The Case Against Containment

John Mueller

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In the great debate over how the United States should respond to an increasingly assertive China, many commentators have advocated a ready-made solution: containment. Under this Cold War policy, Washington pushed back against Soviet (and Chinese) political and military advances wherever they appeared, seeking to prevent international communism from spreading. According to this accepted wisdom, containment won the Cold War, allowing the United States to check the power of the Soviet Union without engaging in a direct war with it.

Many argue that with a track record like this, the United States ought to dust off the containment playbook and apply it to today’s rival superpower. The historian Hal Brands, for example, has contended that this “elegant” and “winning” strategy would prove effective against Beijing, writing, “To succeed against a rising China, the U.S. must relearn the lessons of containment.” In Foreign Affairs, the political scientist Michael Mandelbaum likewise deemed Cold War containment a “success” and argued that it should be applied “once again, now to Russia, China, and Iran” although “modified and updated.”

Such calls are certainly overconfident and probably misguided. Containment was not particularly successful during the Cold War, and it is also unlikely to work well against China today. In reality, more than anything else, it was the Soviet Union’s own errors and weaknesses that caused its downfall. The main problem with U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War was that it tried to do too much, not too little. And like the Soviet Union yesterday, China today is its own worst enemy. As with last time, the key now is not so much to search for ways to balance against the rising hegemon. It is to let this troubled and perhaps declining country make its own mistakes.

AN OVERRATED STRATEGY

The quintessential intellectual presentation of containment remains “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” published in Foreign Affairs in 1947 under the byline “X,” a pseudonym for George Kennan, then the State Department’s director of policy planning. Although concerned about Soviet military strength, he argued that what made that strength threatening was that it was paired with a fundamentally expansionist ideology. Yet he concluded that there was a “strong” possibility that Soviet power “bears within it the seeds of its own decay, and that the sprouting of these seeds is well advanced.”

These seeds included the exhaustion and disillusionment of the Soviet population, “spotty” economic development, difficulty maintaining control over the peoples of East Europe, and looming uncertainties in the impending transfer of power that would follow the death of the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin (something Kennan predicted might “shake Soviet power to its foundations”). Accordingly, Kennan argued that the “main element” of U.S. policy “must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.” In the long run, he hoped, the Soviets would grow frustrated in their drive for ideological expansion and become less hostile and more accommodating.

How long would this take? It was impossible to predict, of course, but in his article, Kennan opined that the process might take 10 to 15 years, strongly suggesting that things would change with the transfer of power in the Kremlin: Stalin was nearing 70 at the time. As it turned out, however, the Soviet regime managed to survive Stalin’s death (which took place in 1953) quite well, and for decades, it was able to maintain its control at home and over people in the middle of Europe.

But a bigger problem was to assume that opposing Soviet power everywhere would be feasible and effective. In the decades after the X article, containment, beyond inspiring such failures as the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Vietnam War, seems to have prevented few countries from turning communist. It may have made a difference here and there—for example, when the CIA supported coups bringing down leftist governments in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954. But it is difficult to determine whether such perceived successes actually prevented a left-leaning country from toppling into the communist camp. Indeed, covert regime change has a lousy track record. As the political scientist Lindsey O’Rourke has found, most efforts have failed, very few worked out as planned, and most of the successes proved to be short-lived.

The clearest case of containment’s success was when the United States and its allies turned back the invasion of South Korea by North Korea in 1950, in a war that then grew costly and ended in stalemate. At the time, the communists’ invasion was almost universally held to be part of a grand Soviet scheme to dominate the world, rather than the opportunistic foray it really was. With the West’s seeming success on the Korean Peninsula, containment policy became much more military, a development Kennan viewed with dismay. Central to this was military deterrence, leading the United States to make massive weapons expenditures focused on Europe. But as Kennan had already concluded, the Soviets did not need to be deterred: they sought to aid and inspire revolutionary movements around the world, but they never had an interest in waging anything like a repeat of World War II. After scouring the Soviet archives, the historian Vojtcch Mastny observed that all of Moscow’s plans were defensive and that the huge military buildup in the West “was irrelevant to deterring a major war the enemy did not want to launch in the first place.”

It is worth noting that containment played little role in communism’s three biggest setbacks during the Cold War; each was substantially self-inflicted. In 1948, Stalin tried and failed to bring Yugoslavia, led by a loyal but independent Communist Party, under tighter control, resulting in a fracturing of the communist camp. In 1965, the Indonesian military cracked down violently on Chinese-linked communists who were apparently attempting to seize control, thereby preventing Indonesia from falling into the Soviet camp; the development undercut a chief justification for the entry of the United States into the war in Vietnam, given that Indonesia had been viewed as a prime domino. And in the 1960s, the communist movement was split by a self-induced and self-destructive theological dispute between China and the Soviet Union. In none of these setbacks was there an American hand.

SOVIET SELF-DESTRUCTION

As the Cold War neared its end, Soviet expansionism mellowed. But that change of heart owed less to containment’s success than to its failure. If the Soviet system was as rotten at the core as Kennan said, logic might have dictated not containing it but letting it expand so that it might more readily self-destruct. To a degree, that actually happened. In 1975, Cambodia, South Vietnam, and Laos abruptly toppled into the communist camp. Then, partly out of fear of repeating the Vietnam experience, the United States went into a sort of containment funk as the Soviet Union, in a remarkable fit of absentmindedness, opportunistically gathered a set of willing Third World countries into its embrace: Angola joined in 1976, Mozambique and Ethiopia in 1977, South Yemen and Afghanistan in 1978, and Grenada and Nicaragua in 1979.

At first, the Soviets viewed these acquisitions with glee—“the correlation of forces,” as they called it, had finally shifted in their direction. But almost all these states soon became economic and political basket cases. Fraught with dissension, financial mismanagement, and civil warfare, they turned expectantly to Moscow for sustenance. Most disastrous for the Soviets was the experience in Afghanistan. In December 1979, they sent a large contingent of troops there to establish order and to quash an anticommunist rebellion but soon found themselves bogged down in a protracted war.

With this array of disheveled dependencies, the Soviets were soon to realize that they would have been better off contained. The breakup of the Soviet Union in late 1991 can hardly be credited to containment. By that time, Washington had long deemed the Cold War to be over and had officially deserted the policy. Moscow, too, had called it quits.

Forty-one years after Kennan wrote his article, the Soviets, plagued by economic, social, and military disasters, abandoned their threatening ideology as he had hoped. In late 1988, the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, called for “de-ideologizing relations among states.” The next year, when the Soviets still controlled most of Eastern Europe, President George H. W. Bush reciprocated. In a series of speeches about going “beyond containment,” he announced that the goal now was to integrate “the Soviet Union into the community of nations,” to welcome it “back into the world order.” In 1989 and 1990, Eastern European states left the Warsaw Pact and worked their way toward democracy and capitalism. The United States welcomed this change, but it also made a considerable effort to keep the Soviet Union itself from collapsing. Most notably, in 1991, Bush gave a speech in Ukraine in which he essentially urged the various Soviet republics to work it out and to remain within the country. If there was a Cold War raging at that time, the United States and the Soviet Union were on the same side.

Shortly after Bush’s speech, however, communist hard-liners in Moscow, intent on keeping the Soviet Union from falling apart, staged a coup attempt to remove Gorbachev. The attempt failed, but it shifted sentiment toward dissolution, particularly in Ukraine, and it resulted in exactly the breakup the conspirators were seeking to prevent. Without that development, it is possible that with some economic reform, including cuts in defense spending, the Soviet Union might have survived more or less intact.

As the analyst Strobe Talbott put it, the Soviet system went “into meltdown because of inadequacies and defects at its core, not because of anything the outside world has done or not done or threatened to do.” The historian Odd Arne Westad agreed: it came about primarily “because of weaknesses and contradictions in the Soviet system itself.”

PATIENCE IS A VIRTUE

In determining whether to apply something like containment to China, it’s worth asking first if the country is anywhere near as menacing as the Soviet Union. China, now in second place in total GDP (although 78th in per capita GDP), does seem to be seeking a spot at center stage. As part of this quest, it is building up its military and has sought to gain influence by lending money through its Belt and Road Initiative to an array of other countries and by engaging in “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy, using economic and military muscle to badger and bully. Meanwhile, the Chinese leader Xi Jinping has been adept at working his way into unchallenged one-man rule in China and at embedding himself at the center of a compliant echo chamber.

But China doesn’t present the same kind of ideological challenge as the Soviet Union. It has sought to aid other authoritarian kleptocracies to better maintain their hold on power, but that is hardly the same thing as spreading an ideology. Moreover, China does not seem to have much in the way of territorial ambitions beyond reincorporating Taiwan at some point and settling disputes over parts of its border and over the seas around it.

Most troubling for China, as it was for the Soviet Union, is its growing set of domestic difficulties. Most of them derive from Xi’s determination to prioritize control by the antiquated and kleptocratic Chinese Communist Party over economic development. The list of resulting problems is nearly endless: endemic corruption, environmental degradation, slowing growth, capricious shifts in government policies (including the abruptly canceled “zero COVID” policy), inefficient enterprises, fraudulent statistical reporting, a rapidly aging population, enormous overproduction, huge youth unemployment, increasing debt, a housing bubble, restive minorities, protectionist policies, the alienation of Western investors, and a clampdown on civil liberties. There also seems to be something of a decline in confidence in, and in the credibility of, the Communist Party’s dictates, a change that could have dire long-term consequences for the regime.

Moreover, China’s efforts in recent years to be treated as a great power have been remarkably unproductive. Rather than generating admiration or obedience from countries that once wished it well, resentment and wariness have soared not only in the West but also in Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam, pushing some of these important neighbors further into the arms of the United States. And the much-touted Belt and Road Initiative is wallowing in unpaid debt, with loan outlays cut from $75 billion in 2016 to $4 billion in 2019.

Given China’s many weaknesses, a policy of containment is scarcely called for. Indeed, it would likely fuel, not allay, the common motivating belief among Chinese leaders that Washington is out to stop their country’s economic growth—something that many fear might cause them to lash out. Most of China’s expansionist moves have nothing to do with force, however. As the former U.S. diplomat Chas Freeman has put it, “There is no military answer to a grand strategy built on a nonviolent expansion of commerce and navigation.”

The alternative is to wait (perhaps for a rather long time) for China to mellow; although currently in eclipse, there is a substantial liberal element in China. This policy of patience could be pursued while warily seeking to profit from China’s economic size and problems to the degree possible. The United States should also continue to maintain the decades-long charade in which Taiwan is effectively independent as long as it doesn’t say so. It might also humor China by welcoming it into the global leadership club as if that had some tangible meaning. If the United States can declare itself to be the one indispensable nation (suggesting that other nations are, well, dispensable), why should China be denied the opportunity to wallow in such self-important and essentially meaningless proclamations?

The lesson of the Cold War is not about the value of persistent containment in breaking your adversary’s will and sapping its power. It is about the wisdom of standing back, keeping your cool, and letting the contradictions in your opponent’s system become apparent. In a 2018 article in Foreign Affairs, Kurt Campbell and Ely Ratner (both now members of the Biden administration) opened by observing that “the United States has always had an outsize sense of its ability to determine China’s course.” Instead of repeating that misguided approach, policymakers might keep in mind an apt maxim from Napoleon Bonaparte: “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”