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# THE TIME AND SPACE OF CONTAINMENT

In intention, practise and effect, containment after 1947 became the governing Western strategic doctrine in the Cold War. For this reason we should examine its pertinence to the circumstances in which it arose as doctrine and to the circumstances which we find today. Regardless of whether the "world to be protected" were deemed to be that of the West, the Atlantic Community, the Free World, or simply America itself, the doctrine was applicable. For in essence it was an other-directed strategy devised to modify the behavior of "the other", notably the expansionist features of that behavior.

The idea of containment in 1947 was a prescription for action. While architecturally grandiose, it set clear limits to strategic action. In the words of George Kennan--

> . . . Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographic and political points, corresponding to the shifts and manoeuvres of Soviet policy. . . . 1

1. "Sources of Soviet Conduct," reproduced in THE SOVIET UNION: 1922-1962, ed. by Philip E. Mosely, p. 179.

The premise of containment was that America and the West had capacities to check this expansion. Its promise was that, consistently and successfully carried out, containment would disabuse Soviet and Communist

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leaders of millennialist expectations of Western collapse; it would also
permit favorable modifications to occur in the style of Soviet and
Communist society and politics. "The palsied decrepitude of the capitalist
world," Kennan wrote, "is the keystone of Communist philosophy." ¹ If

1. *Ibid.*, p. 184.

America "could create. . . the impression of a country which knows what it
wants, which is coping successfully with the problems of its own life and
with the responsibilities of a World Power, " then "the ravens of Red Square"
would see that that keystone of prophecy had no pertinence of value. "For
no mystical, Messianic movement. . . can face frustration indefinitely
without eventually adjusting itself in one way or another to the logic of that
state of affairs."

The promise was ambivalent. Kennan spoke at one and the same
time of two hypothetical yet mutually-exclusive outcomes: either of the
"break-up," or of the "mellowing," of Soviet power. The United States,
having in its power "to enormously increase the strains under which Soviet
policy must operate," could promote "tendencies" leading to one or the
other of these consequences. We will return to this problem in a moment.

From the moment of its birth, containment came under severe
attack from four principal quarters in the West. For Soviet apologists, the
prescription for action was inflammatory, a proposal for "encirclement"

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serving Russian "fears". ¹ Others at the time criticized the doctrine for

1. D. F. Fleming remarked of it that containment "was the rashest policy ever enunciated by any American leader. For the first time in history the encirclement of a great power was openly proclaimed." This remarkable historical judgment is even inconsistent with Fleming's own general thesis, which was that encirclement of the USSR had been a consistent policy thread of the Western powers since 1918. Fleming, *THE COLD WAR AND ITS ORIGINS*, p. 1046.

its negativism: were American and Western policies to become hitched to
the wagon of Soviet initiatives, purposive action would become a fireman's
nightmare--chasing in all directions to quench blazes lit by a mobile, if not
ubiquitous, arsonist while neglecting all else. Others, like Lippmann,
deplored its indiscriminate prescriptions: simply to check Soviet outward
thrusts wherever they occurred would be to blur the crucial distinction
between primary objects of Soviet attack (the Atlantic Community being the
chief one) which also were the primary centers of value to America and
secondary ones. Further, it would neglect the practical strategic aspects
involved in checking Soviet military power: at those points where "our kind
of sea and air power can best be exerted." ² A non-discriminatory policy

2. Lippmann, *THE COLD WAR: A STUDY IN U.S. FOREIGN POLICY*, p. 19.

of resisting encroachments everywhere, finally, risked dependence upon an
array of weak, corrupt and unstable "satellites," "puppets" and "agents"
along the borderland. Weak allies were poor assets; weak allies which

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happened also to be on the periphery of the USSR could even be very
dangerous. ¹

1. Lippmann, *op. cit.*, pp. 22-23. Lippmann's alternative to containment was aimed at a more geographically-specific policy of removing the Red Army from Europe and neutralizing Germany as buffer between the West and Russia. Until the Red Army was removed, presumably after a German treaty, Europe could neither be secure nor free. At no point did Lippmann indicate how the Russians could be persuaded of the value of this *quid pro quo* if it involved disgorging its East European satellites and the restoration of a unified, potentially strong old enemy.

I

Yet the chief objection to containment, in American quarters,
came from those resenting its "negative, futile, and immoral" characteris-
tics. ² Kennan limited his initial prescription to preventing the further

2. These adjectives appeared in the Republican Party Platform of 1952, which bore the imprint of John Foster Dulles' hand. See Beal, JOHN FOSTER DULLES, pp. 311-312.

spread of Soviet territorial and ideological power. "Liberationism" proposed
to turn it backward. As Dulles, Eisenhower's principal foreign policy adviser
during the 1952 campaign, put it at that time: "The only way to stop a head-on
collision with the Soviet Union is to break it up from within." The Republican
platform of 1952 declared that the United States should look "happily forward
to the genuine independence of. . . captive peoples. We shall again make
liberty into a beacon light of hope that will penetrate the dark places. . . .
It will mark the end of the negative, futile and immoral policy of containment,

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which abandons countless human beings to a despotism and Godless terrorism which in turn enables the rulers to forge the captives into a weapon of our destruction." "Stresses and strains" within the "captive world" should be deliberately encouraged so that the "rulers" would be made "impotent to continue in their monstrous ways." Through such a policy, America would "become again the dynamic, moral and spiritual force which was the despair of despots and the hope of the oppressed."¹

1. Ibid.

Anyone with a capacity for distinguishing between declaratory-policy and action-policy must, however, note the ironic contrast between Dulles as preacher and Dulles as actor; and, further, the resemblances between the doctrines of Kennan and the architecture wrought by Dulles the activist. As actor, Dulles became the final architect, not of liberation but of Kennan's own design. Roll-back and liberation² were heady topics for

2. Dulles as preacher always had cautiously phrased liberationist precepts in such a way as to avoid the question of the use of military power to obtain such goals. In a 1952 campaign speech critical of Kennan and the Truman administration's "amorality," Dulles spoke of encouraging a "peaceful" revolution: no actual uprisings, but rather slowdowns, industrial sabotage and passive resistance. New York TIMES, 28 August 1952. Later, as Secretary of State, Dulles always carefully avoided mentioning a "foreward strategy" of roll-back. On the eve of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, Dulles cautiously noted that captive people would be given "assistance" for "economic adjustment" after they had obtained their freedom. See O'Conor, COLD WAR AND LIBERATION, pp. 322-323. While Dulles' frequent sermons about captive nations' freedom may have misled the 1956 freedom fighters in East Europe, American actions in 1953 during the Polish and East German uprisings should have been recalled: severe instability inside the Communist world was to some pleasant to dream of, but frightening to experience; late in 1956, American authorities in Berlin carefully cooperated with their Soviet counterparts in preventing the spread of Budapest-like uprisings to that city.

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sermons, yet Dulles was principally to be remembered for consummating
the vast yet architectonically-simple network of alliances which by the mid-
1950's was laced around the Soviet Union to hinder its further expansion.

Dulles, who as an "out-of-office" sermonizer in 1952 once talked
of the need for crusades, when in office also came to accept precisely the
promises which Kennan himself had held out concerning political change
within an effectively-contained USSR. Both immediately after Stalin's death,
and later when polycentrism became discernible in Soviet Europe, Dulles
frequently spoke of the inevitability of benign social and political change in
Russia and in Eastern Europe. The swallows of anti-Stalinism after the 20th
Party Congress portended to Dulles a future summer of democracy; the
internal liberalization of the USSR was "irreversible;" a taste of freedom
could not be forgotten. "There are," he earlier said in 1953, "processes at
work which will require Soviet policies to become responsive to the will of
the governed, and at that point they cease to be suddenly reversible." In
October 1956, as near revolt and open rebellion in Hungary occurred, Dulles
--having made the point about giving "captive people" aid after they had
obtained their freedom (not before)--paternalistically turned to the problem
of Russia:

> Let me add [he said] a word about future relations with
> the peoples who compose the Union of Soviet Socialist
> Republics. They, too, can have hope. The spread of
> education and industrial development create growing
> demands for greater intellectual and spiritual freedom,
> for greater personal security through the protection of
> law, and for greater enjoyment of the good things of life.
> ... There is ground to believe that that trend will prove
> to be an irreversible trend.

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Even when the Soviets crushed Budapest, Dulles persevered in this conviction: he was "almost certain" that "evolutionary change" in the Soviet system would occur; in fact, he was so sure that he believed its occurrence should be made a "working hypothesis" of free-world policies. Outside, in the countries of the bloc, Dulles had been convinced that "forces for liberalization" were at work, "powerful enough to require some response. . . ." When the Poznan riots occurred in the summer of 1956, Dulles remarked of the "irresistability" of the "forces that are now working." "I believe," he said, "this second postwar decade in which we are will see these new forces take charge of the situation and that we can really hopefully look forward to a transformation of the international scene." 1

1. These quotations are taken from the Department of State Bulletin, by O'Conor in his COLD WAR AND LIBERATION, pp. 321-323.

Eisenhower by 1956 also took up the "inevitability" theme. Perhaps for the best; if something desirable is also inevitable, it is not necessary to push it along by taking huge risks. When Eisenhower, in October 1956, remarked that "the love of freedom is more enduring than the power of tyrants," unarmed Budapest students were already being fired upon, and Soviet tanks were entering the streets of the Hungarian capital. The earlier promise of "liberation," however ambiguously phrased by Republican leaders, was not only unfulfilled; it never was seriously considered as policy. History and sociology would accomplish what the United States, for prudent reasons, was now by its reserve seen clearly to be unwilling to undertake.

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II

Activist critics of administration policies frequently alleged that containment not only--by disavowing liberationist crusades--was immoral. To the degree that it came to dominate Western strategies it explicitly ratified an important ideological asymmetry in the Cold War. Both Kennan, the architect, and Dulles, the practitioner, had recourse to one principal "historical solvent" of the trouble: sociological change within the Communist world; a notion which bore a partial though quite incomplete resemblance to the faith which Soviet doctrine placed in historically-determined change within the West, and in America. A comforting temporal reassurance was thus introduced by combatants on each side into the conflict: if each regarded the other's demise (or transformation) as inevitable, the range of risks incurred in assisting the "inevitable" was naturally less than if the outcome were viewed as wholly indeterminate. But a serious asymmetry between containment and Soviet doctrine could be clearly seen. While containment assumed that favorable change within a "contained" Communist world would occur autonomously, in yeast-like fashion, Communist theories under Stalin and under Khruschev assumed the need to sponsor their own modes of change with continuous overt and active support short of direct military action.

Thus a foreward strategy of liberationism by non-conventional military means among which just wars of liberation (at least, wars by proxy) were permissible; the class struggle was to be continued; guerrilla war, also by proxy, was endorsed, not only in theory but also in practise.

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Containment held forth the prospect only that some benevolent, unspecified transformation of the Soviet Union and the Communist countries generally, which would come about when their expansionist tendencies and their ideological expectations of change in the West and in America were frustrated. Official Soviet doctrine held forth an explicit blueprint not only for America and the West, but also for the entire world. The asymmetry could be diagrammed as follows:

<table><thead><tr><th></th><th>The West and America</th><th>The Communist World and Russia</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><th>Avowed Means</th><td>Containment;<br>"Situations of strength"</td><td>Soviet military strength;<br>Sponsored wars of liberation,<br>including guerrilla wars</td></tr><tr><th>Handmaiden</th><td>Unsponsored indigenous socio-logical change inside Communist bloc</td><td>Sponsored internal sociological change in West and non-Communist, non-West</td></tr><tr><th>Avowed Ends</th><td>Benevolent yet unspecified transformation of USSR into more "liberal" and less "aggressive" system probably with large elements of socialism retained</td><td>Total socialization of the world</td></tr></tbody></table>

To be sure, Soviet doctrine was to be modified in the mid-1950's, due partly to the terrible logic of thermonuclear weapons; "capitalism" did not of internal necessity produce war; war (defined as actual armed combat between principals) was not inevitable, nor was it in Lenin's classical view true any longer that "a series of frightful collisions between the Soviet Republic and the bourgeoisie states will be inevitable," nor, for that matter, of historical benefit to the cause of "Socialism." Yet the asymmetry remained: Soviet doctrine, while endorsing "peaceful co-existence",

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continued to endorse also the uses of violent means short of outright military conflict to obtain their goals in the non-Communist world. Advocacy of the foreward strategy could not be abandoned, lest Marxist dogma itself be eroded beyond recognition or repair. Even ideological co-existence was unacceptable.

### III

Today, the ledger books of containment are hard to read. This is so not only because containment's progeny included many illegitimate children; but also because the tests of accomplishment, which were its proffered hopes, rested upon the soft sand of reasoned anticipation. Unlike its cousin, Acheson's situations-of-strength doctrine, containment offered certain yardsticks with which its fulfillment, and the time, place and degree of it, might be determined. Obviously, a central question which it raised was what the West, including America, wished to occur in Russia: what the desired modifications of Soviet conduct and system were to be. American wishes in this matter, if true to the self-limiting obligations of the doctrine, could not thrust themselves directly into the internal Russian processes of transformation which Kennan optimistically forecast as hypotheses; yet these processes, as described at the time, put forth aspirational norms which might some day be consulted like Delphic oracular intestines to reveal the desired fulfillment. Yet if Acheson's "situations of strength" offered no

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clear criteria by which the day of attainment might be ascertained (when
would a comfortable surplus of power be obtained, from which to negotiate
outstanding issues?) so Kennan's containment theory wavered ambivalently
in its estimates of benign and hoped-for outcomes. One might, for instance,
hope for the collapse of the system from internal causes (was it possibly
already, like the family Buddenbrooks, an exhausted star?); or one might
hope that sociological processes and time would bring about a more gentle
way of life, or at least one exhibiting less pathological views of the world
and less cruelty to its subjects. Whichever possibility one fixed upon,
however, it was important to see that doctrine implied the primacy of
domestic factors in the process of desired change; its logic rested upon
arguments not wholly dissimilar to those of many Marxist analyses of
national behavior in world politics: the dynamics of domestic change, not
the dynamics of world politics, nor specific issues of contention among
nations, constituted the prime sources of conduct; the hoped-for modifica-
tions of that conduct would flow inexorably from interior streams of Soviet
life--from things clearly beyond the capacity of "policy" to generate, but
which wrong policy might choke off. Marxism as credible doctrine would
dwindle, as its apocalyptic prophecies about America and the West were
consistently proved to be at odds with the facts of the real world; Stalinism
as brutal behavior--internally and externally--would dwindle as new
leadership arose to meet new, humane demands of an on-going society.

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When this happened, Soviet foreign policy might permit of Russia's normal
behavior in the society of nations and, in turn, normal stances toward her,
by those who had resisted her encroachments upon the West and upon Europe
and America. So the argument went.

IV

With its stress upon these internal possibilities for change within
the Soviet system, the original containment theory, and its administration
sponsors in the United States, managed to reconcile containment with the
liberal aspirations of open societies; but in suggesting a parallelism between
internal processes of liberalization and external improvement in relations
between Russia and the non-Communist world, it risked the misleading
inference that it was the former which the latter was designed to obtain--
rather than the other way around.

This particular misapprehension or convolution of intention was
not shared by Kennan, its original formulator. To him and others, the
central object of policy remained the advancement and conservation of national
interests of free societies rather than the "redemption" of others. The
messianic tendencies of American idealism, to realists such as he, had
consisted precisely in such a "mistaken" inversion of purpose and the
perversion of national activity to obtain goals not directly related to the

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on-going interests of the national society. ¹

1. We often forget how long American liberals have waited for signs of really significant political change in Russia, and how long the eager habit of construing particular developments as signs and portents of such change has endured. Thomas Bailey, in his AMERICA FACES RUSSIA, notes that in April 1905, when the Tsarist regime capped a series of small liberalizing decrees with an Easter ukase granting religious liberty to all non-Greek Christian and Mohammedan sects, the action "was hailed by wishfully thinking Americans as heralding the dawn on Russian liberalism." Bailey, p. 204.

Yet whichever was the case, a skeptic might at any time have pointed to a peculiar assumption which underlay either version of the expectation. A skeptical question might have been posed: would a Soviet Union enjoying a greater abundance of human freedom, of consumer-productivity, of authentic internal liberality, be for those reasons less expansionist or troublesome than the Soviet Union of 1947 which Kennan described in his "Sources of Soviet Conduct"? Were such a system to come into being, might it not then serve as attractive exemplar of the virtues of "Socialism" and obtain its foreign policy goals—including ones which were objectively expansionist—by means which were the more effective for their very attractive (or less despicable) nature? Would the particular objects of contention—the German problem, for instance—be for those reasons more subject to solution? A power-realist might also have pointed out that insofar as such signs of internal vitality came into play in the international sphere, they could easily become regarded as augmenting Soviet power, and in their

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own ways serve to derange the equations of power as effectively as more
vicious methods earlier had done--perhaps even more effectively.

It is well worth noting this peculiar contradiction in the expectations
of some sober Western optimists; for because of this dilemma there persisted
throughout the stages of the Cold war, in the 1940's and 1950's, a discernible
ambivalence about how to interpret internal Soviet events. The Soviet system
was both a system of power and a political order, with a habit of perceiving
its own strategic interests as related to its requirements as an on-going
political system. Historical change is not unilinear and therefore not to be
focussed upon some future static target-condition. The prudent policy-maker,
in noting that growth in Soviet power was accompanied by corresponding
gestures or tendencies toward internal liberalization, could ill-afford to
infer from this some static future hypothetical condition which would be at
once peacefully-disposed, powerful, and liberal. A marked dwindling of
ideological fanaticism might be welcomed, yet in and of itself not mean the
abandonment of ideology--which might even be strengthened and benefitted
by such change. Fratricides in the Afro-Asian world in the 1960's were to
reawaken an awareness that massive conflicts among nations may arise
over objects and from causes which were essentially non-ideological,¹

1. If by ideological we mean universalistic ideology.

and expansionism need not necessarily require an antecedent condition of
fanaticism and domestic tyranny.

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Thus it was, commencing in the late 1950's, that popular attention
in the West, and notably in America, shifted from an attention to the internal
perfidies and "tensions" of Stalinism, to the real accomplishments of the
Soviet system as an on-going one. As the worst features of domestic
Stalinism receded into the past, and as Soviet foreign policy broke out of its
parochial Stalinist restraints, the Soviet Union increasingly began both to
expand the universe of its effective engagement in competition with America
and to do so by augmenting and in some instances displacing older revolu-
tionary and shock tactics with quite conventional modes of power politics. ¹

1. In many areas, such as Southeast Asia, the Middle East, where existing neutralist regimes had obtained their independence from Western powers, the Soviet Union came actually to prefer reliance on diplomatic manipulation rather than classical Marxist subversion.

In point of fact, the test of containment's accomplishments required
the posing of a question which Kennan's original premises had skirted: was
there a circular, reinforcing process in containment, whereby successful
constraints upon Soviet expansionism fed into, and benignly modified, the
internal nature of Soviet politics and ideology, producing in turn further
modifications of Soviet external behavior? Or was the interaction between
both of these realms through time an indeterminate process? To espouse
containment as Dulles did--as a matter of faith beyond rational proof--meant
either a belief in "inexorable forces" or simply a heroic Micawberism--
posing as more than it actually was--unservingly persisting in policies to
check the outward thrust of Soviet expansion, while waiting for "something

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to turn up." To the extent that the latter and quite unphilosophical view governed policy, one might in a constant series of interactions manage to fix a postwar line, a tacit frontier, with the Soviet Union which it would respect and not transgress by violent means; in this manner, even without diplomacy serving a central role, time might underwrite and legitimize tacit understandings regardless of what internal changes were wrought inside the Soviet Union and the Communist world. To some considerable extent this modest view of the matter--eschewing unverifyable prophecies of benign social change within the Soviet system--had the merit of being tentative, undogmatic and unpretentious; it foreswore false hopes and carbed down the zone of possible disillusionment; it left open the possibility (among many) that through time the Soviet Union might come to see its own future more closely linked with the fate of the very nations and social systems which its ideology had once condemned to death.

That there was something philosophically insufficient in this modest doctrine, as in Kennan's more fulsome version, could not be denied. Its critics on both the right and the left correctly pointed out its static features, which had very little to say about more transcendent and inspiring matters; disavowing crusades, it also said nothing at all about the broader range of organizational problems which the world community confronted. Yet its demonstrable success, between 1947 and 1962, brought time within which such problems could be discerned and dealt with. A philosophy of

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necessity, perhaps, gave containment a bleak and unaesthetic appearance
--for there is nothing less inspiring than devoting considerable energies
through a long period of time to preventing someone else from doing some-
thing. Yet the necessity which inspired it retained the realm of freedom
within which choice remained open.