet system, overextended beyond its own borders, would collapse of its own accord.

History proved him right.

But that was then and this is now. Containment (which was also our policy toward President Saddam Hussein of Iraq during the Clinton years) fell into disfavor in the run-up to the Iraq war, when the Bush administration denounced it as inadequate to meet the threats of the post-9/11 world. If Al Qaeda is attacking and nuclear terrorists are roaming the globe and rogue governments are providing them with weapons, the administration argued, only radical measures -- preemptive war and forcible regime change -- can protect us.

This was the modern equivalent of the "rollback" policy (to push the Soviets out of Eastern Europe) proposed by John Foster Dulles and Dwight Eisenhower in the 1952 election campaign (but abandoned as impracticable when they came into office the following year).

So what's the truth? Is containment in fact obsolete, as the Bush administration would have it? Numerous parallels suggest that it is not.