Noam Chomsky - Turning the Tide U.S. intervention in

The Race to Destruction
4.3 The Containment Doctrine
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
302
While security concerns dominated early postwar thinking, these had
more to do with the Fifth Freedom than with any potential military
threat to the US or its allies. Neither in its near-impregnable Western
Hemisphere fortress nor in Europe nor in other spheres of expanding US
influence did the US adopt a defensive stance, despite conventional
rhetoric about “containment of the Soviet threat” that dominates
scholarship and other commentary. “To a remarkable degree,” John
Lewis Gaddis comments in summarizing his major scholarly study of socalled
“containment” doctrine, “containment has been the product, not
so much of what the Russians have done, or of what has happened
elsewhere in the world, but of internal forces operating within the United
States.” He is referring specifically to variations in the way the policy of
“containment” is pursued, not the persistent regularities, which he
ignores, or the causes for them. Within this narrow framework, he notes
that “What is surprising is the primacy that has been accorded
economic considerations in shaping strategies of containment, to the
exclusion of other considerations,” referring to state economic
management. 50 The same observation holds when we generalize to
broader considerations, including the crucial commitment to the Fifth
Freedom.
In fact, the very term “containment” begs numerous questions and
tends to undercut rational understanding of contemporary history. US
policy is conventionally described in a framework of containment,
détente, and return to containment in response to Soviet transgressions.
The framework of discussion presupposes, as given, that the US stance
is defensive throughout, that the US is not an active agent in world
affairs pursuing its own objectives, but only responds to the acts of evil