Why Containment Works

Power, Proliferation, and Preventive War

Wallace J. Thies

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501749490
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Why Containment Works examines the conduct of American foreign policy during and after the Cold War through the lens of applied policy analysis. Wallace J. Thies argues that the Bush Doctrine after 2002 was a theory of victory—a coherent strategic view that tells a state how best to transform scarce resources into useful military assets, and how to employ those assets in conflicts. He contrasts prescriptions derived from the Bush Doctrine with an alternative theory of victory, one based on containment and deterrence, which US presidents employed for much of the Cold War period. There are, he suggests, multiple reasons for believing that containment was working well against Saddam Hussein's Iraq after the first Gulf War and that there was no need to invade Iraq in 2003.

Thies reexamines five cases of containment drawn from the Cold War and the post-Cold War world. Each example, Thies suggests, offered US officials a choice between reliance on traditional notions of containment and reliance on a more forceful approach. To what extent did reliance on rival theories of victory—containment versus first strike—contribute to a successful outcome? Might these cases have been resolved more quickly, at lower cost, and more favorably to American interests if US officials had chosen a different mix of the coercive and deterrent tools available to them? Thies suggests that the conventional wisdom about containment was often wrong: a superpower like the United States has such vast resources at its disposal that it could easily thwart Libya, Iraq, and Iran by means other than open war.

CHAPTER 1

Preventive War and Containment

On March 18, 2003, US forces attacked Iraq with air strikes followed a few days later by a ground invasion launched from Kuwait. The purpose of both the air war and the invasion was regime change in Iraq—overthrowing the regime of the Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and replacing it with a democratic government. A democratic Iraq, the administration of George W. Bush claimed, would forgo pursuit of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), forswear links with terrorist groups like al-Qaeda, and set an example of democratic rule that would encourage further democratization in the rest of the Middle East.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq was in many respects the culmination of a rhetorical campaign intended to redirect US foreign policy and defense policy—a campaign set in motion by the George W. Bush administration in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Instead of containment and deterrence, the Bush Doctrine, as it came to be known, stressed preemption and even prevention. Instead of retaliating after being attacked, the Bush Doctrine called for the US to strike first. Instead of waiting to see what an opponent would do, the Bush Doctrine stressed acting—indeed, acting vigorously—to prevent potential terrorist attacks before they could be carried out.

The Bush Doctrine proved to be very controversial, not only in the United States but also among America’s allies and friends worldwide.1 In the United States, the Bush Doctrine was criticized by Democrats in Congress as a violation of traditional American norms, which called for responding firmly to provocations but not for striking the first blow ourselves. Within the Atlantic Alliance, the Bush Doctrine was likewise attacked—most prominently by the French and German governments—as reckless and provocative.

The Bush Doctrine

Viewed as a theory of victory, the Bush Doctrine includes six main points.

1. CONTAINMENT CANNOT HOLD INDEFINITELY

Containment worked during the Cold War, the George W. Bush administration argued, because “especially following the Cuban Missile Crisis, we faced a generally status quo, risk averse adversary.”2 That situation no longer holds. Instead, “the security environment confronting the United States . . . is radically different from what we have faced before.”3 New threats, President Bush told the graduating class at West Point on June 1, 2002, “require new thinking.” He cautioned that “containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies.”4 President Bush expanded on this theme during some impromptu remarks at a political reception in Houston on June 14, 2002. “In the past,” he explained, “we used to have a doctrine called containment and deterrence. You can’t contain a shadowy terrorist network. You can’t deter somebody who doesn’t have a country. And you’re not going to be able—future Presidents won’t be able to deter or contain one of these nations which harbors [sic] weapons of mass destruction, nations who hate America.”5

“Nations who hate America” existed during the Cold War, too, but memories of that bygone era were largely eclipsed by the shock and horror that followed the 9/11 attacks.6 “After September 11,” President Bush explained in January 2003, “the doctrine of containment just doesn’t hold any water. . . . My vision shifted dramatically after September 11, because I now realize the stakes, I realize the world has changed.”7 Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld offered a similar rationale. The United States, he explained, “did not act in Iraq because of dramatic new evidence of Iraq’s pursuit of weapons of mass murder. We acted because we saw the existing evidence in a new light, through the prism of our experience on September 11.”8 The British prime minister Tony Blair made a similar argument in 2004 when he said, “Containment will not work in the face of the global threat that confronts us. . . . The terrorists have no intention of being contained. The states that proliferate or acquire [weapons of mass destruction] illegally are doing so precisely to avoid containment.”9

2. DETERRENCE IS NOT ENOUGH

Deterrence worked during the Cold War, the George W. Bush administration claimed, because the Soviet Union and China were “status quo, risk-averse” adversaries that were susceptible to deterrent threats.10 In the post-9/11 world, the Bush administration claimed, “the gravest danger facing America and the world is outlaw regimes that seek and possess nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.”11 The deterrent threats that kept the Soviet Union and China at bay are not likely to work as well against these “outlaw regimes.” The former US undersecretary of state John Bolton told an interviewer in 2007 that, regarding Iran, “when you have a regime that would be happier in the afterlife than in this life, this is not a regime that is subject to classic theories of deterrence. Retaliation, for them, which would obliterate their society, doesn’t have the same negative connotations for their leadership.”12 In the post-9/11 world, “deterrence based only upon the threat of retaliation is less likely to work against leaders of rogue states more willing to take risks, gambling with the lives of their people and the wealth of their nations.”13

As seen by the George W. Bush administration, a strategy based solely or even largely on deterrence had three obvious flaws. First, it was reactive, based on the “threat of retaliation” but little more.14 This kind of deterrence, President Bush claimed in his 2002 commencement address at West Point, “means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks with no nations or citizens to defend.”15 “Given the goals of rogue states and terrorists,” a senior official told reporters in a briefing accompanying the release of the Bush administration’s first national security strategy document in September 2002, “the United States can no longer solely rely on a reactive posture as we have in the past.”16 Instead of reacting to what others did, in the post-9/11 world it was the ability to act quickly and decisively that counted most. “We must be prepared to stop rogue states and their terrorist clients before they are able to threaten or use weapons of mass destruction against the United States and our allies and friends.”17

Second, deterrence as practiced prior to 9/11 was too static, too unimaginative, and too indiscriminate to work effectively against the new threats the United States was facing. “After September 11, a dramatically lowered tolerance for threats helps explain why realists such as [Vice President] Cheney, who had earlier believed that Saddam could be both deterred and contained, suddenly felt differently.”18 In the words of the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review Report, the United States, while still needing the forces and capabilities acquired for old-style deterrence, also required a shift from a “one size fits all” kind of deterrence toward “more tailored capabilities to deter advanced military powers, regional WMD states armed with weapons of mass destruction, and non-state terrorists.”19

Third and most important, old-style deterrence conceded the initiative to America’s foes, in effect making US national security dependent on what others did or did not do. Conceding the initiative to others, waiting to see what they would do, acting only after others had acted to initiate or intensify hostilities—all these were hallmarks of an intellectually bankrupt policy that would likely fail again unless something new was added to the policy mix. Any policy that conceded to others the choice of where and when the next deterrence failure would occur was simply unacceptable to the Bush administration. “Perhaps the clearest lesson” that could be drawn from 9/11 was the “need to act swiftly and firmly before threats become attacks.”20 “The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction—and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack.”21 On the other hand, “if we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long.”22 Above all, “we cannot let our enemies strike first.”23

In fairness to members of the Bush administration, they were not the only responsible parties to question the relative merits of waiting versus acting. David Ben-Gurion of Israel, to cite one example, believed that a “negative attitude of ‘waiting it out’” was “not enough. In the long run,” he believed, “doing nothing may be far more dangerous than any bold deed—such as fomenting a war.”24 President Bill Clinton’s first secretary of defense, Les Aspin, suggested that the primary threat to the United States came from nuclear-armed terrorists and pariah states, and these “new possessors of nuclear weapons may not be deterrable.”25 Tony Blair, in a speech delivered on March 5, 2004, claimed that “it is a matter of time unless we act and take a stand before terrorism and weapons of mass destruction come together, and I regard them as two sides of the same coin.”26 President Clinton’s second secretary of defense, William Perry, in 2006 advocated a US strike on a North Korean missile launch site to prevent launch of a Taepodong long-range missile, lest a successful test embolden North Korea to search for new ways to threaten the United States.27

Neither was the Bush administration monolithic in its view of deterrence. Prior to joining the George W. Bush administration as national security adviser and, later, secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice believed that even an Iraq armed with WMDs would still be deterrable. Iraqi WMDs, she wrote a year before becoming national security adviser, “will be unusable because any attempt to use them will bring national obliteration.”28 President Bush personally described US foes as “unbalanced dictators” and terror networks, both of which he claimed were largely undeterrable. Yet the US Department of Defense, in its 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review Report, viewed US adversaries as highly rational and sensitive to the imposition of costs and risks upon them. “In confronting the range of security challenges [the United States] will face in the twenty-first century,” the report advised, “the United States must constantly strive to minimize its own costs in terms of lives and treasure, while imposing unsustainable costs on its adversaries. The United States, NATO, other allies and partners can impose costs by taking actions and making investments that complicate an adversary’s decision-making or promote self-defeating actions. Effective cost-imposing strategies also heighten an adversary’s sense of uncertainty, potentially creating internal fissures in its leadership.”29

3. TIME IS NOT ON OUR SIDE

In his 2002 State of the Union address, President Bush stated, “We must prevent the terrorists and regimes who seek chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons from threatening the United States and the world . . . yet time is not on our side. I will not wait on events while dangers gather. I will not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer.”30 As seen by the George W. Bush administration, the United States post-9/11 “could wait to be struck again, or adopt proactive strategies to prevent another September 11.”31 This made it imperative not just to act but to act quickly and decisively. Hence President Bush, in his commencement address at West Point a few months later, warned of the need to “take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge.”32 In similar fashion National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on September 8, 2002, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”33

4. ACTING IS BETTER THAN WAITING

“In the world we have entered,” President Bush said in his West Point commencement address in June 2002, “the only path to safety is the path of action.”34 According to the Bush Doctrine, there were at least two reasons why a state with the size and might of the United States should prefer action to a wait-and-see approach. First, acting was preferable to waiting because the costs and risks of inaction would likely prove unacceptably high.35 “If we wait for threats to fully materialize,” President Bush explained in his West Point address, “we will have waited too long.”36 “Facing clear evidence of peril,” he told an audience in Cincinnati on October 7, 2002, “we cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun—that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”37 “The United States,” the George W. Bush administration argued in its first national security strategy document, could not “remain idle while dangers gather.”38 To do so would be to “permit the world’s most dangerous regimes and terrorists to threaten [the United States] with the world’s most destructive weapons.”39

Second, as explained by Jeffrey Laurenti, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, there was in the United States “little high-level interest in tightening multilateral controls, which were widely thought to be ineffective against America’s adversaries but all too constraining of U.S. power.” In the Bush administration’s view, “powerful nations could best protect their security by acting on their own, rather than by trusting easily paralyzed multilateral mechanisms and talk shops.”40

5. OFFENSE IS BETTER THAN DEFENSE

“The war on terror,” President Bush asserted during his 2002 West Point commencement address, “will not be won on the defensive.”41 This was because the United States could “no longer simply rely on deterrence to keep the terrorists at bay or defensive measures to thwart them at the last moment.” Instead, the “fight must be taken to the enemy, to keep them on the run.” As Bush saw it, the United States “must join with others to deny the terrorists what they need to survive: safe haven, financial support, and the support and protection that certain nation-states historically have given them.”42 Offense and defense were not equally plausib...

Table of contents

• Preface
• 1. Preventive War and Containment
• 2. Containing Qaddafi’s Libya
• 3. Dual Containment of Iraq and Iran
• 4. Containing Iraq
• 5. Invading Iraq
• 6. Containing Iran
• 7. Containment Reappraised
• Notes
• Index