Critique
of Containment by Walter Lippmann, 1947
.
. . My objection, then, to the policy of containment is not that it seeks to
confront the Soviet power with American power, but that the policy is
misconceived, and must result in a misuse of American power. For as I have
sought to show, it commits this country to a struggle which has for its
objective nothing more substantial than the hope that in ten or fifteen years
the Soviet power will, as the result of long frustration, "break up"
or "mellow." In this prolonged struggle the role of the United States
is, according to Mr. X, to react "at a series of constantly shifting
geographical and political points" to the encroachments of the Soviet
power.
The
policy, therefore, concedes to the Kremlin the strategic initiative as to when,
where and under what local circumstances the issue is to be joined. It compels
the United States to meet the Soviet pressure at these shifting geographical
and political points by using satellite states, puppet governments and agents
which have been subsidized and supported, though their effectiveness is meager
and their reliability uncertain. By forcing us to expend our energies and our
substance upon these dubious and unnatural allies on the perimeter of the
Soviet Union, the effect of the policy is to neglect our natural allies in the
Atlantic community, and to alienate them. . . .
All
the other pressures of the Soviet Union at the "constantly shifting
geographical and political points," which Mr. X is so concerned about - in
the Middle East and in Asia - are, I contend, secondary and subsidiary to the
fact that its armed forces are in the heart of Europe. It is to the Red Army in
Europe, therefore, and not to ideologies, elections, forms of government, to
socialism, to communism, to free enterprise, that a correctly conceived and
soundly planned policy should be directed. . . .
We
may now consider how we are to relate our role in the United Nations to our
policy in the conflict with Russia. Mr. X does not deal with this question. But
the State Department, in its attempt to operate under the Truman Doctrine, has
shown where that doctrine would take us. It would take us to the destruction of
the U.N. . . .
Judging
by the speeches in the Greek affair of the British and the American delegates,
Sir Alexander Cadogan and Mr. Herschel Johnson appear to be acting on
instructions which treat the U.N. as expendable in our conflict with Russia. It
is a great pity. Nothing is being accomplished to win the conflict, to assuage
it, or to settle it. But the U.N., which should be preserved as the last best
hope of mankind that the conflict can be settled and a peace achieved, is being
chewed up. The seed corn is being devoured.
Why?
Because the policy of containment, as Mr. X has exposed it to the world, does
not have as its objective a settlement of the conflict with Russia. It is
therefore implicit in the policy that the U.N. has no future as a universal
society, and that either the U.N. will be cast aside like the League of Nations, or it will be transformed into an anti-Soviet
coalition. In either event the U.N. will have been destroyed. . . .