Michael Anton: Iran and the Costs of Containment
‘Even as momentum for Iran sanctions grows, containment seems only viable option,” reads a Washington Post headline from April 22. Leaving aside for the moment the dubious character of the first half of that assertion, is it really true that containment is now the “only” option?
It is certainly true that nearly everyone in Washington — from administration officials to the permanent civil service to the foreign-policy establishment — believes that, and has believed it for at least a year, if not longer. The intellectual groundwork was laid long before President Obama came into office, in part as a way of sketching an alternative to an American or Israeli military strike, which seemed a much more likely possibility when the president was named Bush.
In recent days — as one senior administration official after another has either downplayed the significance of an Iranian nuclear weapon or spoken in nigh-apocalyptic terms about the use of military force to prevent one from emerging — it would seem that the triumph of containment as America’s chosen Iran strategy is complete.
The working assumption of containment’s adherents is that it is the low- or lower-cost alternative to tough sanctions or military action. The former are believed to be either impossible to impose (because Russia, China, and other nations won’t go along), undesirable (because sanctions would harm the Iranian people more than the regime and turn popular anger against us), or ineffective (because Tehran is determined to ride out even the most crippling sanctions in pursuit of the bomb). The latter is just dismissed out of hand as the precursor to Armageddon.
But is it really true that containment carries relatively low costs? To answer that, we must first grasp what those costs are likely to be.
It is instructive to begin with a comparison to the lodestar example cited by containment advocates: the decades-long American and allied effort to restrain the expansionist impulses of the Soviet Union. The very term “containment” originated in arguably the most famous foreign-policy essay of all time, George Kennan’s “Sources of Soviet Conduct” [registration required]. Published in Foreign Affairs in 1947, the article outlined a policy that would — short of war — allow America to confront and oppose Soviet aggression.
In order to make containment work, the character of our country had to change in many respects. In 1945, America began its traditional rapid post-conflict demobilization. Defense spending fell from nearly 40 percent of GDP during the war years to 3.5 percent by 1948. The number of men in uniform declined from a high of 11 million to around 1.5 million on the eve of the Korean War. But as the realities of containment sank in, policymakers realized that a repeat of the post-1918 drawdowns and a return to anything like “splendid isolation” would be impossible.
Liberal critics have long fingered the immediate postwar years as the dawn of a sinister “national-security state” in which civil liberties, national resources, and previously cherished priorities were subordinated to the costs of maintaining a permanent domestic and global garrison. This critique is in part facile — isn’t the fundamental question whether what was done was necessary or not? — and in part overblown. But it is not entirely manufactured. America did have to maintain a far larger and more expensive peacetime military than we had ever had before — and with it an unprecedented peacetime draft. Moreover, hundreds of thousands of our troops had to be stationed far from home, in overseas bases partly, or in some cases entirely, financed by American taxpayers. Billions were poured into research and development of cutting-edge weapons systems, with layers of security and secrecy surrounding the labs and manufacturing facilities. We designed and built an enormous, potentially civilization-ending thermonuclear arsenal. For the first time in our history, America established a permanent civilian spy agency.
What did all this cost over the lifetime of the Cold War? The left-wing Center for Defense Information simply added up U.S. defense budgets for those years and arrived at a figure of $17.7 trillion in 2009 dollars. Much of that would have been spent anyway. Then again, other agencies also spent billions of other dollars on Cold War projects. And that is to say nothing of lives lost, effort expended, and other less tangible costs — costs we would not have borne had we not deemed them absolutely necessary.
Nor would we have maintained our nuclear arsenal on hair-trigger alert for more than 40 years. In hindsight it is tempting to look back and see the settled rut that came to be called Mutual Assured Destruction as a policy success. And it was, in that the assurance of destruction never exploded into the reality. But let’s not forget how close we sometimes came — whether from a real crisis such as Berlin or Cuba, or from a fluke like the 1983 glitch in the Soviet early-warning system that registered five (phantom) incoming ICBMs. No one who didn’t have to would choose for his country such a terrifying, razor’s-edge day-to-day existence.
Making matters worse, American officials felt obliged to offer nuclear-security guarantees to foreign countries, in part to keep them in the anti-Soviet alliance, in part to discourage them from developing nuclear arsenals of their own. What this meant in practice was that America had pledged to risk — and potentially lose — dozens of American cities and millions of American lives in order to protect Bonn or Ankara. Such a pledge would have been unthinkable before the Cold War, and, to the limited extent that the American people really understood it, it was deeply unpopular.
And while it is true that the Cold War never erupted into a global conflagration, that’s not to say that it never, ever went hot. Korea and Vietnam are only the most famous Cold War soils onto which American servicemen and civilian personnel shed their blood; their brothers and sisters died in similar or related causes all over the world. And that is to say nothing of the various brush-fire wars in which both sides strained to keep their own people off the front lines but in which U.S. officials nonetheless determined that opposing Soviet proxies through proxies of our own was a necessary pillar of containment. One unforeseen and unintended consequence: deep divisions in American society over the wisdom of such interventions, which rent the fabric of our domestic politics.
Then there were the myriad other ways in which, despite our policy of containment, the Soviets declined to be contained. It suffices to mention two: constant espionage — up to and including political violence — and relentless ideological warfare. The former almost got Pope John Paul II killed in St. Peter’s Square. The latter inspired wholesale slaughter in nations across the globe and undermined the West’s confidence in its beliefs and institutions in ways that reverberate to this day.
More prosaically, the very logistics of containment often got complicated. The aforementioned forward deployed military posture required basing arrangements in more than a dozen countries, each with its own unique interests and a willingness to use its leverage over America because of our desire for basing rights to further those interests. This problem was primarily technical, but it points to a larger diplomatic problem. Maintaining the alliances that sustained containment — not just NATO but also the various bilateral relationships and multilateral arrangements in Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America — required a constant, cat-herding vigilance that dominated Washington’s time and drew its attention away from other issues. Our entire foreign policy had to be subsumed to the requirements of containment, with opportunity costs that are impossible to calculate. Many critics of the Bush administration have levied exactly this charge at its conduct of the War on Terror without realizing (or at least admitting) that it applied in spades to the Cold War and would to any other example of containment in action.
Diplomatically, containment also swept away the last remnants of George Washington’s advice in the Farewell Address to avoid permanent alliances. Containment presumes a boundary. On the other side of that boundary from the contained were the countries that we were pledged to protect, or whose help we needed, or both. As liberal critics of containment were and remain eager to point out, a not inconsiderable number of those countries were ruled by unsavory (or worse) regimes, with which the United States would otherwise have maintained standoffish relations or not have treated at all. The moral and political costs of propping up anti-Communist dictators were also ones that would not have been borne but for the necessity.
Nor did the moral and political costs end there. Containment — remember, its rejected alternative was rollback — conceded to the Soviets not merely the non-Russian possessions of the czarist empire, and not just Stalin’s pre– and post–World War II conquests, but also a large “sphere of influence” in which Washington implicitly allowed Moscow a free hand. Probably there was not much that we materially could have done for the millions suffering under Communist tyranny. But at least we recognized the stakes and regretted the limitations imposed by necessity....