Customer Reviews

Containment: Rebuilding a Strategy against Global Terror

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Shapiro presents a rational, concise, and morally consistent alternative to Bush's foreign doctrine of aggression and the Democrat's barren response. Supported by illustrations of former foreign policy successes and blunders, his proposal to rekindle the Cold War strategy of containment to fit a post 9-11 environment is apt and well worth consideration. Moreover, his prose, sprinkled with wit and metaphors ("Triangulation's centrol flaw is that it is good tactics but bad strategy. In the short run it can deliver as promised, but as soon as your opponent realizes what you are doing, politics becomes about shifting the goalposts."), turns what could be a dry subject into an engaging read.

I was very disappointed by this book. When I saw the cover, I thought that this would lay out an reasonable alternative to our present foreign policy based upon the containment policies of the Cold War. I became even more excited when the introduction promised just that. When I was finished with the book, though, I felt like I had read Part 1, and someone had torn our Part 2 from the end of the book. A huge let down.
Shapiro rightly blames Democrats for not coming up with a well-thought-out foreign policy alternative to the Bush administration. He says that "you cannot fight something with nothing." But unfortunately Shapiro's "something" consists of little more than a bulleted list on the first page of the final chapter.
In fairness to Shapiro, he does offer a very well reasoned argument for why the Bush administration's foreign policy is misguided on a very fundamental level. And he does often show how the general theory of containment would oppose these policies, but he never shows what concrete Containment-based policies he would recommend.
Most maddingly, he never even defines what we are supposed to be containing. There is obviously no clear country (like the USSR) to contain. He say that we are not fighting against Terrorism, because terrorism will always exist and many terrorist groups are not attacking the USA. True, but he also criticizes those who want to fight against radical Islamists, saying they are provoking a "war of civilizations" against Islam. So who exactly are we containing?
Shapiro criticizes our cooperation with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan because they are authoritarian, even though our Cold War containment policies worked with many authoritarian regimes. It is difficult for me to believe that we can have any kind of containment policy in the Middle East without at least some cooperation with authoritarian regimes. So how do we decide who is our friend and who is our enemy? Shapiro offers little.
Some day someone will develop a true Containment policy against the Global Jihadist Insurgency based upon the successful policies of the Cold War but updated to a different region, different time and different enemy. That would be an interesting book! Unfortunately, Shapiro decided not to write that book.

I was very disappointed with this book and would have given it one star were i not such a big fan of the containment doctrine. I wanted to give this book 5 starts, but unfortunately it falls very short. The shame here is that Shapiro has a fantastic thesis; applying the doctrine of containment to fight terrorism is a wonderful idea. Unfortunately, he does a terrible job of developing his thesis. And terrible is being complementary. This book is so poorly focused it is laughable. And its only 131 pages! My graduate thesis was longer. It is hard to be so poorly focused in such a short book. He probably really only has about fifty pages of real content in this book. Shapiro repeatedly drifts into tangents on Iraq, and while I agree Iraq is an unfortunate situation, he fails to make this really relevant and it makes the book smack of politicization and detracts from the few, dispersed good points he makes. The book is a quintessential definition of what can be wrong with academia. He develops a thesis, applies absolutely no sort of structured analysis to it whatsoever, and fails to explain how to actually go about implementing this policy. He never explains how he would actually go about implementing this. If he were to walk into to the NSC with this material he would get laughed out of the room because he makes no effort to bridge theory and practice. His lack of structured analysis is really frightening for someone who teaches at Yale. He makes some really dubious analytic leaps, has tremendous logic gaps throughout the book, and supports his theories with rants and claims, not evidence. In summary, great concept, poorly executed.