Most Western analysts indicate that the state of confrontation and tension in relations with Russia will continue for many years, regardless of the outcome of the war in Ukraine. Even if one succeeds in breaking Russia’s back there, leading to its complete retreat, it will not change the anti-Western attitude in its policy, nor will it lead to the removal of the current elite from power. In this diagnosis (as it was written in one of the analyzes recently), Putin is by no means a problem, but a symptom of the problem. Although Russia’s defeat will destroy its further possible plans to annex Belarus, Transnistria, South Ossetia, or even the western and northern parts of Kazakhstan, it will prevent aggression against the Baltic states or Poland, but it will not suppress its imperial instincts, and it will not cleanse the revanchist and aggressive mentality. In a strategic sense, Russia will not accept defeat, and an internal pro-Western revolution will not take place there. The West should therefore prepare for a long-term confrontation and follow the logic of containing Russia. The doctrine of containment, which the West devised and applied in its time to deal with the expansionism of the USSR, began to be dusted off. The original doctrine of containment of the Cold War era is considered an example of consistency and effectiveness. Let’s recall her story.
(I warn you: today’s post will be bulky and abundant in boring historical descriptions; therefore, I invite the impatient readers to go straight to the final paragraphs, where again contemporary and personal threads will be found).
The doctrine of containment was formulated in 1946 by George Kennan, then the head of the political section of the US Embassy in Moscow. On nineteen pages of dense print, in five portions, he laid out in an encrypted message (Long Telegram) the essence of Soviet foreign policy which was expansion, domination and confrontation with the capitalist West. Kennan suggested that the United States should consolidate the West, put Western Europe under the American protective umbrella, and to repel Soviet expansion. Although the Soviet dispute with America seemed ideological, Kennan described it in classically geopolitical terms. Its gist was that the predatory land power (USSR) was pushing towards the Atlantic, and could only be stopped by the opposing force of the Atlantic naval power. It is undoubtedly a rare case in diplomacy when a relatively low-ranking diplomat formulated the principles of a policy that dozens of Western countries have practiced for decades. Hundreds, if not thousands of young, ambitious foreign policy planners dreamed of following Kennan.
After returning to the US and assuming the position of Chief of the Planning Staff at the State Department, Kennan published the main theses of his telegram in 1947 in the form of an article (under a pseudonym) in Foreign Affairs. The doctrine of containment began to circulate in public space.
But the first leader to publicly establish its framework was Winston Churchill, with his Fulton speech in March 1946, from which the metaphor of the “iron curtain” derived. Churchill called for the unity of Western forces, an alliance between the British Commonwealth and the United States, and European unity.
Time, he argued, was by no means working in favour of the West. Pretending, turning a blind eye, waiting for events to unfold, or practicing appeasement was, according to him, a suicidal strategy. Churchill then wanted a grand bargain with the Soviets in which the Soviets would still have to reckon with the preponderance of the West (based on American nuclear weapons), until it was too late.
The idea of a big deal did not convince the Americans. After Kennan, they assumed that the source of the conflict with the USSR was not the confrontationally defined national interests, but the moral and ideological identity of the Soviet system. It was therefore necessary to play for time and wait for the collapse of the communist system. It was assumed that when it fell into a spiral of crisis, it would collapse on its own and immediately. As a matter of fact, the prophecy turned out to be quite accurate.
However, as long as the Soviets stuck to their system and ideology, negotiations and agreements with them were, in the opinion of the Americans in the late 1940s, pointless.
The first expressive application of containment became the Truman Doctrine. The doctrine (associated with an address to Congress in March 1947) called for American assistance to nations threatened by communist revolts and Soviet pressure. This aid was to be not only moral and political, but economic and military. As stipulated by Truman, hundreds of millions of dollars were soon earmarked for aid to Greece and Turkey. In fact, there was a real civil war in Greece then, in which communist-dominated forces stood up against the royalists and the government. Later, the communist guerrillas assumed impressive size and even established their administration in parts of the country. However, they succumbed to government forces and capitulated in 1949. The war cost the lives of over 50,000 people, and hundreds of thousands were forced to migrate (including to Poland).
In turn, the threat to Turkey came primarily from outside. Before the end of the war, the USSR began to formulate a demand for a revision of the navigation regime in the Black Sea straits regulated by the Montreux Convention. The Turkish authorities feared a military confrontation with the USSR. In 1945, the USSR concentrated a considerable military force in the South Caucasus and was preparing a possible invasion into Turkey.
The thesis that the Cold War broke out because the USSR wanted to go beyond the zone of influence assigned to it in Yalta, and that it tried to include Greece, Turkey and even Iran (delaying the withdrawal of its military units introduced there in during the Second World War) into the area under its control. If, in the days of Yalta, Western leaders hoped that the Soviet expansion would be self-restrained, this would prove their extreme naiveté and ignorance of the ideological dictates governing the behaviour of the Bolsheviks. The USSR emerged from the war, despite enormous losses and evident economic weakness, in a state of total political dizziness over the successes of the war. World War II broke out and ran, perhaps not entirely in accordance with the ideological prophecies of Leninism-Stalinism openly proclaimed in the 1930s, but it confirmed the fundamental thesis that the imperialist world war would expand the influence of socialism (first the capitalists were to inevitably argue and beat each other and bleed, and then the USSR would step in and protect the working class revolution that would take place in war-stricken countries). Even Stalin’s cool and cautious mind did not dampen faith in the inevitable victory of socialism in the world.
The Truman doctrine, unlike Kennan’s original formulas, already had a strong moral message. The confrontation of the West with the East has become a confrontation of the forces of freedom with the forces of enslavement, the forces of law and order with the forces of lawlessness, the forces of tolerance and diversity with the forces of uniformist order.
For the needs of internal consumption, the thesis that America was entering the path of a moral crusade in the interests of all humanity was droned. The purpose of containment was to eradicate the Soviet system as such.
But containment was by design a passive strategy. In essence, it was to maintain the geopolitical status quo pending the final collapse of the Soviet system. The guiding principle was patience. The ultimate goal was to dismantle the Soviet system. There were, however, accusations that the West’s restraint (passivity towards the Soviet pacifications of Berlin in 1953 or Hungary in 1956) only made the Soviets impudent and encouraged them not only to continue their conquests (Cuba), but also to ruthlessly tighten their control over the satellites ( Czechoslovakia in 1968).
Truman’s thesis that containment was a moral doctrine aimed at the collapse of socialism as a system could be questioned. Because the doctrine was abandoned after the collapse of communism in Europe and the collapse of the USSR. But the communist system as such (the dictatorship of the communist party) survived in China, and also in Cuba, Vietnam and North Korea. The West can somehow live with it to this day. Of course, one could believe that after the collapse of the USSR, communism had no chance of surviving in the world. But, although only in the form of an ideological hypostasis for state capitalism, it still persists. Because it is already nothing more than non-expansive and non-exportable communism? But on the other hand, it would be too simplistic to reduce containment solely to a geopolitical doctrine against the USSR.
The 1948 Berlin Crisis was the first test of the effectiveness of Western resistance and a catalyst for the operationalization of the containment doctrine in Europe. When the Soviets closed transport routes to West Berlin, the West rushed through the airlift operation. The aid kept the people of West Berlin in the belief that the West had no intention of withdrawing. According to Kissinger, referring to his conversation with Gromyko at the fall of the USSR, Stalin did not believe that there would be a nuclear war over Berlin. If, during the blockade of Berlin, the Americans tried to force their way into the city with convoys, the Soviet Army would resist them by force, but only locally. Only an attack by the West on the entire German front would require Stalin’s personal decision as to the extent of the Soviet reaction.
And yet, until the mid-1970s, Soviet academics believed that a third war would break out in Berlin. From the mid-seventies on, they were inclined to think, however, that it would happen in the Middle East.
The communist coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948 was proof that Stalin’s doctrine ruled out any systemic compromises in countries militarily controlled by the Soviets. According to it, wherever a Soviet soldier went, a communist system could and was supposed to be built. Undoubtedly, the Czechoslovak coup was the catalyst for the military integration of the West. And historiographers associate it with the beginning of the Cold War.
The consolidation of Western forces resulted in the establishment of the North Atlantic Alliance in 1949. The document NSC 68, developed in April 1950, became a comprehensive interpretation of the policy of containment in American politics. Vital US interests were equated with the moral imperative of fighting communism.
Logically, containment quickly went beyond the political and military dimension. In 1950, the COCOM, i.e. the system of export control to socialist countries, was established, imposing an embargo on the supply of strategically important technologies. Economic containment involved the active use of the MFN clause in trade with the socialist camp and political criteria in the granting of government loans and loan guarantees. The West took up the challenge of the information and ideological war waged by Moscow. In 1949 Radio Free Europe was established.
The doctrine of containment had its critics from the very beginning.
One of the critical schools (Walter Lippmann) argued that containment leads to overextension, psychological and political overload, and strain on American resources. America would inevitably get bogged down in peripheral disputes and conflicts without any strategic importance for America. And America’s many puppets would use containment for their own ends. This critical current of the prophesied Indochina to become a dead end in containment.
Another (Churchillian) school claimed that confrontation should not be overstretched and that a way of getting along with the Soviets should be sought before they became too strong. Excessively prolonged containment would begin to work in favour of the Soviets, as it would give them time to solidify and catch up with the West militarily. Which also happened in the seventies, when unquestionable parity prevailed in strategic armaments.
And the third, most defeatist school (Henry Wallace) postulated that the sphere of Soviet influence should be considered lawful and justified. Questioning what they gained after World War II could be only a source of unnecessary tension. Even the collapse of communism in Europe did not bury this school, and its followers bluntly objected to the process of enlargement of NATO and the European Union to the east.
By replicating the successful Euro-Atlantic pattern, attempts were made to build an integrated front to contain Soviet expansion in Asia Minor and the Middle East (CENTO in 1955) and Southeast Asia (SEATO in 1954).
However, the policy of “Northern Tier”, i.e. building dams on the Asian fringes of the USSR, did not bring the expected results. The Baghdad Pact was born on the initiative of the British, but the internal divisions in the region were stronger than the common perception of the Soviet threat. Pakistan feared India more than the USSR, Syria did not enter the Pact at all, and Iraq cared more about Arab radicalism inside the country than about the external threat.
SEATO was a natural consolidation move in Southeast Asia. Next to the US, there was a CENTO keystone of Pakistan, as well as the Philippines, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, UK, and France. Key regional actors such as India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Burma were missing. They escaped into non-alignment and neutrality. The Geneva Agreements of 1954 made the Indochina states also neutral. There was no coherent vision of threats. SEATO lasted until 1977, but it operated in a moribund state long before that.
The establishment of NATO, CENTO, SEATO brought the principle of containment in political and operational application to building military blocs. With or without blocks, the world was falling apart into two conflicting parts.
The great practical challenge was how to make political use of the West’s evident military superiority in the late 1940s and early 1950s linked to the nuclear monopoly. In time, the forces would equalize and it would become impossible to discount this advantage, as Churchill had predicted. However, the West did not follow the idea of a “grand bargain” postulated in the 1950s, the core of which was Stalin’s proposal to unite Germany on the basis of neutrality. The West waited (and rightly so) for communism to self-prostrate and collapse under its own weight. It made tactical compromises (detente), but did not go for any big deal.
In March 1952, the USSR submitted the so-called peace note on Germany. In the West, this was interpreted as Stalin’s readiness for a comprehensive agreement on Germany, based on the principle of neutrality. It was treated as a real expression of readiness to compromise. And had it been folded four years earlier, perhaps the West would have been ready to negotiate it. But it was too late. It was feared that Stalin’s proposals, if taken seriously, would shatter the unity of the West. Even before his death, Stalin wanted to meet Eisenhower – the president-elect. But at the same time, Stalin was carrying out a new wave of repression in the country. And he was accelerating the rearmament. He was getting ready for a nuclear war.
Was Stalin then concerned with the nuclear conflict in the 1940’s and early 1950’s? In the 1940s, he was reportedly not afraid of the use of nuclear weapons (nor did Mao Tse Tung). He believed that nuclear weapons could only scare the faint of heart. However, the nuclear weapons could not, in his opinion, prejudge the outcome of the war. He did not assume that the US could use nuclear weapons in the Berlin conflict and was not afraid of it at all. It was not until the Korean War, when MacArthur began to publicly call for the use of nuclear weapons that Stalin was said to take into account its strategic importance. According to Beria’s son, the death of Stalin stopped the already advanced preparations of the Soviet troops for a great war in Europe with the use of nuclear weapons.
Kennan called for a confrontation with the Soviets whenever they showed intent to harm the interests of a peaceful world. But the pragmatic application of the doctrine of containment prevailed.
The doctrine of containment found concrete expression in only a few military operations, especially in Korea and Vietnam. US involvement in peripheral conflicts with communism resulted from the so-called the Eisenhower doctrine, or the domino theory, according to which the victory of communism in one country could lead to a chain reaction and the takeover of other countries by the communist camp. It wasn’t just Asia. The origins of the domino theory date back to before the Korean War. US directive NSC-64 of February 1950 recognized Southeast Asia as a key area for regional security. If Indochina fell, it stipulated, Burma and Thailand would also fall. However, the geopolitical dependencies in Asia were misinterpreted. China was considered an extension of the USSR and Vietnam was considered an extension of China. It was necessary to wait for Kissinger to come to break free from these false assumptions.
The US involvement in Korea (1950-1953) defined a certain model of intervention, the so-called intermediate intervention. It was serious enough to bind America and demonstrate its determination, but too weak for American involvement to settle a geopolitical dispute. After the defeat of the French in Vietnam in 1954, this model was transplanted to Southeast Asia. American anti-colonialism had to be connected with the approval of the process of gaining independence by the countries of the region. Decolonization, by removing France from the region, placed all responsibility of the West in protecting the region from communism on the American shoulders. At the same time, however, it was not taken into account that the nationalists taking power from the French, e.g. in South Vietnam, would prove to be little attractive to the country’s inhabitants. They would become dictators who defy the ideals of containment – the defense of democracy, the rule of law, and human rights.
In 1952, another American document (NSC 124/2) formalized the domino theory. The communist seizure of power by Vietnam could spread to all of Indochina, and then to all of Southeast Asia, India, and the Middle East (except Pakistan and Turkey). Even Japan would have to seek an adaptation to communism. And this communist march would undoubtedly have an impact on the situation in Europe. Attempts to erect anti-communist walls in Malaysia or Thailand, as the British had suggested, were not sought.
However, there was no evidence of the global dimension of the Domino Theory.
However, the gains of communism were not always consistently confronted. No attempt was made to prevent the victory of the communists in China in 1949. It was only Taiwan that became in the American policy the limit for communism not to be crossed. The flirting of the Burmese authorities with communist ideas, and even with the Soviets and the Chinese (development aid, personnel training) was tolerated. The excesses of Sukarno in Indonesia were stopped by an internal military coup.
Only Korea and Vietnam remained case studies of active containment in domino theory.
Korea was recognized in 1945 as an area without strategic importance for the United States. But the containment doctrine made US involvement in the Korean Peninsula the test of the credibility of the entire strategy. Thanks to the imprudence of the Soviets, the American operation was mandated by the United Nations, that is, it gained the status of a collective security operation. But this advantage also became a constraint in action. The level of engagement had to be put under the scrutiny an international institution. America could not afford more even in need (for example, the use of nuclear weapons). It also did not know how to reconcile the limited nature of the war with the global challenge of containment (because of Korea move the war to Europe?). The West turned out to be reluctant to escalate, raise the stakes and shift the clash to fields other than the east (both in Europe and Asia). The conflict ended with a “military-political draw”. But it became firmly established in America that Korea was part of a global communist conspiracy. Which resulted in the Eisenhower Doctrine and America’s overstretch, culminating in Vietnam.
Kissinger argued that Stalin did not want war in Europe because of Korea. Others (Beria) argued otherwise then. Yet, the death of Stalin cut short the preparations for the total mobilization of the Soviets for war with the West. This is well documented.
In June 1953, Berliners (encouraged by the death of Stalin and the signals of the post-Stalin thaw) launched an uprising, brutally suppressed with the participation of Soviet tanks.
The Hungarians, emboldened by the Polish October, and perhaps naively inspired by the introduction of Austrian neutrality and the departure of the Soviet troops from there, launched in November 1956 the most serious geopolitical challenge for the Soviets after the war. Crushed, however, ruthlessly with the passivity of the West. And the West was experiencing the most serious rupture of the Cold War era: the Suez crisis. For Great Britain (and France), the intervention was a logical adaptation of the doctrine of containment in the Middle East (because Nasser handed over Egypt to Soviet influence), but for the Americans it was the last run of colonial reflexes. For America, anti-colonialism then became more important in the Middle East than containment. There was an unprecedented fact: in the Security Council, the Americans voted together with the USSR, and against the United Kingdom and France. The Americans gave a clear signal to their allies that they would together defend the West against the Soviets, but the United States would have a separate opinion on colonialism. The loss of colonial lands made Europeans even more aware of their global secondary role and the need to rely on America’s leadership.The grudge remained, however, and one only had to wait for some European allies to use the Suez “betrayal” as an excuse to distance themselves from the US in global skirmishes. They did so during the Vietnam War, in the conflict in the Middle East in 1973, or in the face of the US intervention in Iraq in 2003.
The conclusions of this splitting of the West over the Suez conflict were drawn by Europeans differently.
The British submitted themselves strategically to the Americans. France, on the other hand, deemed it necessary to build a European political and defense identity.
In the Suez conflict, the USSR for the first time declared its readiness to act against the West (Great Britain and France) in defense of Egypt. The Middle East became a potential igniter of the world war. In January 1957, Eisenhower announced his doctrine of economic, political and military support and protection of the Middle East from communist aggression. So the US original intention to separate European containment from other regions resulted in the US assuming sole responsibility in the world for the fate of the fight against the expansion of communism.
The confrontation with the USSR due to the deployment of missiles in Cuba was laid exclusively on the United States shoulders. And Kennedy decided that European allies were no longer needed in negotiations about the future of the world (and of Europe). The bilateral US-Soviet plane became a formula for resolving the world’s strategic problems.
The passivity of the West towards the Hungarian events in 1956, the Czechoslovak events in 1968, and the Polish events in 1981, confirms the thesis that containment excluded liberation, liberalization of enslaved nations. Although it meant the lack of acceptance for Soviet influence in Europe, it assumed the resignation from attempts to push the USSR out of these countries. Admittedly, back in 1952, Dulles tried to make containment more active by supporting liberalization. It brought about an activation of the propaganda work, especially of Radio Free Europe. In 1956, the Hungarians were misled by this, when listening to Radio Free Europe, believed that it expressed Washington’s official views, which would lead to America’s active support for the Hungarian uprising. Nothing like that happened. Admittedly, Dulles announced that any country that leaves the Warsaw Pact, even if it did not convert to democracy, could count on America’s support.
An alternative concept to liberalization would be titoization, i.e. the acceptance of the West to maintain the communist system while breaking these countries out of the orbit of Soviet influence. Paradoxically, after 1956 (drawing conclusions from the effects of Polish October), the Soviets were willing to accept deviations from systemic orthodoxy, but never to break free from geopolitical influences. In the mid-1970s there was even a thesis in American thinking that so strong ties had developed between the USSR and the other socialist states that an attempt to weaken them would be detrimental. The so-called Sonnenfeld doctrine even suggested that the Americans should foster the strengthening of these “organic” intra-camp ties. Both Sonnenfeld and the entire administration denied the existence of such a doctrine. Even if it did exist, it did not last long.
Albania did its own style of titoization by formally leaving the Warsaw Pact in 1968, but the Albanians replaced the Soviet umbrella with the Chinese one. And they did not want American support in their apostasy.
June 1961 brought a crisis caused by the construction of the Berlin Wall. The West had virtually no realistic option for action. It had to passively observe the partitioning of Berlin. 1,500 US troops were symbolically sent to the west of the city. Not enough for the Soviets to be provoked. They simply ignored the American movement. Brandt later argued that his Ostpolitik grew out of deep disenchantment with the US passivity during the construction of the wall.
The détente policy was a status quo policy, because it legitimized the so-called systemic achievements of communism. Even the Americans, not only recognizing the reality of the existence of two German states, encouraged the Germans themselves to abandon the Hallstein doctrine.
The Vietnam War forced a redefinition of American global involvement. It was reflected by the so-called the Nixon doctrine of late 1969. It tried to find a balance between overstretch and abdication. Its assumption was that the United States should honour its treaty obligations and spread a nuclear umbrella over allies whose survival was crucial to US security. In the case of non-nuclear aggression, the United States was to expect the state interested in taking over the main responsibility for providing armed forces adequate for defense.
In the early seventies, under the influence of the Vietnamese defeat, two schools of containment emerged.
The so-called psychiatric school claimed that the fight against communism by the West only strengthens communism. The communists were convinced that the West wanted them to be exterminated. And they were ready to fight for communism as for an existential cause. In these American assessments, hawkish leaders dominated at the top of power in the Eastern bloc. But it was necessary to strengthen those who were more peaceful among them. So it was advised: let the communists do what they want, let them gain new fields. And then they will overload themselves with their own obligations and implode. Nota bene, and that’s what happened. The USSR was overloaded with its intrusion in Afghanistan.
The so-called theological school assumed that there was no point in negotiating with the communists, that they were incapable of compromising. But also in the final conclusion this school advised that one only needed to wait patiently for the system to collapse. It contained no idea for action. There were voices in it that de-Stalinization and Brezhnev reforms had already internally rekindled the system, removed the most oppressive elements, and the system itself, at least in the USSR, enjoyed popular legitimacy. That it made no sense to act. In general, capitalism and socialism were to follow the path of convergence (even Brzeziński fell under the charm of this convergence school).
Thus containment opened the door to détente politics.
The last regional edition of the doctrine of containment, but in a more geopolitical form, was the Carter Doctrine, formulated (by Zbigniew Brzezinski) in January 1980. It proclaimed that the United States was ready to use military force should any outside force attempt to extend its control over the Persian Gulf. It was a response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and was intended to dissuade the Soviets from any political and military escapades in the Persian Gulf. It was criticized as a symptom of an overreaction. But Reagan reaffirmed it by adding American guarantees for Saudi Arabia, which was beginning to be threatened by the Iraqi-Iran conflict. Without the Carter Doctrine, there would probably not be such a support later for Operation Desert Storm.
The vision of a new world order proclaimed by President George Bush in 1990 marked the end of the doctrine of containment. It was to be replaced by the doctrine of active engagement and cooperation with the USSR (and then with Russia).
This course was confirmed by the Clinton team. Containment was replaced by a policy of promotion of values. America’s goal was to expand and strengthen the community of democracy, the rule of law and market economies. For freedom, as proved by the fall of communism, is irrevocably a universal value. And the process of promotion of values was to be both inevitable and peaceful.
Unfortunately, the assumptions of the politics of the nineties turned out to be idealistic. The world at the beginning of the third decade of the twenty-first century turned out to be a world once again split into areas of contradictory values. On the one hand, the old, western camp of liberal democracy and individual freedom. On the other, strongholds of authoritarianism and limitation of rights in China, Russia and other countries. The diagnosis of a new Cold War has emerged. Some even started talking about the beginning of the Third World War.
However, strong resistance persisted to duplicating the patterns of a proven containment strategy against Russia or China. Primarily because the new authoritarianism did not declare any expansive goals. While then communism did so. Neither China nor Russia claimed that the world should copy their political system, system of values, and model of social life. They just wanted that their practices of governance should be recognized as legitimate. They wanted the West to admit that its understanding of democracy and civil liberties cannot have universalist aspirations, does not work everywhere, is not acceptable to other nations, and cannot pretend to be the matrix of civilization progress.
Also in a geopolitical sense, the appetites of Russia and China were limited, in comparison to the global claims of the communist world system of the past. Russia focused its revanchist claims on the subjugation of the post-Soviet space (plus a possible limitrophization of Central Europe). China focuses on its interests in Asia (reunification with Taiwan, the “nine-dash line” around the coast of China, buffering on the Korean peninsula). If both countries were engaged in diplomatic and political struggles with the West in other parts of the world, it was primarily on the basis of the rights of “spoilers” who wanted to gradually exhaust the West by means of the smudging.
And the West was full of inconsistency in its policy. For years, it psychologically resisted the need of the return to the politics of confrontation. It believed that prosperity in China would, with time, evoke thymotic needs in society, aspirations for freedom. It believed that the tangle of economic ties with Russia would prove to be strong enough to make Russia resemble Europe and would tie it there permanently. And when that faith wavered, the West was unable to pursue a coherent policy. And it imposed sanctions on Russia in 2014, but allowed it to play an energy card (Nord stream). And it frowned at China, but trembled for access to the Chinese market and allowed the Chinese to enter strategic areas of Western economies.
Russia’s aggression against Ukraine in 2022 left the West no choice. It had to adopt a line of sharp containment towards Russia. Will it also send a similar signal to China as a precautionary measure?
The doctrine of containment was an absolute doctrine. It was a typical meta-strategy (polistrategy) in the classical sense. It included the purely military sphere (nuclear deterrence and forward deployment of American potential), political and military (creating defense blocs and granting unilateral guarantees by the USA to states threatened by communist invasion, fostering integration of the Western world), ideological (active information policy towards socialist states, supporting freedom tendencies in these countries), economic (control over the export of technology, etc.), diplomatic (supporting the tendency to autonomy in the foreign policy of USSR satellites), aid (supporting the mechanisms of social stabilization in developing countries).
The doctrine of containment had to be a total doctrine because even more total was the doctrine of conduct of the world socialist camp.
In recent years, it is impossible to find an equally comprehensive view of foreign policy. Will the Russian aggression towards Ukraine induce the political, diplomatic and military establishments to undertake a similarily deep reflection? Also in Poland? Will the public opinion in the West be prepared to carry the burden of such strategy?
Several Polish foreign ministers during the times of the Third Polish Republic tried to derive the assumptions of foreign policy from the general vision of the country’s civilization and social development. However, created in expert circles close to the Chancellery of the Prime Minister, the strategies of national development only intuitively combined the aspirations of internal policy with the analysis of external conditions and foreign policy. The syndrome of silo governance in Poland was also manifested in strategic thinking. And during the rule of PiS, strategic schizophrenia reached Himalaya levels. On the one hand, the goals of leveling the income gap separating us from Western countries were declared, and the modernization of the economy based on high technologies, and on the other hand, a foreign policy was pursued which, in its assumptions, politically distanced us from the West, pushed us out of the integration project, and endangered economic ties with the West, and was based on a vision of society filled with retrotopian illusions of the nation’s conservative-Catholic identity (which would help Poland survive the inevitable collapse of European integration and the liberal social model).
Strategic thinking is difficult, especially for politicians, because their time horizon is the present (and their agenda is how hold to power), and strategic documents (strategies, doctrines, directives) are by nature ephemeral. And yet strategic thinking is worth practicing.
I participated in the creation of two Polish national security strategies. Although in the first case my participation had to end even before it really started. In 1999, as the deputy director of the European Security Policy Department, I proposed to the then managing director Jerzy M. Nowak the idea of developing a comprehensive strategy that already reflected our membership in NATO. I even outlined some elements of the document. Nowak immediately ran with this proposal to Minister Geremek, who accepted the initiative. It was, however, already realized by a team led by the then deputy director Robert Kupiecki. I could only support them discreetly and from a distance. In 2000, the first Polish national security strategy was adopted.
When in 2002 I took over the management of the Department of Foreign Policy Strategy, work on the new version of the strategy was already advanced. It was led by professor Roman Kuźniar. He collected considerable scientific material. The direction in which this effort was taken, however, was not entirely in line with the thinking of operational departments, especially the Department of Security Policy. I had to propose a new basis for the work. I took advantage of my stay in New York in early 2003 and a sleepless jet lag night to draft such a project. Surprisingly, it managed quite well in numerous consultations and discussions both within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and with the participation of the Ministry of National Defense, the National Security Bureau and other institutions. It even collected compliments from the then parliamentary opposition. It was undoubtedly written under the influence of the war on terrorism and new global challenges. But we managed to intuitively anticipate the so-called Solana’s strategy. And it was undoubtedly a confirmation of the maturity of our thinking.
During the rule of PIS in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, no more serious strategies emerged. Even the purely paper ones. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has become an official prosthesis to mitigate and neutralize the external effects of the domestic decisions cooked up by the PiS party headquarters in Nowogrodzka.
