Back to containment

Sensible words from Dominic Sandbrook at UnHerd. Yes, we'd love to see a military challenge to Putin's vicious war in Ukraine. Yes, it's unbearable knowing that we have the means - the West, that is, Europe and America - to intervene decisively and end the carnage. But Putin has nuclear weapons, and has given large hints that he's not afraid to use them. He may very well be bluffing: he almost certainly is bluffing. But, as he knows only too well, we can't afford to take the risk. So what to do? Containment - the Truman Doctrine - took decades to work against Soviet Communism, but work it did. The Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Empire, and not a nuclear weapon fired in anger. 

Back to 1947, and the deeply uncharismatic president Truman makes his speech:

[W]hat Truman said that day was so electric, so momentous, that it arguably had more impact on history than almost any other speech by any other president since Abraham Lincoln. The United States, he told his listeners, was in a new world war — an undeclared war, not of armies but of ideologies. “At the present moment in world history”, he said, “nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life”. One was based on individual liberty, free speech and democratic elections. The other, Communism, relied upon “terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio; fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms”.

They all knew that. But what followed was the real surprise.

Truman wanted Congress to give $400 million immediately in aid to Greece and Turkey. It was essential, he said, that neither fell to Communism, and the United States must ensure that they didn’t. And he went further. This would not be a one-off; it must be a general rule. “I believe”, Truman said, “that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way. I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid”.

It would be expensive, he admitted. But it was an “investment in world freedom and world peace” — the kind of investment that only the United States could afford. That was their historic challenge, and Harry Truman was not afraid to meet it.

Today that speech is remembered as the genesis of the Truman Doctrine, when the United States committed itself to the defence of democracy against the advance of Communism. The usual word for this campaign, which never appears in the speech, is “containment”, and that sums it up pretty well. Truman had no intention of going to war against Stalin’s Soviet Union, and was careful to avoid any overtly military provocations. But he was in absolutely no doubt that there were such things as right and wrong; that Soviet Communism was wrong; and that it was his patriotic and moral duty to contain it.

You can probably guess where I’m heading with this. First, though, an illuminating historical side-note. The man who coined the word “containment” was an American diplomat called George F. Kennan, who had studied Russia’s language and history as a young man. In February 1946, Kennan, then deputy head of mission in Moscow, had sent a long telegram to Washington urging his bosses to ditch any idealistic assumptions about reaching a modus vivendi with Stalin.

“At the bottom of the Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs”, he argued, was a “traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity”. And though Kennan took Stalin’s Marxism seriously, he thought it was mixed up with something else, something older, perhaps even darker. For in some ways, he wrote, Marxism was simply the “justification for the Soviet Union’s instinctive fear of the outside world, for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not dare not to inflict, for sacrifice they felt bound to demand”.

What Kennan also recognised, though, was that for all Stalin’s purges and persecutions, even his imposition of puppet governments in the brutalised capitals of central and eastern Europe, the Americans could not just fight him. Even with their nuclear monopoly, they would probably incur hundreds of thousands of casualties as they tuned their guns on the Red Army. Europe would be utterly devastated; the total death toll would probably run into millions. There was right, and there was wrong; but doing the right thing was complicated.

So as Kennan argued in a subsequent article, the West really only had two options. They could sit back and let Stalin get away with it, playing the part of appeasers once again, and allowing him to erode democratic freedoms in one European country after another. Or they could draw a line and say: “This far, and no further”, and do all in their power to undermine those regimes that flew the red flag. Their strategy, wrote Kennan, “must be a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies”. They would corral the Eastern monster and defend Western freedom by “a policy of firm containment, designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counter-force at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world”....

So let’s turn to the present. With the headlines full of the atrocity at the Mariupol maternity hospital, the slaughter of Ukrainian civilians and the looming siege of Kyiv, as well as Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s rousing Churchillian rhetoric, it’s easy to dismiss containment as a kind of appeasement, an acceptance of defeat. Most of us would love to see Russia defeated, its troops streaming back home to launch a revolution and Vladimir Putin on trial in the Hague — just as most decent people in the late 1940s and early 1950s dreamed of seeing Stalin toppled and Communism overthrown from Trieste to the Baltic.

But in truth this feels depressingly unlikely. For the time being, the Putin regime seems entrenched. And of course Putin has something Stalin didn’t in the spring of 1947 — nuclear weapons. That’s why most Western politicians have ruled out a no-fly zone over western Ukraine. It’s entirely understandable that people think we should “do something”. But there’s no point in doing something if the firestorm kills the very people you were hoping to save....

There’s part of me, I admit, that feels wretched in urging a policy of Cold War containment on the leaders of the Western world. Against the background of so much Ukrainian suffering, the thought of Vladimir Putin’s regime enduring for years — and not just surviving but glorying in slaughter — seems almost intolerable. But what are the alternatives? Appeasement, as recommended by certain so-called realist professors of international relations, strikes me as not merely morally contemptible but stupidly self-defeating. As for NATO intervention, how many Ukrainians would die in even the most limited nuclear exchange? Millions? Tens of millions?

Truman didn’t live to see the success of his policy. In very basic terms, though, containment underpinned the Western world for the next 40 years. The Cold War was a hard slog, involving a lot of false steps as well as some dreadful mistakes. But it worked. That was the important thing. I sometimes read that we should never return to the Cold War. But why not? It was the right thing to do, and the right side won.

And remember: Soviet Communism was a much more formidable adversary than Putinism. The latter offers nothing but a nihilistic celebration of warmongering nationalism, but Communism held out the promise of a better world, illusory as that was. Containment beat it, all the same.

I think it will beat Putin, too, given time. It may take years of unrelenting political, economic and cultural pressure, but we should have no doubt about the outcome. The little man from Missouri has already beaten Lenin and Stalin. Even in death, he can wipe the floor with Vladimir Putin.

Tragically, meanwhile, we watch the carnage in Ukraine, and the astonishing bravery of the Ukrainians under Zelensky, and we hope against hope that they succeed in their historic battle for freedom against barbaric totalitarianism. But maybe we're realistically doing all we can do to help. We just have to wait - while they lose their country, and their lives. It's a desperately grim time.

Comments

[Horace Dunn]

Unfortunately, we are probably unable to win a second cold war. The first time round, the vast majority of people in the western world understood what was at stake (many of them had fought for democracy and freedom, or lost loved ones in the fight for it). This time round that isn’t so. The left-wing media, led robustly by the BBC, relentlessly cheapen western civilisation. The educational system promotes the “maybe it wasn’t perfect but…” view of Soviet communism while focusing only on the mistakes and occasional barbarities of the western world. Generations now have grown up instilled with the view that western democracy = vulgar capitalism = imperialism = enslavement of Africans.

I’ve been encouraged by the way that western governments have acted over the invasion of Ukraine, and by the way that the press have been reporting it. But it won’t be long before that sense of unity starts to erode and gradually the Jeremy Corbyn / university lecturer attitudes will prevail. And even after the odious and unreliable Biden has left the White House, the likelihood is that the USA will continue to elect moral degenerates (to continue in the great Obama – Trump – Biden tradition) to the position of leader of the free world. You’re right to say that the only possible approach is to embark on another cold war. Unfortunately that cold war is already all but lost.

[Mick H]

I don't really share your pessimism. As you say, it's encouraging that western governments have come together over the Ukkraine invasion, and the press reporting's been excellent on the whole. The West seems to have recovered at least some of its mojo. The revulsion at the Russian invasion is pretty well universal. I don't see that changing.

But we'll see...

[Alan]

There is a very powerful and new dimension to this emerging cold war. The Internet, mobile phones, and the spread of information. So far, the free world despite all its contradictory trends, is pushing a strong message, which is getting through to the Russian people (many of whom might be wondering why they can't get a MacDonalds)

Come on Horace, Jeremy Corbyn / university lecturer attitudes will NOT prevail.