The first of the giants of American grand strategy during the Cold War lived to be the last of the giants. When George F. Kennan died a few weeks ago at the age of 101, none of his great contemporaries was left. Truman, Marshall, Acheson, Forrestal, Harriman, Bohlen, and Lovett had all preceded him in death years ago; and even Kennan's most formidable rival on matters of policy, his longtime friend Paul Nitze, died last fall at 97.
It is an appropriate moment, therefore, to assess what Kennan and his generation accomplished. For although great grand strategies are bounded by time and space, they also transcend time and space. They all arise, as the strategy of containment did, within particular periods, places, and sets of circumstances. And yet the adjective "great" implies relevance beyond context. It suggests that the strategy in question may serve as a guide in periods, places, and circumstances yet to come.
When Kennan returned to Washington in the spring of 1946, having riveted the attention of the United States government with the longest telegram ever sent from its embassy in Moscow, his first job was to design a course on strategy and policy at the National War College. "We found ourselves thrown back," he recalled, "on the European thinkers of other ages and generations: on Machiavelli, Clausewitz, Gallieni--even Lawrence of Arabia." Total war in a nuclear age would be "suicidal," but there was no American tradition of limited war. So it was necessary to explore other traditions: Montesquieu's view that "nations ought to do one another in peace the most good, in war--the least possible evil," or Gibbon's claim that the "temperate and indecisive conflicts" of the eighteenth century had been a strength rather than a weakness of that era. Kennan was relying here on the principle of transferability: that grand strategies from the past could suggest what to emulate and what to avoid in shaping grand strategies for the future.
It seems fair enough, then, to apply that standard to the strategy that Kennan himself devised after moving to the State Department early in 1947. To what extent might containment work in other periods, places, and sets of circumstances? Not at all, he seemed to suggest during the Vietnam War: "I emphatically deny the paternity of any efforts to invoke that doctrine today in situations to which it has, and can have, no proper relevance." The possibility that there could be strategies of containment--that his own strategy could spawn mutations of which he disapproved--left Kennan frustrated, apologetic, and often angry. The sensation, he recalled, was that of having "inadvertently loosened a large boulder from the top of a cliff and now helplessly witness[ing] its path of destruction in the valley below, shuddering and wincing at each successive glimpse of disaster."
By the end of the Cold War, however, the successes of containment had clearly outweighed its failures. There was no war with the Soviet Union, as there had been twice with Germany and once with Japan between 1914 and 1945. There was no appeasement either, as there had been in the years between the two world wars. Whatever the miscalculations, whatever the costs, the United States and its allies sustained a strategy that was far more consistent, effective, and morally justifiable than anything their adversaries were able to manage. Indeed, it is difficult to think of any peacetime grand strategy in which the results produced in the end corresponded more closely with the objectives specified at the beginning.
Students of strategy will therefore be studying containment for decades, even centuries, to come. Leaders will be applying its lessons in periods, places, and circumstances that nobody can now foresee. Transferability, however much Kennan resisted the notion, is unavoidable. But because the context can never again be that of the Cold War, not all aspects of that strategy are likely to transfer equally well.
Kennan himself suggested one such aspect: the requirement that the adversary to be contained share one's own sense of risk. Containment probably would not have succeeded against Napoleon or Hitler, he pointed out in 1947, because both gave themselves historical deadlines--determined presumably by their own mortality--for achieving their objectives. Sticking to timetables was more important to them than avoiding war. They lacked the caution that Marxism-Leninism had instilled in Soviet leaders: "the Kremlin is under no ideological compulsion to accomplish its purposes in a hurry," Kennan reminded the readers of Foreign Affairs that summer. Convinced that history was on their side, Stalin and his successors were prepared to be patient. And this bought the time that was needed for containment to demonstrate that they were wrong.
Nor is it clear that containment would have worked against states whose leaders believed in, as Sir Michael Howard has put it, "the inevitability of, and the social necessity for, armed conflict in the development of mankind." Such views were common in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a fact that helps to explain how so many great powers could have blundered so easily in 1914 into a Great War. But that global conflict, and the one that followed in 1939, profoundly shook "bellicist" assumptions; and the use of atomic bombs in 1945 shattered them. Quite apart from the presence of a cautious adversary, therefore, there was in the postwar era a far more favorable psychological climate than had previously existed for developing measures, such as containment, short of war.
This sense of shared risk persisted throughout the Cold War, which is why the adjective remained attached to the noun. It did not matter whether Democrats or Republicans occupied the White House, or whether reformers or reactionaries inhabited the Kremlin: all feared a third world war. All had societies to defend and states to preserve. Total war had ceased to be a means by which those objectives could be accomplished, even if limited wars were still possible. It is hardly surprising, then, that Kennan and his war-college students read Clausewitz, for it was his great principle that the use of force must never become an end in itself: "The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and means can never be considered in isolation from their purpose." No major leader during the Cold War would have disagreed.
That fact suggests a second limitation on containment's applicability beyond a Cold War context, which is that it was a state-based strategy. It depended not only on the fear of all-out war, but also on the existence of identifiable regimes that could manage the running of risks short of war. This, too, was consistent with Clausewitz: where else could the capacity to constrain force come from if not the state, the entity created, at the dawn of the modern era, to monopolize the means of violence? To imagine Clausewitz apart from the state is to imagine a boat without water. Might the same be said, then, of containment? Can that strategy function in an environment in which states are no longer the principal threats to be contained?
The attacks of September 11, 2001 posed that question for the United States in the starkest possible terms. The Bush administration was quick to conclude that Cold War strategies--containment and the deterrence that accompanied it--would not have worked against Al Qaeda. How does one contain someone who, before striking, is invisible? How does one deter someone who, in the act of striking, is prepared to commit suicide? These problems led Bush to announce a new grand strategy of pre-emption. The United States would henceforth act multilaterally where possible, but unilaterally where necessary, to destroy terrorists before they could hit their intended targets. The purpose was to defend states against stateless enemies.
But Bush's strategy was less of an innovation than at first it seemed to be. Pre-emption had never been ruled out during the Cold War. No American president, in a nuclear age, would have knowingly risked another Pearl Harbor. Nor was Al Qaeda an entirely stateless enemy. Osama bin Laden ran it from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, against which the Bush administration swiftly and successfully retaliated in the fall of 2001. Its first clear act of pre-emption also took place against a state, Iraq, in 2003. One purpose was to frighten the leaders of any other states who might be harboring terrorists or thinking about doing so: but that was deterrence, with a view to countering an anticipated danger. Pre-emption by the Bush administration's logic, then, led back to containment. It did not replace containment.
Yet there is another way of understanding September 11 that might indeed make containment obsolete. It comes from claims that the attacks could only have occurred because of a diminished capacity on the part of all states to control what happened within their territories and across their borders. If September 11 initiated a new age of insecurity in which the actions of only a few individuals could endanger entire societies, then strategies of containment as traditionally conceived would be of little use. Containment presumed threats from states seeking to survive. It was never designed for movements seeking martyrdom. Preemption in such situations, the argument runs, may be the only feasible option.
A third limitation on containment's relevance beyond a Cold War context has to do with the persistence, throughout that conflict, of something obviously worse than American hegemony. It is clear in retrospect that the United States retained a preponderance of power-- in all of the categories that constitute power--throughout the last half of the twentieth century. But it did so more often by invitation than by imposition: as long as the Soviet Union was the alternative, there was always something worse, in the eyes of most of the rest of the world, than the prospect of American domination. That minimized the "friction"--to use Clausewitz's term--that hegemony might otherwise have generated.
With the end of the Cold War, however, the unintended advantage that the Soviet Union had given the United States disappeared--as did the urgency of cultivating allies and neutrals who, if neglected, might defect to the other side, or at least threaten to do so. Multilateral consultation diminished steadily during the administrations of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, not because the principle was objectionable, but because the practice seemed less necessary than it had during the Cold War. George W. Bush's administration inherited unilateralism. It did not invent it.
But it certainly intensified unilateralism in several ways: through tactless diplomacy with respect to the Kyoto Protocol on global climate change, the International Criminal Court, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty; through the casualness with which it brushed aside offers of help from NATO allies in invading Afghanistan; through its single-minded determination to overthrow Saddam Hussein despite widespread opposition within the international community; and through its reluctance to acknowledge, having conquered Iraq, that it had no clear idea what to do there. All of this led to an unprecedented loss of support throughout the rest of the world for the United States and its foreign policy objectives. The view seemed to be emerging that there could be nothing worse than American hegemony if it was to be used in this way.
If this trend continues, the basis for American power will indeed have shifted from invitation to imposition, a very different context from the one in which containment arose during the Cold War. When Kennan wrote in 1947 that "the United States need only measure up to its own best traditions," he assumed that those traditions would have greater appeal beyond American borders than would those of the Soviet Union and the international communist movement. He was right: the existence of such rivals provided an eminently realistic reason for Americans to respect their own ideals and to try to reflect them, for the most part successfully, in their actions. But if the United States now ceases to do that--if it creates a new tradition of imposed rather than invited power--then it should hardly be surprised to find little that might transfer from the strategy of containment that produced its own pre-eminence.
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