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Ian Shapiro

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"This book succeeds in showing that there are sound alternatives to the dominant unilateralist approach for dealing with the national security and foreign policy challenges confronted by the United States. Bravo for Professor Shapiro!"--Ernesto Zedillo, former President of Mexico, Director of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization

"At a time and on an issue that cry out for fresh, critical, and constructive thinking, Ian Shapiro has performed a great service by laying out a bold yet pragmatic idea for dealing with the threats America faces in the post-September 11 world. He has adapted an old idea that worked--the containment of communist expansion during the Cold War--to the task of replacing a policy that has, to a spectacular and tragic degree, not worked: military preemption and the attempt to impose democracy in the name of waging 'the War on Terror.' His critique of both the Bush administration and many of its Democratic opponents is hard-hitting and well substantiated; his recommendations are compelling; and his presentation is concise and forceful. The result is a major contribution to the debate over the single most vexing and important political challenge facing the U.S. and the world."--Strobe Talbott, President of the Brookings Institution, former Deputy Secretary of State

"Ian Shapiro follows up his masterful analysis of the politics of taxation(Death by a Thousand Cuts) with a wonderfully clinical dissection of U.S. foreign policy. Shapiro recognizes that the policy of the present administration is not just a bad idea stumbled across by accident, but a bad idea that was carefully husbanded and nurtured for years by people who were deadly serious about power and unafraid to use it. It is time, he believes, for Democrats who are serious about making the best use of power to stop triangulating these bad ideas, and to start trying to nurture some good ideas of their own. This crystal-clear account of the merits of a policy of containment represents an excellent place for them to begin."--David Runciman, author of The Politics of Good Intentions

"This is by far the best critique of the Bush administration's national-security doctrine that I have read. Its prose is lively and engaging. It focuses on the essentials and makes a clear argument that is effectively supported by his judicious reflections on the history of the Cold War and on contemporary issues including the war on terror and the conflicts in the Middle East."--Michael W. Doyle, Columbia University

"Shapiro's new book is a rich and nuanced critique of the Bush administration's doctrine of preemption and democracy promotion and its related foreign-policy agendas. He traces the rise of the administration's preoccupation with Iraq and terrorism, and the fallout in domestic and regional terms. He manages to cut to the heart of the matter without compromising the detail. His analysis also provides the all-important historical backdrop that has often been absent in other studies."--Anoush Ehteshami, Durham University

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Containment

Princeton University Press

Chapter One

Power expands to fill a vacuum. This holds for ideas no less than for military campaigns, as the George W. Bush administration's national security doctrine has so dramatically underscored. Announced in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, it ranks as one of the most dramatic sea changes in U.S. national security policy ever. The Bush Doctrine has also turned traditional Republican Party foreign policy inside out and upside down. The congenital skeptics of foreign entanglements, whose leader heaped scorn on "nation building" in his 2000 presidential campaign, were transformed overnight into the world's self-appointed internationalists and policemen. The Bush administration committed itself to exporting American-style freedom and democracy worldwide, to confronting an "Axis of Evil" that was said to reach from to Tehran to Pyongyang, and to waging unilateral preemptive war by coalitions "of the willing" so as to achieve regime change as was undertaken in Iraq in March of 2003.

A good part of the Bush Doctrine's easy ascendancy can be explained by the shock, scale, and sheer drama of the 9/11 attacks that unfolded in excruciating detail on live television on that beautiful September morning, killing more civilians than had the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor sixty years earlier. It created an opening for Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and his influential neoconservative deputy Paul Wolfowitz to rewrite American national security policy almost overnight, without any serious debate on Capitol Hill or any significant opposition from the Democrats.

The Florida election debacle in November of 2000 brought George W. Bush to office with less legitimacy than any president since John Quincy Adams. By the time of the 2002 midterm elections, however, his standing was sufficiently enhanced that the Republicans gained seats in both houses of Congress, bucking the usual pattern whereby the party controlling the White House loses seats on Capitol Hill. The Republican congressional majorities grew again in 2004. Moreover, President Bush erased the dead heat of his contest with Al Gore by winning a majority of close to three million in the popular vote over Democratic challenger John Kerry. The administration's reduced popularity took its toll on Capitol Hill in the 2006 midterm elections, but the Bush White House remained in firm control of the national security agenda.

By the time of the 2004 presidential election the original rationale for the Iraq war was in tatters. It was obvious to all that the widely touted weapons of mass destruction did not exist. Nor was there any evidence of a reconstituted nuclear program. President Bush had been forced to admit that there was no link between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks. The war itself was going badly, with more than a thousand American combat troops dead, some multiple of that number wounded, and no plausible exit strategy-not to mention actual exit-in sight. Yet a decorated war veteran could not unseat an administration that had abandoned its core national security principles and bungled a reckless war of choice. Kerry played into the administration's hands by turning the spotlight from the start onto the wrong war- the last war-by declaring that he was "reporting for duty" and flaunting his Vietnam past and buddies at the Democratic National Convention in Boston. The result was months of charges and countercharges about whether Kerry had won his medals honorably, whether he had faked throwing them over the White House fence, whether he had called his comrades war criminals in his antiwar congressional testimony in the early 1970s, and whether he had misrepresented other aspects of his war record.

When Kerry did confront Bush over the conduct of the Iraq war, there was no contest of ideas or principles. The charges were over gullibility in believing the claims of Ahmed Chalabi and others that Americans would be greeted with flowers in the streets as liberators, over poor postwar planning, over lack of adequate equipment for the troops and armor for trucks, and over other matters of fundamental competence. Kerry did describe the conflict as "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time," but he was handicapped by having voted to authorize it in the Senate-a vote based, as the Bush campaign never tired of pointing out, on his having seen the same national intelligence estimates (NIE) that they had seen. This reduced Kerry to parsing the differences between voting to authorize war and deciding to go to war. Such distinctions are too subtle for electoral politics, where everyone knows that once you are explaining you are losing-if you have not already lost. It was as if Kerry had never noticed how disastrously Michael Dukakis had failed against George Bush's father in 1988, when Dukakis declared that "this election isn't about ideology. It's about competence." Or perhaps, as I contend here, the problem was that Kerry focused on tactical attacks on the Bush administration's competence because he lacked his own strategic vision of U.S. national security. The first rule of electoral politics is that you can't beat something with nothing. Particularly when one is confronting an administration that is as explicitly and dramatically ideologically driven as the George W. Bush administration, it is essential to formulate an alternative and demonstrate its superiority and attractiveness.

My goal here is to do just that. I begin with an account of the ideological vacuum created by the 9/11 attacks, which obliterated the possibility of thinking about counterterrorism through the lens of the criminal justice system. In chapter 3, I chronicle how the Bush administration filled this vacuum with the Bush Doctrine and its "war on terror," illustrating how radical a departure this has been not only from traditional Republican and conservative ideas in recent American politics, but also from U.S. national security practices at least since the days of Woodrow Wilson. In chapters 4-6, my attention shifts to defending a credible alternative to the Bush Doctrine.

My argument depends centrally on adapting the doctrine of containment developed by George Kennan, a career foreign service diplomat and then director of the Policy Planning Staff for President Truman, in response to the emerging Soviet threat after World War II. Kennan's argument was laid out in "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," published in Foreign Affairs in 1947, signed by "X," but widely known to have been his work. It provided the basis for the Truman administration's early postwar approach to the Soviet Union. Although it was modified in a variety of ways by Truman and his successors, the core ideas structured U.S. national security policy for much of the Cold War. The architects of the Bush Doctrine have declared containment to be obsolete in the post-9/11 era. I show that they are wrong. Refashioning containment in light of the realities of the twenty-first century offers the best bet for securing Americans from violent attack while preserving democracy at home and diffusing it abroad.

Kennan believed two things about the Soviets: that appeasement of their ambitions would be disastrous for America's vital interests, and that a direct assault on the USSR or its client states was unnecessary and would be counterproductive. The dangers of appeasement required...