DID 'CONTAINMENT' WIN THE COLD WAR?

In a thoughtful and useful essay at The American Thinker, Naval War College Professor James Holmes argues that an approach more aggressive and more interventionist than 'containment' will be necessary to win the Global War on Terror.

Far be it from this pseudonymous blogger to disagree!

However, in his careful work to avoid over-arguing his case, the Professor gives too much ground to the containment aficion. He writes:

This is the last place Washington should turn for guidance. Containment may have brought victory in the Cold War, but, applied to today's circumstances, the term implies cordoning off the Middle East and applying pressure at points of Islamist expansion. Moreover, references to Kennan conjure up bad memories in places like Moscow and Beijing, which found themselves on the receiving end of American containment.


A former ambassador to the Soviet Union, Kennan crafted a policy intended for decades of struggle against a well-armed, ideological foe with global reach. Kennan spelled out his ideas in an anonymous, deeply influential article titled "The Sources of Soviet Conduct."

His "X" article appeared in the journal Foreign Affairs 60 years ago this month. (Emphasis added.)

If 'containment' brought victory in the cold war, it was a strange victory, indeed. Kennan's article was published in 1947. Let's look at what 'containment' accomplished.

• In 1945, there were two communist nation-states in the world, the Soviet Union, and the Mongolian People's Republic. Mexico was also a "revolutionary" state.
• By 1948, the Soviet Union had solidified its hold over the captive states of Eastern Europe, and in 1949, China, the world's most populous nation, was seized by the Communist Party.
• India, too, although nominally neutral, was drawn into the Soviet orbit.
• In the 1950s and 1960s, the emerging new nations in Africa and Asia were largely oriented towards the Soviet Union, if not openly socialistic or communistic.
• [Remember: Hungary was INVADED in 1956; Czechoslovakia in 1968.]
• Don't forget Cuba.
  
• In the 1960s and 1970s, all of Vietnam fell to the Communists, as did Cambodia, Laos, and Burma. Afghanistan succumbed to a communist coup.

• In fact, at the time [UNTIL REAGAN], considered opinion held that socialism was inevitable even in the United States, and that the Soviet Union was here for eternity.

As Ann Coulter has pointed out, going against the consensus of opinion in the west, and going against the consensus of opinion in our own State Department, President Ronald Reagan resolved to defeat the Evil Empire, and he did. His view of the Cold War was not containment; it was "We win, and they lose."

As Coulter wrote in "Treason":

Reagan took an approach to the Cold War dramatically different from any other US President. To wit, he thought we should win. This was a fresh concept. At the time, it was widely ridiculed as a dangerous alteration of US policy. Only after it worked was Reagan's dangerous foreign policy recast as merely a continuation of the policies of his predecessors.

'Containment' was a failure. [Neither the USSR or communism were ever "contained". Countries under the "sway" of the USSR INCREASED steadily from 1947 to 1980.]

The policy of 'containment' was in part the product of an accomodationist State Department that had been infiltrated by Soviet agents such as Alger Hiss.





'Containment' was a process of losing the Cold War as slowly as possible.


[Reagan's confrontational and competitive polices brought the USSR to its knees. Along with Thatcher and the Popoe, the West confronted the USSR in Afghanistan, Poland, Central America - and in the arms race with the largest defense spending increases since WW2 and the threat of SDI.

Just as Reagan courageously stood against his accomodationist critics at home and abroad, so to has Bush.

Appeasement never won a war, pr defeated a vile foe- or an "evil empire."

WANT MORE OF THE TRUTH: Read this WSJ article and this book. Reliapundit]