Event Summary
Four years ago, the Bush administration concluded that containment as a foreign policy strategy had become obsolete and that pre-emptive, unilateral military action was warranted, even necessary.
Governing Ideas
Event Information
When
Friday, April 13, 2007
10:00 AM to 12:00 PM
Where
Stein Room
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave. NW
Washington, DC
Map
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Yale professor of political science Ian Shapiro disagrees. In his book, Containment: Rebuilding a Strategy against Global Terror (Princeton University Press, 2007), Shapiro argues for containment as a pragmatic idea for dealing with the nation's post September 11 threats and critiques the current policy of military pre-emption.
On April 13, Shapiro joined Daniel Benjamin, Brookings senior fellow and former National Security Council director for counterterrorism, in a discussion of containment policy. Brookings President Strobe Talbott provided the introduction. The discussion is part of the "Governing Ideas" series, moderated by Brookings senior fellow William A. Galston. The series, hosted by Brookings's Governance Studies program, intended to broaden the discussion of governance issues through forums on timely and relevant books on history, culture, legal norms and practices, values and religion. After the program, participants will take audience questions.
Transcript
IAN SHAPIRO: The Democrats have made many powerful critiques of this [the Bush] doctrine, and shown the ways in which it makes unviable assumptions. They've pointed out the enormous incompetence in the lack of post-war planning in Iraq, the lack of exit strategies, the insufficient troops -- and on and on and on.
But almost all of these critiques come down in the end to questions about competence. There has not been a contest of ideas. There hasn't been an alternative put out there, in the wake of 9/11, that Americans could resonate with and think of as something that we could be for, rather than simply being against the Bush Doctrine.
And it's my case in this book on containment that the doctrine of containment, as developed by Kennan in the 1940s, provides important conceptual tools for the challenges that we face into the future to pursue what seems to me the basic goal of national security policy, which should be: the preservation of Americans in their democracy into the future. A secondary goal, I argue in the book, is the preservation of other democracies into the future -- to the extent that it's compatible with the first.
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