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Lee Jones
posted 23 March 2007

Ian Shapiro is a scholar so exasperated by the Democratic Party's standing like 'donkeys in the headlights' (p125) in the face of the so-called 'War on Terror' that he is promoting the 60-year-old concept of 'containment' as a viable alternative they can offer to the 'Bush doctrine'. There is much to commend in any attempt to offer a more mature strategy than the mind-numbingly foolish blend of 'shock and awe' and democracy promotion pursued by the Bush administration. But Shapiro's conception of containment and his understanding of its ramifications during the Cold War and beyond verges on the naïve at times. Although he would like to have his cake (contain dangerous states and the terrorists they sponsor) and eat it (promote democracy simultaneously), it is far from clear this is actually possible in practice.

The Bush doctrine's departure from traditional Republican orthodoxy and American national security policy is described as six-fold: it differs in its worldwide scope, its affirmation of a right to unconstrained unilateralism, a recasting of pre-emptive war as legitimate, its promotion of regime change, its removal of the possibility of neutrality via its 'you're with us or against us' rhetoric, and its envisaging a condition of permanent war. Chapter Three of Shapiro's book is the most succinct and comprehensive review and denunciation of the Bush doctrine available. Most importantly, it illustrates that the Iraq War was disastrous not because of incompetence on the part of Bush administration officials, but because the Bush doctrine itself is woefully flawed in every respect. By contrasting the strategy as it evolved post-9/11 with Bush's own earlier remarks (such as his hostility to 'nation-building' and the use of American force in a dictatorial and arrogant fashion), Shapiro shows how the doctrine is fundamentally an impetuous ad hoc improvisation worked out by a small clique of neoconservative hawks in response to an 'ideas vacuum' and the national trauma of 9/11. Moreover it is doomed to fail because it is so ignorant of allies' priorities and is fundamentally illegitimate.

Shapiro's alternative is to revive the use of 'containment', a strategy first proposed by George Kennan, head of the State Department's planning unit, in 1947, as a means of meeting the challenge posed by Soviet Communism. Containment aimed to avoid both appeasement of the USSR and a direct military confrontation, and so involved the judicious use of 'economic sticks and carrots, fostering competition within the world Communist movement, engaging in diplomacy, promoting the health and vigour of capitalist democracies and ensuring that our attempts to combat the Soviets would not make us become more like them', while waiting for Communism to exhaust itself beneath the weight of its own internal contradictions (p5). The argument is that a similar strategy could be used today to build a new international coalition against the state sponsors and bases of terrorists, thus undermining their capacity to do harm.

One of the major contributions of Containment is to defeat many of the arguments positing terrorism as a new kind of threat that necessitates radical new responses. Shapiro shows many aspects of the 'new' threat are not new at all, but are amenable to classical strategies. Suicide missions are, for instance, not novel, and there is no necessary connection to Islamism either: Japanese kamikaze pilots, adherents of many religions and members of the Marxist Tamil Tigers all engaged in suicide missions in the last century, with the Tamil Tigers way ahead in terms of body count. Focusing on suicide bombers, asking what their motivations were, misses the point: 'individual bombers need organisations, and organisations are not immune from containment and disruption strategies' that target their funding and command networks and their physical bases (p79). Likewise, the supposedly new threat we face from dirty nuclear bombs or chemical and biological weapons is also not new. Such weapons are extraordinarily difficult to construct, store and transport, and these scenarios belong more in a James Bond movie than the real world (p65). Where they can be obtained, far from being new, they are often WWI-era technologies - as we are reminded by the recent use of chlorine gas in Iraq.

Nor are the enemies we face irrational and therefore impervious to logical strategies of containment. Rogue regimes are subject to the same fact of deterrence as any other regime, meaning they are highly unlikely to deploy nuclear weapons, overtly or covertly, for fear of massive retaliation; and none, not even Iraq in the first Gulf War, has deployed chemical or biological weapons against the West (pp64-8). Many terrorist organisations, such as Hezbollah, are not 'Islamofascists' bent on world domination, but have limited, liberationist goals that are readily comprehensible if we bother to try to understand domestic Arabic politics (pp80-84). Many terrorists are middle class, illustrating that economic deprivation does not determine terrorism - but the evidence shows that it does determine support for terrorism by local communities - and this, too, can be remedied (p105). If the case of Libya is anything to go by (pp96-7), the US should be able to use the traditional tools of alliance building, diplomacy, coercion and incentives to undercut the backers that lend terrorist organisations their power, more effectively and more cheaply than the crude use of brute force.

There are, though, some major problems with Containment. The most immediately obvious is Shapiro's rather naïve understanding of containment as practised during the Cold War. Kennan's emphasis on the judicious use of force at key points, and the ranking of strategic priorities, lasted all of two or three years. The 'loss' of China to Communism and the McCarthyite backlash against the Democrats compelled the US to defend the strategically useless South Korea and prompted the adoption of NSC-68, which stressed the countering of communist force wherever it appeared - the logical terminus of which was the disastrous US intervention in Vietnam. Shapiro describes Vietnam as the 'exception that proves the rule', resulting from the abandonment of containment (p60) - but in fact containment always tended towards escalation. Despite Shapiro's suggestion that containment was 'more behavioural than ideological in that its focus is on what potential adversaries do rather than on their internal political arrangements' (p42), the two were not in fact separable. If the 'internal political arrangements' of a country appeared to be turning towards Communism, Washington used any means at its disposal to prevent this, from propping up right-wing dictatorships to military interventions, to supplying the names of Communists to the Indonesian army to facilitate their mass slaughter in 1965-66.

While Shapiro argues that containment aimed to defend 'diversity', was an 'anti-imperial stance' and is essentially 'to refuse to be bullied, while at the same time declining to become a bully' (pp33, 39, 37), the actual record of containment is precisely the opposite. In fact, the very problem Shapiro confronts is itself a product of that policy. America's overthrowing of Iranian democracy in 1953 and its backing of the Shah produced an Islamist backlash and a theocratic 'rogue state'. America's backing of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan rolled back Soviet troops but involved CIA training for Al Qaeda, led to the installation of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, and the creation of Islamist funding networks that now finance terrorism aimed against the United States. America's unceasing support for Israel and its backing of the Syrian occupation of Lebanon helped fuel the hatreds that prompted the formations of Hamas and Hezbollah. Shapiro devotes an entire chapter to arguing that containment can go hand in hand with democracy promotion, but I doubt that in practice this is true.

Shapiro compares cooperating with General Musharraf of Pakistan against terrorism to cooperating with Stalin against Hitler, but states that 'such cooperation should be accompanied by pressure on the regime in question to democratise' (p50). This is remarkably naïve. Musharraf's grip on power is tenuous at best and democratisation would certainly produce a regime profoundly hostile to US interests. The same is true of the Saudi Arabian regime and others (including Iraq, where full democracy can only be harmful to Washington). Likewise, saying to Israel, 'we will underwrite your survival but not your conquests' sounds nice on paper (p51), but in practice if Israel argues conquest is necessary for its survival one is faced with the unsavoury choice of backing this course or losing an ally's cooperation. It is a long-standing delusion of geopoliticians that the world is manageable in all its aspects; Shapiro merely adds to this delusion by wrongly claiming that there is no trade-off between the interests of the United States and the interests of oppressed peoples elsewhere on the planet.

By resurrecting a Cold War-era strategy, Shapiro also makes the strategic mistake of buying into the neocons' assessment of the scale of the threat of terrorism, claiming that 'the world is less stable' today (p7). This is simply false. The threat of major war is minimal, and even international terrorism is less common now than in the 1980s. The fact is that the West is more secure and prosperous today than ever before. But rather than taking on the securocrats, Shapiro wants to beat them at their own game, which concedes crucial ground. Despite the assertion that terrorist groups are rational, Al Qaeda, as Olivier Roy points out, has 'no strategic vision. It fights against Babylon, against what it sees as evil, the US and its ally, Israel' (p86). Whatever the US does, some terrorism will always take place. Buying into terrorism as a cause for a new Cold War betrays a reluctance to challenge the securitising behaviour of American political elites, to transcend the politics of fear and argue that there are some residual risks we simply have to accept as the price of living in free societies.

Moreover, the 'war on terror' only resurrects the most degraded aspects of the Cold War - fear and loathing of 'the other' and the scandalous waste of resources that militaristic policies involve. The best aspects will not be resurrected: containment's military aspects were coupled with the political imperative to answer Communism's challenge to capitalism with a progressive, purposeful vision for Western society and a promise to share the fruits of development more widely. It is the collapse of these political meta-narratives that has contributed to people groping towards the certainties offered by religious fundamentalism and security policies premised on a black and white us/them dichotomy. As Shapiro's own impassioned and astute denunciation of Democrats' 'triangulation' strategy makes clear, the Party 'lacks well-articulated moral principles that can be defended as appealing to its natural constituencies' (p128), and the same applies to most democratic politicians in the West today.

Without the revival of a project worth fighting for, we are left mindlessly defending the status quo. The Bush doctrine cannot simply be dismissed as an ineffective foreign policy but must also be understood as a desperate attempt by an isolated elite to justify its existence and leadership and reinvigorate the moral fibre of the American polity. In this respect, too, the Bush doctrine is doomed to failure.