The Containment Solution Today

Kennan argued that these factors of uncertainty, combined with Communist ideology and the Soviet system's internal seeds of decay, meant that the United States could safely engage in a policy of containment. Given the similarities between 1940s Communism and today's Jihadism, such an active containment policy is promising for the war on terror. Barriers should be constructed to stem Fundamentalism's tide. The US disengagement from Africa, for example, has opened the continent to Fundamentalist influence; thus, a return there, with generosity of funding and ideas, could erect barriers against the consolidation of Fundamentalism and may even push it back.

Critics of Kennan and containment contend that the policy cannot deter a force of such power as Communism or Jihadism. However, as the Cold War illustrated, containment is not limited to manning an ideological Maginot Line. Rather, Kennan suggested that the United States influence actions in the Warsaw Bloc via "information activities" and wider engagement with society. He viewed the United States itself as the most powerful tool to dismantle Communism. If it could create an image of strength and power, Communism would appear "quixotic and sterile," as its legitimization required the "palsied decrepitude" of the outside world. The more linkages between the West and the East that could be exploited, the more persuasive the counter-ideological message would become.

A similar strategy has already shown progress in some Jihadist states. An active containment policy in the current war includes supporting Islamic civil society, working with Liberal intellectuals and discontented youth, partnering with moderate regimes, and investing in education. Increasing these connections will further expose Jihadists to Liberalism. Though the lure of the United States is not as unchallenged today as it was in the years after World War II, the soft power of culture and the promotion of Liberal values can undermine Fundamentalism. If the United States and the West can penetrate the Jihadist world and inculcate a belief that there exists a world with more opportunity which need not betray Islam, Jihadism's hold will wane.

Maintaining constant pressure, erecting unassailable obstacles, and adopting Western culture at each point of an attempted breach would increase the strains surrounding Jihadism, promoting tendencies that will lead to its breakup or mellowing. If Jihadism is effectively contained, Kennan's argument for the pragmatism of even blindly ideological groups suggests that the force of extremist groups may diminish.

The Dangers of Selective Pre-emption

Though Kennan's containment succeeded, he greatly underestimated the amount of time it would take to degrade Soviet power. Similar optimism exists in today's war, with many who believe that Western power can quickly dispatch the new enemy. As with the Soviets, this will not be the case, and the West needs to prepare for a lengthy engagement.

Despite the likely duration of the war, containment would certainly be more effective now than during the Cold War. Compared to 1940s Communism, Jihadist states are militarily weaker. Their decline in quality of life is more profound, their susceptibility to Western projections of alternate cultures more advanced, the malcontent of their youth more severe, and their economic vulnerability more acute. The speed at which they wish to move also works against them, since effective barriers will likely increase their frustration more quickly than they did for the comparatively unhurried Communists. Further, a critical difference between today's war and the Cold War is the overwhelming power of the United States and the West. The staggering amount of their absolute and comparative wealth precludes some of containment's most articulate critics, such as Walter Lippman, who argued that universal containment was constrained by limited resources. Even during the Cold War the essentially defensive posture of engaged containment proved within the limits of the United States and Western powers. Now, the West is even more economically powerful and thus clearly unbound by resource limits.

While universal containment in the Cold War mold seems possible, the financial, diplomatic, and security costs of universal pre-emption are likely prohibitive. Thus, pre-emption is necessarily a sporadic choice, a fact that may produce dangerous byproducts. For example, states observing the Bush Administration's application of pre-emption in Iraq and lack of preemptive measures in North Korea may rush to develop more powerful weapons, potentially leading to mass proliferation. Additionally, pre-emption has two unsettling postscripts. First, despite Iraqi jubilation, Jihadists view US forces in Iraq as another round of long-standing Arab humiliation. Pre-emption into the Jihadist world will produce further Arab shame; and humiliated people may be cowed into Liberalism. Pre-emption's second troubling codicil is that it demands conclusion: a new regime must be built to replace the old. The difficulty of doing so may be debilitating and may, via increasing rifts within the West, empower Jihadism. As Kennan saw in the 1940s, "exhibitions of indecision, disunity, and internal disintegration [in the West had] an exhilarating effect on the … Communist movement." If Iraqi pleasure during the standoff over UN Resolution 1441 is a guide, similar displays in recent months have likely had a similar effect on today's Jihadists.

Even in the absence of its costs and uncertainties, pre-emption's proponents are hobbled by the fact that containment has a history of success while pre-emption's record is less assured. Today's consolidating democracies in Eastern Europe demonstrate that containment achieved the Cold War goal: a change in its enemy's ideology. Meanwhile, the forced dissolution of the Taliban, similar in effect to the result of pre-emptive action, has yet to produce a move toward a democratic ethos in Afghanistan. Moreover, pre-emption has long been the tool of the aggressor. Soviet pre-emptive incursions into Budapest and Prague and the Nazi's seizure of Sudetenland are two examples of a strategy which can evidently be modified into one with insidious ends.

Though the containment described by Kennan and practiced during the Cold War was not a policy of rolling back Soviet power, neither was it a policy of appeasement or passivity; and while it disdained conflict, it did not exclude it. Despite its military adventurism, however, containment remained fundamentally defensive and the philosophical structure to which the United States and the West held firm throughout the Cold War. In the end, this "holding the line" was largely credited for Communism's defeat.