Moving Beyond the Bush Doctrine

Flashback to 2004: it’s high election season and not a single Democrat can come up with a tenable solution to the already sinking war in Iraq. (Yeah John Kerry, 40,000 more troops will probably do the job.) Maybe if Ian Shapiro had written “Containment: Rebuilding a Strategy Against Global Terror” a few years earlier, the United States wouldn’t be up to its elbows in dead soldiers without an exit strategy.

“Containment” is both a forceful critique of current foreign policy and a prescriptive response to it. Shapiro, a Yale political science professor, argues in favor of renewing the policies of containment first put forth by George Kennan in his historic “Long Telegram”—though as that might lead you to expect, the book often gets wallowed down in the past.

The bulk of his argument is that the United States should have used this policy from the start of our present conflict, but Shapiro also puts forth a series of open solutions for the future that go beyond such common talking points as “better international relations” and “withdrawal from Iraq” to include a complete refocusing of American foreign policy.

Much of Shapiro’s argument for containment is based on the shortcomings and fallacies inherent in the Bush Doctrine, which he describes as “the Monroe Doctrine on crack.” His systematic argument begins with the “idea vacuum” in post-9/11 political thought caused by both the Democratic Party’s “Third Way” and George W. Bush’s neoconservative policies. After delving into how the Bush Doctrine took hold, Shapiro spends the rest of the book defending the policies of containment.

“The defense of containment,” says Shapiro, “is not that it will always work, but rather that it should always be attempted.” In making this argument, Shapiro meticulously picks apart every aspect of the Bush Doctrine, to show how and why it is ineffective. He compares it to historical precedent, designating six features of the doctrine that are extreme departures from prior American national security policy. He attacks Bush’s hypocrisy by using the president’s own stance in the 2000 elections as a contrast to his present policy. And he weighs the detriment—fiscal, moral, and military—the United States has faced since the institution of the Bush Doctrine.

But the book is much more than one long polemic. Shapiro argues that terrorism can be contained despite the contrast between these small cells and the gigantic Soviet Union for which the policy of containment was developed.

Though he acknowledges that it is impossible to know what would have happened, he makes quite a strong case for how Iraq and terror cells can be contained, and how it would benefit us to have at least tried. Shapiro offers a series of complicated and detailed strategies to confront global terror, including greater investment in human intelligence to methodically track and stop weapons proliferation, and to his credit, he avoids oversimplification and instead offers thorough analyses of individual situations.

His criticisms lack the liberal slant you would expect in such a work. Shapiro lambastes both Democrats and Republicans: Democrats for their lack of a standpoint and Republicans—more specifically neocons—for ignoring tried and true public policy in favor of more imperialist maneuvers.

This book is a good read if you want to find out what America should have done in the recent past, or if you need to strengthen your anti-Bush arguments for the sake of good old-fashioned friendly debate. It’s short, painless, and actually quite interesting, even for one without any knowledge of politics. If only such a clear and thorough analysis existed before the last election.

­—Reviewer Joshua J. Kearney can be reached at kearney@fas.harvard.edu.