American Foreign Policy of Containment - Blundering to Success

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During the same year, Dwight Eisenhower was elected President and championed his ‘New Look’ doctrine, a modification of containment that would expand foreign policy beyond containing the progression of communism and into ‘rollback,’ the active pushback against communism where it already exists.5 While this element of his New Look plan amounted to only rhetoric, the Eisenhower administration escalated containment in practice by promoting the deterrence strategy of ‘Massive Retaliation’ which threatened any attacker with a response of greatly disproportionate size.

Eisenhower’s version of containment was then replaced by President Kennedy’s ‘Flexible Response’ doctrine in the early 1960s. The United States realized that as the Soviet Union gained parity in nuclear weapons, Eisenhower’s approach of brinksmanship would not be effective as the U.S. could no longer make threats of ‘disproportionately larger’ force. Any major conflict would then result in either American defeat or the use of nuclear weapons and, in all likelihood, mutually-assured destruction.4

Failures in Cuba and Vietnam

These dynamic variations of presidential doctrine toward containment resulted in no greater failure than President Kennedy’s strategy of Flexible Response. It expanded upon the United States’ military commitments on a global scale. Kennedy’s method of containment had little to no success and resulted in two major national embarrassments: the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion and the futile escalation of commitment in the Vietnam War. Fidel Castro brought communism within nuclear range of the eastern U.S. seaboard in 1959, and the Soviet Union pushed this antagonistic relationship to the brink of mutually-assured destruction during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The American mission in Vietnam resulted in the deaths of over 58,000 Americans as well as the expansion of communism into South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Clearly, containment failed miserably in both Cuba and Vietnam.

Conclusion

While Paul Nitze may argue that “our defeat in Vietnam cannot obscure the overall success of containment,” it is evident that just the opposite is true. The American victory in the Cold War cannot obscure the overall failure of containment; the victory occurred in spite of it. Furthermore, Nitze’s justification of containment with the eventual American victory ignores the recklessness and poorly-defined goals of the idea in the first place as well as the many different possible outcomes that could just as easily have arisen including global nuclear war (which some accounts contend came within minutes of occurring during the Cuban Missile Crisis).

In the same way that a blackjack player can hit on twenty and may get lucky with the one-in-thirteen chance of an ace being dealt, it is simply revisionist history to contend that such a risk was the ‘right’ choice. In judging a political strategy, the mere outcome is not sufficient; the full context of the decision-making process is crucial. A good judge must consider the inherent risks along with associated costs and compare alternative courses of action. Gabriel Kolko seems to understand this method of analysis better than Paul Nitze, although one wonders if Nitze, the principal author behind NSC-68 which was successful in advocating for the global expansion of containment, continues to stand by the policy despite its many failures because it is his political legacy.

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