Vice President Dick Cheney, the prophet of pre-emption, has become the most influential American strategist since George F. Kennan, the father of the doctrine of containment.
Kennan’s doctrine, laid out in a 1947 magazine article and adopted by the Truman administration, prevailed for a half century and won the Cold War. Cheney’s ideas, contained laid out in a still-classified Pentagon paper from 1992, have just been endorsed as official policy by President Bush and will guide America’s role in the world for at least part of the 21st Century.
If Kennan had been wrong (but he wasn’t), we would have fought a nuclear war and, had we survived, might be living today under communism. If Cheney is wrong (and we don’t know whether he is), America’s could squander its world leadership on a self-destructive search for empire.
The story of the two doctrines is a story of ideas–who has them, how they grow and spread, how they mutate from a gleam in the eye of a few true believers to become the lodestar of the most powerful nation in the world.
The new American doctrine was issued Sept. 20 by the White House. It is a 31-page document titled The National Security Strategy.
Its main points are:
– That America’s military might remain “beyond challenge,” presumably forever, so overwhelming that no nation, friend or foe, has any “hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States.”
– Deterrence and containment, the keys to the previous strategy, are out. “Traditional concepts of deterrence will not work,” it says. “Some enemies cannot be deterred.”
– Pre-emptive war–a first-strike policy of hitting anyone who might be thinking of hitting us–is in. The new key is “anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack. . . . The U.S. will, if necessary, act preemptively.”
– Current international law approves pre-emptive attacks “on the existence of an imminent threat.” But sometimes threats will be more vague, so “we must adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today’s adversaries.”
– Our Cold War enemies were hostile but rational and not suicidal. The new doctrine demonizes America’s new enemies as “more willing to take risks, gambling with the lives of their people” and says they “reject basic human values.”
– Alliances and international organizations have their uses, but the new emphasis is on more temporary “coalitions,” presumably similar to the grouping of Central Asian states now helping the U.S. in Afghanistan.
All this is in stark contrast to the doctrine of containment, as published in Foreign Affairs magazine in 1947 and later adopted and adapted–often to Kennan’s dismay–by the nine postwar U.S. administrations, both Republican and Democratic.
Kennan, a former American diplomat in Moscow, wrote an internal U.S. government memo in 1946 describing the Soviet Union of Stalin’s day as a hostile force, “a rival, not a partner,” impossible to do business with on a normal diplomatic level. The solution, he said, was a “long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies . . . the adroit . . . application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points.”
The idea, Kennan wrote later in his memoirs, was to bottle up Kremlin power “and to wait for the internal weakness of Soviet power, combined with frustration in the external field, to moderate Soviet ambitions and behavior.”
The editor of Foreign Affairs asked to publish Kennan’s memo. The State Department approved but forbade him to use his byline. So he signed it “X.” Kennan’s cover was soon blown, but his piece became known ever after as “the X article.”
It may be the most influential magazine article ever written.
Blueprint for postwar policy
Kennan’s idea was adapted by a small cadre of Washington insiders, later dubbed the “Wise Men”–men like George Marshall, Dean Acheson, John McCloy and, ultimately of course, Harry Truman. In essence, America’s postwar foreign policy was set by a group that would fit comfortably around a dining table.
Kennan, a sensitive and complex man, later renounced his fatherhood of “containment,” arguing that it had come to mean mostly military containment when he foresaw mostly political and diplomatic pressure.
Whatever his intention, it worked. Kennan saw containment as a strategy “to tide us over a difficult time,” hopefully without fighting a war. Forty-four years later, the Soviet Union threw in the towel and collapsed, into the arms of Bush’s father, the president of the day.
This is the way policy gets made, the way an idea held by no more than a handful of people becomes a force on which history turns.
When the Cold War ended, the United States was left without a coherent new doctrine to replace containment. Throughout the ’90s, legions of scholars labored to fill the gap–and make their names–with a new “X article.”
None of them knew that it had already been written, in the Pentagon in 1992, and was even then making the rounds of think tanks and right-wing editorial offices, waiting like a land mine to explode into policy.
Now, the moment has arrived. The new doctrine issued this month bears Bush’s signature. But no one pretends that the president has the global grasp to do more than sign off on someone else’s idea. For the germ of that idea, we must go back a decade, to the last year of the administration of Bush’s father.
A team around Cheney, then defense secretary, wrote a draft called Defense Planning Guidance. It explicitly rejected containment and global cooperation in favor of a military strategy that would “prevent the re-emergence of a new rival.” Other nations have to be persuaded, it said, to “not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests.”
The draft made no mention of the United Nations but said “we should expect future coalitions to be ad hoc assemblies, often not lasting beyond the crisis being confronted.”
If coalitions cannot be formed, it said, “the United States should be postured to act independently”–in other words, pre-emptively. (Actually, prevention might be a better word than pre-emption. Pre-emption implies hitting the other guy before he hits you; prevention means hitting him before he even gets the gloves on.)
Finally, the draft said the U.S. would seek unchallenged dominance in every strategic region, which included almost everywhere except Africa.
This was a prescription for global domination, in essence a worldwide empire. But it emphasized that this would be benevolent imperialism, because we would “account sufficiently for the interests” of our allies to keep them from having any reason to challenge us or ever act independently. An undercurrent to this paternalistic doctrine was the idea that Washington would define allies’ interests and expect them to go along.
Leaked to The New York Times, the draft caused a furor and was quickly rewritten as an official, unclassified document. Even toned down, it emphasized that “we have moved from Containment to the new Regional Defense Strategy” and said America should act independently “should international support prove sluggish or inadequate.”
The Clinton administration ignored the paper. Its authors, cast into opposition, spread out to universities and think tanks and spent their wilderness years honing their ideas, spreading them in articles in magazines like the National Interest and the Weekly Standard and op-ed pieces in newspapers like The Wall Street Journal.
With the second Bush administration, both the authors and their ideas popped to the top of the ladder.
Cheney, of course, became perhaps the most powerful vice president in history. One of the draft’s chief authors, Paul Wolfowitz, became deputy defense secretary and the administration’s leading Iraq hawk. Wolfowitz had developed his views at the University of Chicago under Albert Wohlstetter, a leading critic of containment, and later became a classic in-and-outer, bouncing comfortably between government and academia.
Colin Powell, now secretary of state, had helped write the draft. He now finds himself doing battle with hawks like Cheney and Wolfowitz. I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, a lawyer and one of Wolfowitz’s former students at Yale University, is now Cheney’s chief of staff. Richard Perle, who was an acolyte of the hawkish Democrat from Washington Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson, is another true believer, now ensconced in a semiofficial think tank called the Defense Policy Board. Douglas Feith, another lawyer who used to work for Perle, is an undersecretary of defense.
Smart people, different ideas
The Wise Men and the Cheney Gang have much in common. All are smart, well-connected, very experienced, veteran Washington insiders, adept at turning ideas into policy. Both could fit comfortably around that proverbial dinner table.
Only their ideas are different.
Containment came out of the State Department and emphasized diplomacy. Pre-emption comes out of the Defense Department and emphasizes military might.
Both have a strong sense of moral superiority. But containment assumes that one’s foes, while bad, aren’t crazy or suicidal.
Containment relies on broad and lasting partnerships among allies. The new Cheney doctrine assumes U.S. guidance of grateful clients who will not be encouraged to dissent. The rest of the world “will either be for us or against us,” as Bush has said.
Kennan and containment had their day, and history will reward them. Cheney and pre-emption are just beginning their run, but history already is sharpening its pen.
