51. Containment and territorial transnational actors: Israel, Hezbollah and Hamas
- Author:
- Amnon Aran
- Publication Date:
- 07-2012
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Institution:
- Chatham House
- Abstract:
- Containment is the term generally used to characterize American policy towards the USSR after the Second World War, when it consisted of a series of attempts to deal with the power and position won by the USSR in order to reshape postwar international order. Containment, as originally articulated by its chief architect, George F. Kennan, was always contested, for example because it did not clarify whether Soviet behaviour had strictly national or ideological roots, and would result in the USSR's having the initiative about where and when to act. Nonetheless, throughout the Cold War it remained US policy, partly because of the failure in 1953-4 of the alternative, 'liberation' and 'rollback'. Although containment changed and sometimes seemed to have broken down, for example in the Vietnam War, the imprint of Kennan's ideas—perhaps more than anyone else's—endured. After 1989 it seemed that containment had no place in the peaceful multilateral environment which seemed to be emerging; however, it proved adaptable to a range of post-Cold War situations, including some which appear to have little in common with the context and goals of containment's original formulation: among these are the challenges posed to US national security by the so-called rogue states.
- Topic:
- Cold War
- Political Geography:
- United States, Israel, and Soviet Union