F. Andrew Wolf, Jr.
Forget the ‘Grand Schemes,’ he said, the world was now too complex. Try, instead, he suggested, “for a thoughtful paragraph or two.” – George F. Kennan (1994)
Why is it that American foreign policy experts continue to reiterate (perhaps regurgitate would be more apt) a seemingly inherited trait that has lost its relevance? Moreover, this trait perpetuates a widespread belief that protecting vital U.S. interests abroad depends on the perception that America is willing to intervene irrespective of the magnitude of the interests, the power of the perceived adversary, or on whose territory the engagement might occur.
This mantra of the foreign policy elite sounds suspiciously like something George F. Kennan might have uttered back when I was old enough to fight in Vietnam – but too consumed with Cold War propaganda to know better (and this continues today with many young Americans). Ed Hermann and Noam Chomsky would later call this propaganda effect ‘manufactured consent’ in their 1988 seminal text, Manufacturing Consent.
Containment
The narrative and its attendant propaganda have their genesis in a Cold War era initiative called ‘Containment.’ The latter was a geopolitical strategic foreign policy pursued by the United States during the post-World War II era – ostensibly to prevent the spread of communism.
The theory asserted that if any country in a region fell to communism, other and potentially more strategically significant states would soon follow. The experience of the Vietnam War and its aftermath should have dissuaded American policymakers today from accepting this principle. The latter, after years of ineffectiveness (and afraid politically to lose face by admitting victory was impossible) pointlessly wreaked destruction on Southeast Asian countries including Cambodia and Laos
Vietnam ultimately fell to communist Hanoi in 1975 after a 10-year US military campaign fought mostly from the Pentagon with 50,000+ American soldiers dead and millions of Vietnamese. The overarching result was a somewhat humbled US and a foreign policy based on “containment” that would eventually reveal its ‘non universal applicability.’
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