USA Today proclaims that GWB is abandoning the policy of containment adopted by Harry Truman in 1947 in favor of a doctrine of preemptive war. Forget for a moment the intellectual gymnastics necessary to compare policies for dealing with a movement for worldwide Communist revolution and for dealing with dispersed terrorist groups. The USA Today gets its facts wrong by saying that containment was a winning policy that brought down the Soviet Union.
Truman's decision to offer aid to Greece and Turkey in 1947 began a containment policy that continued for more than a half-century and prevailed in the Cold War.GWB's policy is more akin to the policy that Reagan adopted to win the Cold War. Containment required that the West resist the efforts of the USSR to foment communist revolution, but once a country had fallen to Soviet agents, then containment required that we pull back and attempt to prevent the fall of further dominos. Thus, we went to war to protect South Korea and South Vietnam from falling, but in each case did not make a real attempt to roll back the gains already made by the Soviets. Reagan abandoned containment and adopted the doctrine of rolling back Soviet gains. He drove the Communists out of Afghanistan, Nicaragua and, most dramatically, Poland. By confronting Communist threats head on, and preemptively aiding anti-communists in Soviet satellite states, he put the Soviets on notice that they would have to fight. Now, Bush is making a similar statement to terrorists and the nations who support them. Bush is adopting a version of the Reagan Doctrine and applying it now to international terrorists. Perhaps this is a change from the previous policy of negotiating with terrorists. And it is a welcome change and war in Iraq should put Iran, Syria and North Korea on notice. There's a new Sheriff in town.
