Why Containment Can Stop the China Threat

IN 1947, Walter Lippmann wrote a small book called The Cold War: A Study in U.S. Foreign Policy. Based on a series of newspaper columns, it was hardly an endorsement of American strategy in the U.S.-Soviet rivalry. Lippmann, rather, wrote his volume in response to George Kennan’s “X Article,” published in Foreign Affairs earlier that year, in which Kennan outlined the concept of containment. Lippmann, at the time perhaps America’s most prominent pundit, issued a blistering critique of that concept, calling it a “strategic monstrosity” that would fail at an exorbitant price. Containment, he wrote, “cannot be made to work” and “the attempt to make it work will cause us to squander our substance and our prestige.” One of the first prophets of American defeat in the Cold War was the man who gave that conflict its name.