The News: The Broken Promises of Containment

Wednesday's Child is Full of Woe

All over the social media I read, there’s a disquieting undercurrent of sentiment about the war in Ukraine. At first I thought it was just one forum, but then I saw it echoed everywhere.

The basic gist of it: NATO should hit the Russian forces in Ukraine now with a heavy air attack and be prepared to follow up with conventional ground forces if necessary. And if that means an all-out war between NATO and Russia, so be it. And if that means a widening world war, so be it. And if that means nuclear war, so be it.

I understand the first part of the sentiment. It’s always there as a wild thought any time any nation and its leaders decide to use offensive military force for no real reason against peaceful civilians in the name of conquest or punitive destruction. “Can’t we just attack those military forces? Isn’t that the reason we say we have a military?”

There’s almost always a reason not to give into the impulse. Sometimes it’s because we’re the ones using military force heedlessly or pointlessly. Most of the time it’s because it would be impossible to just strike the military assets involved and then leave with the job done. You can’t just hit all the armed men making life miserable for everyone else in Eastern Congo: they don’t have the kind of facilities and organization that a major national military like Russia’s have. A lot of imagined interventions mean lengthy occupations, and lengthy occupations almost always go sour unless there is near-universal desire within the country or territory in question for that kind of protection and near-unanimous agreement in the international community that such an intervention is just and necessary.

And some of the time it’s because the next step after the righteous strike on illegitimate aggressors is a possible nuclear war that destroys the entire planet.

That’s why NATO did not respond with military force to the Soviet Union’s invasions of Hungary and Czechslovakia in 1956 and 1968 when the people of those respective nations attempted to go their own way and leave the East Bloc behind. It’s why the US and its allies did not respond with military force to the Soviet Union’s unprovoked invasion of Afghanistan in 1980. Even if the cause was righteous, the consequences were too grave. That felt bad then and it still feels bad looking back, to have said to the Hungarians, Czechs, and others “Sorry that you are being left under the rule of a totalitarian empire, but we can’t take the risk of the entire world dying in nuclear fire.” (Not to imply that the US or NATO were generally clear-headed about freeing other societies from unjust imperial rule in either 1956 or 1968, considering their own imperial projects at that time.)

That’s what’s disquieting now in the discussion about Ukraine, when I see it. In 1956 and 1968, just about everybody agreed that if a nuclear war was the result of military action that you shouldn’t undertake the military action. Advocates of a “winnable nuclear war” were not just uncommon but seen as dangerous due to a widespread belief that universal commitment to the doctrine of “mutually assured destruction” was the most important way to discourage an aggressor from first-strike use of nuclear weapons. It’s one of the things that worried many of us about Ronald Reagan’s military build-up and associated statements, that he seemed to be hinting at some sympathy for the idea of a winnable nuclear war. (It turns out we were right to worry.)

The logic of containment in the Cold War was that the Western alliance committed to keeping Soviet hegemony within its immediately post-1945 boundaries in the belief that some day, its power would crumble. I honestly don’t think that many of containment’s architects really believed that would happen: they were trying to make a fundamentally pessimistic, status-quo accepting doctrine look as if it had an optimistic perspective. I grew up in a Cold War that almost everyone believed would be geopolitical bedrock into an indefinite future. And yet, containment ended up fulfilling its optimistic ideal: keeping a totalitarian empire inside the boundaries of its hegemony, at the price of the freedom of the people on the wrong side, pressuring that empire with economic, diplomatic and cultural competition? That eventually led to its downfall. The nations it had kept under its thumb had their self-determination restored. No direct military conflict, with its risk of nuclear annihilation, required.

(This is not to underrate the appalling global destructiveness of the Cold War, since direct military conflict was avoided at the cost of provoking numerous proxy wars outside of Europe, at the cost of coups and support for dictators, etc.)

But now what I see, from some people at different ends of the political spectrum is “fuck it, we have to act forcefully now, and if it leads to a nuclear war, so what”. Many of the people speaking this way are young enough that they didn’t live with the dread of nuclear war that was a familiar part of my childhood, so perhaps it’s easier to say this with bravado or determination. However, I don’t think the people in question are unaware that nuclear war means the end of everything, though there’s also been a modest resurgence of people thinking (pointlessly) about how to survive a nuclear conflict, particularly in Western Europe. So what’s going on?

My thought is that this is a sign of the deeper failure of Cold War containment as a doctrine. Meaning, containment worked: the Soviet Union fell apart. But by the 1980s, the US and much of Western Europe had stopped being high on their own supply, e.g., stopped actually believing themselves in the core propositional ideals that containment’s most optimistic architects really did think were attributes of modern Western liberal democracies. The Cold War always had a horrific stench of hypocrisy around it, but most mainstream liberals and conservatives at its height could still reasonably assert that liberal democratic societies were better foundations for human flourishing than the East Bloc’s regimes and that progress towards liberal democratic ideals was still possible and even likely in the US and Europe. European empires were ending, the civil rights movement was leading the way towards internal reform followed by feminism and other social movements, social democracies were taming the excesses of capitalism.

In the 1980s, however, Reagan and Thatcher turned their backs on that vision of progress, and then “Third Way” liberal-progressive parties in the US, UK, Spain and elsewhere followed in that direction in the 1990s. As we enter the second decade of the 21st Century, the consequences of that abandonment are brutally clear. Nobody believes in progress any longer, no political leadership has a vision of a future where human beings are freer, happier and more secure than they are today. The best we get from most political parties and leaders is a vision of holding on to what we’ve got with a few modest incremental improvements around the edges. The entire global economy is strangling under the weight of runaway inequality and shadowy wealth accumulation that is beyond the ability of any nation to regulate or control. Democratic governance is threatened at every level, from school boards to national leadership. The entire planet just performed a resounding pratfall in the face of a global pandemic and almost no government is willing to honestly and thoroughly commit to the scale of response needed to face climate change.

Containment’s architects never really dreamed that the West would need to do anything if somehow their strategic plan paid off. The bad guys would crumble, the unfree nations would become free. Mission accomplished. The staggering complacency of their thought is perhaps most compactly expressed in Francis Fukuyama’s spectacularly terrible 1992 book The End of History, which gets mocked largely for the ineptitude of its predictive imagination but should instead be condemned for its provision of aid and comfort to the bipartisan complacency that seized most liberal democracies at the end of the Cold War. Fukuyama laid it out: there is nothing left that you need to do. Liberal democracy is the final form of human political life, nothing can arise to challenge it, and it is sufficient unto itself as it stands.

This was completely wrong, and we’ve all paid the price for it. For containment to have worked, the moment it succeeded in bringing down the great enemy of the Cold War it needed to free the West to do everything left that needed doing, to reallocate the grotesque and squalid costs of containment to the unfinished business of making liberal democratic societies fulfill their promises. Those costs weren’t just in making weapons and sustaining armies, they were in the proxy wars, the supported dictators, the covert actions, the we-can’t-fix-this-now-because excuses.

So when I hear someone today saying, fuck it, let’s fight even IF it risks nuclear war, what I hear unspoken inside of it is, “Because what’s so great about the world that we would be saving if we held off and committed to something like containment again?” Most of us live in nations gripped by political stalemate and mass delusion, deformed by grotesque inequality and unchallengeable corruption. We’re facing an accelerating global catastrophe from climate change that our political systems seem unable to act upon. The simplest reforms elude us, and the forms of satisfaction, pride and meaning that sustained us are slipping away.

Containment was not just a doctrine of surviving one more day, of waiting it out. It was a promise that if we could hold on, if we endured the present sacrifices of some people (however unwilling they might be to be the sacrifice), the world would be a place where freedom and justice could rise unimpeded towards greater and greater heights. The promise was broken. No wonder some people restively consider the possibility that today it is better to fight aggression and save what can be saved even if it risks the end of everything.

Image credit: "Nuclear explosion" by Gerald Simmons is marked with CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.