THE RETURN OF CONTAINMENT

ONE OF THE MOST SUCCESSFUL U.S. foreign policies of the last 50 years may well have been containment, which the United States used from 1947 until the end of the Cold War to block the expansion of Soviet power and influence. Today, as pundits and politicians talk about a new cold war erupting between the United States and China and Russia, it’s worth asking whether some version of containment could once again make sense for the coming decades as well.

To be sure, there are vast differences in the nature of the threat facing the United States in the 1950s and that today. But there are plenty of reasons to give the policy a second look, too. And an approach that relies more on the positive aspects of the original policy—promoting multilateral cooperation, eliminating trade barriers, and adopting market principles among allies—than the negative ones, such as military deterrence and economic embargoes, could go a long way toward securing U.S. interests.

introduced the United States to the idea of containment in 1946 with his “Long Telegram” to the State Department, in which he, as chargé d’affaires in Moscow, laid out his perspective on how to counter the rise of the Soviet article. In the latter, Kennan recommended a “long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.” If the United States frustrated Soviet expansionist tendencies long enough, he believed, Moscow might “mellow,” allowing for a negotiated settlement with Washington. Kennan’s idea appealed to U.S. President Harry Truman, who formally made containment U.S. policy in March 1947, during a speech to Congress in which he outlined what is now known as the Truman Doctrine.