Containment vs. Rollback

During the Cold War, there were roughly two ideas on how to stop the spread of Communism. The first was the containment model, as developed by President Harry Truman, George Kennan, George C. Marshall and Dean Acheson. The basic insight of the plan was that Communism was an unstable political system and political economy whose internal tensions guaranteed its collapse, and that all that was needed was to restrict the spread of Communism over the globe. While this policy led to some bad decisions--the war in Korea to a certain extent, Vietnam for sure--it was ultimately quite successful, and was upheld by both Democratic and Republican presidents until the end of the Cold War. The other major theory on how to stop communism was called rollback. It was primarily a product of the right, championed by people like William F. Buckley, Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater and John Foster Dulles, though it found support among some of the more conservative quarters of the Democratic Party, such as Scoop Jackson. Basically, people who believed in this philosophy were people who felt that Communism was an outright evil (hence Reagan's evil empire remark), and that tolerating any subjugation of Eastern Europe was completely immoral, and that we should try to roll back Communist influence to this end. This was the context under which Lyndon Johnson ran his infamous "Daisy" ad, which stated that Goldwater would start a war with the Soviets. Johnson has had his ass run through the wringer quite a bit over any number of things, including that ad, but I think he was right and I suspect a Goldwater foreign policy in the mid-1960s would likely have culminated in war over Eastern Europe, which would certainly have ended with a nuclear attack on the part of the loser. This is because Goldwater's policy was fundamentally unsound. It might well have been immoral for the Soviets to subjugate Eastern Europe but military action would have gone hot, and aside from military action nothing else was going to work. The Hungarian popular uprising during 1956--and its ultimate failure--showed just how unwilling the Warsaw Pact was to lose a member. Rollback was championed by the right and by their ultimate hero, Ronald Reagan, though he thankfully stuck more or less with the containment option once he actually gained power.

This is all a long-winded prelude to Daniel Larison's post on the "long war" with Islam. It's worth reading in full, but he posits the following:

There is a split in the country that is very much like the difference between supporters of rollback and containment during the Cold War, but unlike in the Cold War the advocates of containment seem to be a small minority. Even though containment was the wiser, superior policy during the Cold War, it has somehow lost its appeal. During the first two decades of the Cold War advocates of rollback considered it insufficiently “robust” (to use a word that ideological fantasists like to throw around a lot) and not nearly aggressive enough, and current partisans of the Long War concept seem intent on not making the “mistake” of opting for containment, which is to say that they are intent on embarking on fool’s errands.

This leads me to ask, why is containment such an unappealing option these days? It's not as though Islamism is inherently more stable than Communism--if anything, the opposite is true. And Islamism is much less popular in general, it's much more regional, it's much less powerful and it has virtually no defenders in the United States, while Communism had a significant minority of sympathizers at various times (the '30s, the '70s). What's more, Communism had defenders who perhaps loathed the surveillance state and the poverty (1 of 7 East Germans worked for the secret police, the Stasi) but remembered how things had been worse under whatever earlier despot or tyrant had been running things. Outside of the organizations themselves, groups like al-Qaeda seem to be universally reviled among actual Muslims.

I suspect all of this has to do with the superficial moralism of rollback. You saw this in the Iraq War, in which you became an opponent of human rights if you opposed the war, because it's not like war leads to countless deaths, injuries, diseases, property damage, and atrocities. War never happens without all of these things. But military intervention was our moral obligation because, well, we could? Except not in places like Darfur, where there might actually have been some positive results. I'm not a Saddam sympathizer by any means, but when your Saddam "liberation" project has killed way more Iraqis than the man himself ever did one can only wonder if the cure is worse than the disease. Rollback always sounds good. Sounds noble. We're big, we're powerful, we should protect people being bullied. Fine. But nothing is that clear-cut when war enters the picture. It seems to me that rollback has a few fundamental problems:

1. It overrelies on utilitarian moral reasoning.
   
2. It requires as a prerequisite information that is fundamentally unknowable. How can one know that military power will work and won't cause a backlash? How can one know if military power can handle such a mission? What about the fifty million other random things that can happen? War brings a lot of uncertainty into the equation.
   
3. It has no real track record of success.
4. It is too tied to assuaging guilt and military triumphalism--in other words, it's emotionalism in the guise of self-interest--it's self-esteem policy.
5. It seems difficult to put into practice in any sort of logical way. Why Iraq instead of Iran? Why not North Korea or the Sudan? No one knows.

In the end, it smacks too much of playing God for me, along with the little matter of it being difficult to put into practice. It seems to me to be the product of people who see everything as a binary choice, as black and white. I don't like resorting to cliches about how the world is really gray, but these sorts of ideologies can't help but break down when put into even the most cursory evaluation. It's difficult to argue with the, "People are suffering, we have to do something!" mode of discourse, aside from just saying that, while we know people are suffering, it's difficult to determine whether inserting ourselves into the mix will actually help, and that absent some sort of sign that we can actually impact things positively it is not a good idea to intervene in conflicts that don't explicitly involve our interests.

But to return to the original question: why is rollback so popular these days? I suspect it has a lot of causes--Reagan is perceived as having both "stood up" to Communism and been successful, so the right doesn't buy into the containment consensus any more; complacency about our military might while refusing to acknowledge that, as Andrew Bacevich tells us, power does have its limits; a post-9/11 consensus on the hawkishness of the "Bush Doctrine" as the proper way to exterminate al-Qaeda; and a lack of seriousness among our political elite to plan policy, as well as among our media elite as well for being unable to call a spade a spade. Containment is a harder sell than rollback, especially to a society accustomed to swift military victories without any seeming cost, because it requires restraint, a grasp of history, and a long strategic view. Do these traits sound like what you find in today's Americans?

I suppose we can rest easy in the fact that the threat posed by al-Qaeda is, in every substantive way, much milder than that posed by Communism, so at worst we probably won't destroy the entire world, but merely our national prosperity. As President Obama seems like a smart guy and a strategic thinker who knows how to exercise restraint I hope that he puts us on this trail. Unfortunately, we have become a nation of superficial moralists so I guess we'll just have to see.