As technology creates more porous borders between nations, containment policies are becoming more and more difficult to effectively implement.

The Council on Emerging National Security Affairs recently compiled a set of frameworks proposed by some of the most influential foreign policy professionals of our time. Are containment strategies no longer effective, and if so, which alternatives do you think we should employ instead?

1. Bush Doctrine I – Pre-eminence and Preemption: In the first national security plan following the September 11th attacks, the National Security Strategy of 2002 outlines the Bush administration’s policies of pre-eminence and preemption, stating that “while the United States will constantly strive to enlist the support of the international community, we will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self-defense by acting preemptively against such terrorists, to prevent them from doing harm against our people and our country.”  It expands the definition of preemption to encompass not just the ability to attack when there is an imminent threat, but also the ability to begin a preventive war to stop a future threat -- “As a matter of common sense and self-defense, America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed.” 
   

2. Bush Doctrine II – Global Freedom:  Bush’s second inaugural address (January 2005) outlines a doctrine in which creating peace and setting the conditions for security means spreading democracy.  The problem is that while “whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny - prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder - violence will gather, and multiply in destructive power, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat.” The only force to stop this threat is the force of worldwide human freedom. In order to achieve this freedom, the policy of the United States must be “to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture.” The final result will be “ending tyranny in our world.”

3. Haass -- Unity and Integration:  In The Opportunity – America’s Moment to Alter History’s Course (Public Affairs, 2005) CFR President and former State Department Policy Planning Director Richard Haass rejects earlier suggestions for a Bush Doctrine – unilateralism or isolationism (unrealistic given the nature of the world), counter-terrorism (too narrow), promoting democracy (too impractical).  He calls instead for a doctrine that would broadly integrate the nations of the world “in efforts to tame the challenges inherent in globalization and the post Cold War World. . .The opportunity exists for our era to become one of genuine global integration. . .From terrorism, to WMD, to human crisis, to energy and global economy, the answer is more integration – commitment to a process, not a single policy.”

4. Barnett – The Core and the Gap:  Phillip Barnett, author of The Pentagon’s New Map, War and Peace in the Twenty First Century (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2004), believes that the world’s unsettling security picture stems from a growing divide between the connected and functional “Core” and the disconnected and dysfunctional “Gap.”  Barnett’s key prescription is simply to shrink the Gap, bringing the disconnected parts of the world into the Core in terms of economic prosperity, information flow, and security alignments.  He outlines a “global transaction strategy” that “recognizes the primacy of the four global flows of people, energy, investments, and security.”  U.S. armed forces are organized on two tracks -- “system administrator” for nation-building, and Leviathan, to crush foes. 

5. Meade – Forward Containment: CFR’s Walter Russell Meade (Power, Terror, Peace, and War, America’s Grand Strategy in a World at Risk; Alfred A. Knopf, 2004) takes the rationale that containment served us so well that our best approach now would be to adapt it to the new realities rather than start from scratch with a new doctrine.  He proposes a version of the triple containment that defeated communism -- contain Soviet military power, box in friendly governments, and limit influence on civil society.  The new strategy would: 1) Contain terrorists by directly weakening organizations, cutting ties to governments, and blocking access to WMD; 2) Contain expansion and consolidation of state power by those embracing the ideology of terror, leaving open regime change as an option; and 3) Contain influence of terrorist ideologies with a flow of new ideas and by fixing the Arab-Israeli conundrum. 

6. Hart – The Fourth Power, Principle-Based Leadership:  In The Fourth Power – A Grand Strategy for the United States in the Twenty-First Century (Oxford, 2004), former U.S. Senator Gary Hart expresses the belief that a return to principle-based leadership by the United States would be so compelling that it would itself provide us with security and go far in solving the problems we face.  He eschews doctrine, but provides a framework for new policies, based on the mission statement: “to transform our domestic economy from one of consumption to one of production and, through long-term investment, to recapitalize our education and technology base and achieve energy security; to use the forces of globalization and information to strengthen and expand existing democratic alliances and create new ones; to employ those alliances to destroy terrorist networks and establish new security structures; and guided by our historic principles, to lead international coalitions in spreading economic opportunity and liberal democracy and in nation-building, counter-proliferation, and environmental protection.”

7. Fallows – A Containment Strategy for the Age of Terror:  Like Meade, the Atlantic’s James Fallows (“Success Without Victory,” The Atlantic, January/February 2005) believes that our age is more similar than dissimilar to that of the immediate post-war period and argues for a strategy that would focus on three broad themes, which he couches in terms of the leadership that would be required to deliver them.  “A Truman would tell us that loose-nukes are the real emergency of this moment, and that instead of pussyfooting around we should control them right away.  A Kennan would explain the sources of Muslim extremist behavior and how our actions could encourage or retard it.  A Marshall would point out how gravely we left ourselves exposed through our reliance on oil from the Persian Gulf.”  Our actions should take place against a backdrop of a “courageous, confident, open society” which is “a goal in itself.”

8. Murdoch – Anti-Doctrine, or Just Do it Right:  In a unique approach that could be said to have support from the 9/11 Commission and undoubtedly some anti-doctrine policymakers, CSIS’s Clarke Murdoch (Improving the Practice of National Security – A New Approach for the Post-Cold War World; CSIS, 2004) believes that “it is not a lack of specific grand strategy to replace containment that is the problem, but the uneven effectiveness with which NSS practitioners make and implement strategy.”  He supports the old Army adage that a good plan poorly executed is worse than a mediocre plan well executed, arguing that “the sustainability of U.S. national security strategy depends primarily on whether NSS practitioners get the strategy right.”  He has since followed this up with suggestions for going “Beyond Goldwater-Nichols” in a paper that similarly lays out specific recommendation for further enhancing the inter-agency environment for results-focused policy execution.  The 9/11 report similarly does not attempt to chart doctrine as much as a one-time strategy for attacking terrorists and their organizations, preventing the continued growth of Islamist terrorism, and protecting and preparing for terrorist attacks.

9. Peters – Extending American Primacy: In his latest offering (New Glory – Expanding America’s Global Supremacy; Sentinel, 2005), the provocative Ralph Peters begins with the premise that America “is the greatest – and most virtuous – power in history.”  Though difficult to pin down precisely, Peter’s would use that virtue to expand raw U.S. power (mostly military) in a web of alliances that reminds one of the New Europe Strategy of the early days of the Iraq War, when America dismissed standing alliances in the interest of putting together a posse of like-minded countries.  Peters would do this on a global scale, turning “our attention from the lands of yesterday and extending a hand to the struggling lands of tomorrow.”  His proscription for the Middle East captures the flavor of the strategy: “engagement where there is hope; containment where there is no hope; preventive military action against terrorists. . .”  It goes beyond America first, it is America only.  

10. Mandelbaum – America as World Government:  Johns Hopkins Professor Michael Mandelbaum (The Case for Goliath, How America Acts as World Government in the 21st Century, Perseus, 2005), takes a more subtle approach to American primacy, arguing that “the world needs government and the United States is in a position to supply it.”  The rise of American power during the long struggle against the Soviet Union, combined with the failure of Europe to recover its footing, the crash of the Russian empire, and the inability of international organizations to fully function, left the U.S. as the “best source of global governance because, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, there is no other.”  Mandelbaum argues that absent this U.S. role the world would be a less secure, less prosperous, and less democratic place, and the U.S. (and the world) would do well to guard this role and help facilitate it, rather than grousing about it. Consider also Niall Ferguson’s Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire.

11. Lieber – America as World Leader:   Georgetown University Professor Robert J. Lieber (The American Era: Power and Strategy for the 21st Century, Cambridge, 2005) also sees the U.S. as the indispensable player in international security in an age when the potential merger of militant Islamists with weapons of mass destruction could pose threats on a scale previously unimaginable. He dismisses the U.N. and other international bodies as being incapable of acting in a timely and effective way to curb these threats, and believes the absence of a true central authority in the international system forces the U.S. to act as world leader.  “American intervention becomes a necessity, not something about which to be apologetic.” 

12. Shapiro – Containment Redux:  While some have looked to George Kennan for inspiration, Yale Professor Ian Shapiro (Containment: Rebuilding a Strategy Against Global Terror, Princeton, 2007) formulates an entire doctrine by directly adapting Kennan’s ideas to the current world.  Shapiro finds the current threat more dangerous and complicated than the monolithic Soviet threat, but in how Islamist terrorists have positioned themselves as being antithetical to our way of life, it has far more in common than the architects of the Bush Doctrine have, to date, accepted.  As opposed to the push for, or acceptance of, American primacy in the world, an offensive strategy, Shapiro argues for a very moderated role that would intervene only defensively to secure America’s survival as a democracy.  It would have America “guard against terrorism by containing enabling states, investing in human intelligence, and enhancing homeland security.”  It would “gear military alliances and collective defense agreements first to America’s survival as a democracy and then to the defense of other democracies.”  Finally, it would “support democratic oppositions against dictatorships around the world, and sow the seeds of an environment friendly to democracy by promoting economic development in poor countries.”   

13. David Kilcullen – Disaggregation:  Australian policy analyst David Kilcullen (Countering Global Insurgency, Journal of Strategic Studies, August 2005), offers a unifying strategic conception for winning the War on Terrorism, which he narrowly describes as a “globalized Islamist insurgency,” rather than a conventional terrorism campaign, the difference being largely in the level and modalities of global support networks.   Kilcullen argues for a strategy of “disaggregation,” that “seeks to dismantle, or break, the links in the Global jihad.”  He explains that “like containment in the Cold War, a disaggregation strategy means different things in different theatres or at different times.  Disaggregation focuses on interdicting links between theaters, denying the ability of regional and global actors to link and exploit local actors, disrupting flows between and within jihad theaters, denying sanctuary areas, isolating Islamists from local populations and disrupting inputs from the sources of Islamism in the great Middle East.”  It works at the global, regional, and local levels – “seeking to interdict global links via a worldwide CORDS program, isolate regional players through a series of regional counterinsurgencies and strengthen local governance through a greatly enhanced security framework at the country level.”

14. Ignatieff – Post-Westphalianism:  Embedded in his award winning 2002 Gifford Lectures, former Harvard Professor and now Deputy Leader of Canada’s Liberal Party Michael Ignatieff (The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror, Penguin, 2004), identified Al Qaeda as a distinctive kind of terrorism and a wholly new threat.  The “apocalyptic nihilists” who attacked America on 9/11 defended their actions “in the language of Islamic eschatology, not in the language of rights,” with apocalyptic, not political intentions.  “Such an attack cannot be met by politics but only by war,” he suggests.  He places this in historical perspective: “A long historical parenthesis – the ascendancy of the modern state – might be closing.  Since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 . . . international order has depended on state’s possessing a monopoly on the legitimate means of force.”  This era, he suggests, may be ending with the rise in non-state actors with the power to destroy cities.  The geography of the new threat is the band of failed and failing states running across Africa and on the periphery of the former Soviet Union.  The answer is to keep destructive power firmly in the state system where it can be deterred, by ensuring states have “effective coercive control over their own territory.”  He lays out a strategy for non-proliferation and control of nuclear materials, state-building, enhanced multilateral and multinational cooperation, while holding out the use of preemptive force “to prevent the sale or distribution of such weapons to non-state actors.”  See also Phillip Bobbitt’s The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History.

15. Fukuyama  I – State Building: Francis Fukuyama believes that the greatest threat to international security comes from unstable states (State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century. Cornell University Press, 2004).  The foreign policy of the United States, then, should be one which fosters development, better organization of private and public sectors, and lasting political and economic institutions in those regions which are most prone to instability and corruption by outside influence.  The organization and infrastructure of the state must be able to survive after outside aid and intervention is withdrawn.

16. Fukuyama II – Realistic Wilsonianism:  In a later critique of the neo-conservative movement which he once found himself a part of, Fukuyama posits in America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy (Yale University Press, 2005), that “the world is characterized by American hegemony and a global anti-American backlash, complete with inchoate forms of ‘soft’ balancing; a shift in the locus of action away from nation-states toward non-state actors and other transnational forces; an accompanying disintegration of sovereignty both as a normative principle and as an empirical reality; and the emergence of a band of weak and failed states that are the source of most global problems.”  Realistic Wilsonianism, or what could be called “hard-headed Liberal Internationalism” would use American power to change what goes on inside states, albeit through a “dramatic demilitarization of American foreign policy and reemphasis on other types of policy instruments.”  It would focus on “good governance, political accountability, democracy, and strong institutions,” through soft power: our ability to set an example, to train and educate, to support with advice and often with money.”  And it would not be afraid of new institutions – “a large number of overlapping and sometimes competitive international institutions, what can be labeled ‘multi-multilateralism.” 

17. Ethical Realism: Anatol Lieven, a senior researcher at the New America Foundation, and John Hulsman, a member of Council on Foreign Relations and former senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation come together from opposite ends of the political spectrum to formulate a unique foreign policy they call ethical realism (Ethical Realism: A Vision for America’s Role in the World. Pantheon, 2006). The policy is defined by five “core teachings:” prudence, humility, study, responsibility, and patriotism. Lieven and Hulsman propose spreading capitalism before spreading democracy, and ultimately strive for an international order which does not call for preventive war, citing containment of communism in the Soviet Union as a prime example to follow. 

18. Princeton Project – A World of Liberty Under Law:  Reasoning that it would take a number of individuals to do “what no one person in our highly specialized and rapidly changing world could hope to do alone,” Woodrow Wilson School Dean Anne-Marie Slaughter and Wilson School professor G. John Ikenberry, serving as co-chairs of the Princeton Project on National Security, engaged some 400 policymakers and academics with the aim to write a “collective X article.”  The final report argues for “an American grand strategy of forging a world of liberty under law by supporting popular, accountable, and rights-regarding governments; building a liberal international order; and updating rules on the use of force.”  The report has new ideas for nation-building (supporting Popular, Accountable, and Rights-regarding governments worldwide), rebuilding international institutions through a Concert of Democracies, and countering terrorism through a global counterinsurgency campaign.  It similarly pulls in new ideas on nuclear proliferation, global pandemics, energy security, and building a protective infrastructure.

19. Fareed Zakaria: Liberalization before Democratization:  Zakaria finds fault with doctrines that blindly promote democracy, something he believes is not an inherently good or bad as a political system (The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad. W.W. Norton and Company, 2004). He triumphs liberal values, whether or not they come attached to a democracy, and contends countries that first liberalized their economies were better off in the long run than countries that first promoted democracy and then worked for liberal values. Zakaria discusses the “paradox” of Iraq: “to build democracy in Iraq, the United States must stay on, but to demonstrate that it is not a colonial power it must leave.”  Involving other countries in the process, he proposes, will solve this problem.

20. Louise Richardson: Define and Contain:  Louise Richardson, Dean of the Radcliffe Institute, proposes that a war against the terrorist threat is futile because it is essentially a war against a tactic. (What Terrorists Want. Random House, 2006). “Terrorist" tactics were used by Americans against the British in the 1770's, by the Israelis against the British, by the Algerians against the French. Progress is only possible if the problem is clearly defined “as global militant Islam.” Richardson proposes that the roots of terrorism are too varied to defeat, but that they can be contained by isolating terrorist groups from their communities through a “war of ideas.” Without a broad appeal in their communities, recruitment for terrorist groups will decline. The audiences for coercive and conciliatory policies must be kept separate, in that “Coercive policies should be restricted to the few actual perpetrators of the violence, while conciliatory policies ought to be focused on their potential recruits.”

21. Parag Khanna, New Global Order:  In The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order  (Random House, 2008) Khanna argues that America's unipolar moment has been replaced by a tripolar world order in which the US, China, and the EU compete on increasingly equal footing. (Other great powers do not meet the criteria of a superpower nor does the concept of a global Islamist jihadism.)  Military power alone is a false indicator of aggregate influence. Each superpower combines hard and soft power in unique ways to influence events in every corner of the globe, specifically in the most strategic "second world" regions of South America, the Middle East, the Black Sea region, Central Asia, and East Asia. America's diplomatic style is "coalition," the EU's is "consensus," and China's is "consultative". Success or failure to win the allegiance of second world state-regions will ultimately tip the global balance of power. The 21st century is the first in which truly global multi-polar competition has ever occurred, with not all superpowers being Western (e.g. China), and not all even being traditional nation-states (e.g. the EU). Maintaining stability thus requires not a tenuous "balance of power" or a culturally unachievable "concert," but rather a system of "equilibrium" based on an active division of labor among the Big 3 to manage differences while reestablishing the foundation of shared norms which is rapidly eroding.