If History is any Guide, 'Containment 2.0' May Become Another Bloody Debacle for the West

By pursuing a strategy that is both brutal and underhanded, the West is likely to undermine the very values it is attempting to promote.

[Photo Credit: By Staff Sgt. Julianne Showalter (U.S. Armed Forces) Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20485668]

[Editor’s note: this is the second installment of the Simone Weil Center’s Symposium on ‘Containment 2.0.’ The first installment can be read here.]

There is an interesting line in Bergman, Kimmage, Mankoff, and Snegovaya’s article ‘America’s New Twilight Struggle with Russia,’ in which the authors talk of ‘checking Russian influence in Central Asia and Africa.’ The distance between the United States and Kazakhstan is about 6,500 miles. The distance between Russia and Kazakhstan is zero, as the two are neighbours. Yet for some strange reason, it is considered quite natural that the United States should seek to dominate a region 6,500 miles from its shores, whereas ‘Russian influence’ right on its own borders is deemed a threat that must somehow be contained.

This example aptly illustrates what one might consider the extreme self-centeredness of the call for a new policy of containment. The idea that other states might have legitimate interests, even next to their homes, is entirely absent, while the interests of the United States are deemed to span the entire globe. Moreover, it is taken for granted that American assistance is something that all people desire, that it is for the good of all, and moreover that it will inevitably produce positive outcomes for all concerned, other, of course, than a few malign actors. The fact that others might have different ideas, or that American assistance might actually be harmful rather than helpful is not considered. What is good for us is good for them.

The experience of containment in the Cold War tells a rather different story. Containment sounds like a relatively benign, peaceful strategy compared with ‘rollback,’ the alternative of the time that envisioned actively pushing communism back from its existing boundaries. In reality, containment was an extremely bloody affair. The war in Vietnam was possibly the most extreme example, but bloodshed followed containment almost everywhere outside Europe. The massacres in Indonesia in 1965-66, for instance, probably claimed the lives of about half a million people. Proxy wars backed by the United States in countries like Angola, Mozambique, and Afghanistan claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands (perhaps even millions) more. It is hardly an experience that one would wish to repeat.

To be fair, Bergmann et al. do admit that containment came with ‘abuses.’ They argue that outside of Europe, Containment 2.0 should rely not on military intervention but on economic and political assistance. But it is clear that the impetus for their proposal comes from the war in Ukraine and that in that instance their focus is, in fact, military. As they write: ‘that strategy should retain Ukrainian victory as a long-term goal. Forcing Russia to abandon all or most of the territory it has occupied there will push the Russian threat further from Europe’s borders … a Ukrainian military victory will require larger and more sustained Western military assistance.’

Interestingly, the stated aim here is not actually containment but rollback – ‘forcing Russian to abandon all or most of the territory it has occupied.’ This is an extremely ambitious program, and even if were achievable it could not be achieved without a very long war that would cost the lives of an extremely large number of people (including, of course, Ukrainians), as well as the wholesale destruction of Ukrainian infrastructure. Containment 2.0 is a recipe for prolonged and bloody war.

It’s also unlikely to succeed. War is full of uncertainty, so one can never tell for sure, but as things stand, the prospects of Ukraine recapturing most, or all, of its lost territory seem very low. Pursuing that goal will lead not merely to death and destruction, but to futile death and destruction.

This doesn’t seem to bother the new Cold Warriors. Convinced that they are ‘helping’ Ukraine, they lead it further into the abyss, just as their predecessors led Vietnamese, Afghans, Angolans, and others into the abyss in decades past.

Looking at this from a philosophical point of view, one might complain that the issue here is a failure to follow Kant’s categorical imperative and to view people as ends in themselves rather than a means to an end. The end is weakening Russia and China, and if others suffer in the process, we shrug our shoulders and consider it a price worth paying, knowing full well that it is not us but others who are paying the price.

I think, though, that this complaint is not entirely accurate because the architects of these policies strike me not so much as cynics who know full well what they are doing but as true believers, who really imagine that their ‘help’ is in fact help, that the United States is a force for good in the world, and that spreading its influence and undermining that of others is thus for the benefit of all humanity.

This comes through in the talk of ‘support for governance reform and trade’ and of countering ‘Russian influence outside Europe primarily through development assistance, trade, and investment.’

The first thing to note about this is that it is not nearly as new as the authors would like readers to think it is. Development assistance, trade, and investment were key aspects of Cold War-era containment. From the mid-1950s, for instance, the United States invested heavily in southern Afghanistan, through projects such as the Helmand Valley Authority. Other developing countries were similar recipients of American aid. This built on modernization theory, developed by the likes of Eugene Staley and Walt Rostow, who imagined that one could export the experience of the American New Deal to Africa and Central Asia, enable local economies to ‘take off,’ build a liberal civil society, and at the end of it all save the recipients of US aid from communism.

It generally didn’t end well. US-backed irrigation projects in the Helmand Valley, for instance, left it not a blooming garden but a salty desert (I exaggerate a bit, but it is generally agreed that the results were not very positive). Similar outcomes appeared elsewhere.

Unfortunately, the world is littered with failed development assistance projects. If Bergmann et al., imagine that the United State has gotten better at this since the Cold War, they should read the reports of the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, which provide excruciating details of billions of dollars squandered on failed, and often counterproductive, aid projects in the years between 2001 and 2021. The U.S. and its allies imagined that they were helping Afghanistan, but their aid just made things worse. It is a recurring pattern. If I truly believed that the U.S. and its allies really knew what they were doing when it came to development assistance, support for good governance, and the like, I might support it. But the evidence suggests rather the opposite.

Beyond this, one gets no sense from Bergmann et al. that people in outside Europe might not want American assistance or might not regard American models of development as appropriate for their circumstances. Their article speaks of the ‘brutality and corruption of Russian-backed juntas,’ by which one imagines they have in mind the military governments that have recently taken over countries such as Niger. But there is a reason why these ‘juntas’ seized power and seem to enjoy some popular support, and that is that their predecessors were themselves corrupt and incompetent. And if the Russians also enjoy some popular support in parts of Africa (as seems to be the case), it is because the Western backers of the previous regimes had become thoroughly disliked.

If Africans in some instances choose to prefer Russia over America, France, or Britain (a choice possibly partly determined by memories of colonialism and the Soviet Union’s support of national liberation struggles), who are we to tell them that they must do otherwise? There is, it seems to me, a profound arrogance to this approach, as well as unwillingness to consider that others might legitimately view things differently and have a right to go their own way.

At this point, it is perhaps necessary also to express what some might consider a somewhat cynical view about the expressed intent to promote U.S. interests by ‘supporting locally led initiatives to foster civil society.’ Superficially, it sounds totally benign. Dig a bit deeper, though, and there are grounds for concern.

In its broadest definition, civil society includes any organization operating outside the purview of the state, from the local knitting club upwards. In the meaning more often used by Western politicians, in the context of countries they do not like, civil society is a much narrower concept. It is more strictly a Westernizing, liberal civil society. The term civil society thus refers to that segment of society that is politically opposed to the ruling regime, wishes to advance Western understandings of democracy and human rights, align its country more closely politically with the West, and more generally Westernize that country’s institutions and values. As such it is often at odds with much of the surrounding population. Western support for it can prove deeply destabilizing, particularly when civil society of such a sort succeeds in taking power against the wishes of important segments of the population, leading to a backlash and in the worst circumstances civil war. This is more or less what happened in Ukraine in 2014. Beyond that, overt Western support for this kind of civil society may have the effect of tainting it in the eyes of the authorities, resulting in its suppression. This can be seen in Russia, where the association of liberal civil society with the West has arguably had the effect of persuading the state that it is a fifth column being promoted by the West to undermine the state from within. By promoting democracy and liberal values in such a way, Western states can inadvertently undermine it.

The repeated failures not only of military intervention but also of development assistance, democracy promotion, and the like, never seems to stop Western liberal internationalists from wanting to do the same thing all over again. This reveals another serious deficiency – a lack of self-awareness. Such is our certainty that we are the ‘good guys’ that we seem all too often to be incapable of understanding that our record does not match our expressed intention and that others might therefore have very good reason to view us as a danger. When, for instance, Russians say that they view NATO expansion as a threat, they are dismissed as talking nonsense. In our minds, we know that NATO is purely defensive. If others think something different, they are wrong, and should therefore be ignored. But it doesn’t actually matter if they are wrong. If that is how they will think, it will affect their behaviour, and it must therefore be taken into consideration.

Take, for instance, the article under discussion. How do the authors imagine it will be received in Moscow or Beijing? Do they imagine that people there will somehow reconsider their actions? Or is it more likely that on reading it, even sceptics will conclude that their leaders are right, that the West is out to get them, and that they must therefore resist? I suspect that the latter answer is more likely. If so, Containment 2.0 is likely to prove deeply counterproductive.