U.S. Cold War Containment Strategies: From Flexibility to Détente

Introduction: Containment as U.S. Foreign Policy

During the Cold War, the United States employed a geopolitical strategic foreign policy known as containment. This policy was adopted as part of the country's efforts to prevent the spread of communism in the aftermath of the Second World War, and it was essentially geared toward limiting the power and reach of the Soviet Union. Strategies of containment adopted by the U.S. during the Cold War have been the subject of numerous publications and studies throughout history, presenting different perspectives relating to history, national security, and international relations.

John Lewis Gaddis wrote a book titled Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy During the Cold War. The book provides a critical assessment of the strategies employed by the U.S. during the Cold War and their effectiveness in national security. Through this critical appraisal, Gaddis sought to reinterpret U.S. national security policy during this period based on recent research and new evidence. This paper examines key sections of that book in relation to the geopolitical strategic foreign policy employed by the U.S. since World War II.

Flexible Response: Kennedy's Symmetrical Strategy

Flexible response was a new military strategy that dramatically changed post-war U.S. foreign relations and national security policy. It emerged under John F. Kennedy's administration to replace the massive retaliation strategy adopted by his predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eisenhower's administration focused on portraying international communism as an efficient and ruthless monolith (Lewis, 2005). President Kennedy's incoming administration sought to replace Eisenhower's strategy on the grounds that the National Security Council had become bloated and unwieldy. Kennedy believed that the Eisenhower administration spent too much time creating policy papers on nearly everything, routing them through appropriate bureaucracies, and debating them in lengthy meetings. As a result, the National Security Council had become an obstacle rather than a catalyst for coordinated action. These bureaucratic structures forced actual decisions on major issues to be made independently by Eisenhower in consultation with only a few key advisers.

The adoption of flexible response by Kennedy's administration involved cutting back the National Security Council staff and relying more on direct contacts across different agencies for decision-making. Through these measures, Kennedy sought to downgrade the National Security Council as the primary decision-making body on national security matters, believing this would facilitate the adoption and implementation of the new strategy.

Flexible response remained a critical part of America's foreign relations policy after Lyndon B. Johnson assumed the presidency. While President Johnson had a significantly different personal style, he continued with the new strategy — a continuity that suggests both Kennedy and Johnson viewed it as an effective instrument of containment. Johnson retained most of Kennedy's key advisers, including Rusk, McNamara, Taylor, Bundy, and later Rostow. However, Johnson disagreed with certain aspects of his predecessor's implementation approach. Importantly, both administrations adopted flexible response partly out of fear of embarrassment, humiliation, or appearing weak. While the strategy largely addressed the Soviet threat to Western Europe, neither administration feared communism as much since it was too fragmented, nor China because it was largely impotent, nor the Soviet Union because it was more devoted to détente (Lewis, 2005).

Lewis (2005) notes that by the time flexible response was adopted, U.S. containment strategies had oscillated between symmetrical and asymmetrical concepts. Prior to this strategy, approaches like Eisenhower's massive retaliation were largely asymmetrical — and received criticism for offering inadequate responses to various challenges. President Kennedy's administration therefore created a symmetrical approach known as flexible response. When formulating this strategy, Kennedy was fully aware of the perceived interests and threats facing the country.

As a symmetrical approach, flexible response represented a radical change that aimed to improve deterrence by giving the president flexible nuclear options and increasing conventional capabilities to address a range of military crises. The strategy derives its very name from the flexible nuclear alternatives it offered the president for dealing with such crises. When addressing the public in March 1961, President Kennedy stated that the goal of flexible response was to ensure the sufficiency of U.S. bargaining power as a means of halting the arms race, and to deter both general and limited wars — whether nuclear or conventional. His administration sought to achieve this by persuading all potential attackers that war would not resolve disputes as effectively as diplomacy. The strategy also placed emphasis on lessening dependence on nuclear weapons to deter limited aggression and on enhancing the conventional capabilities of NATO.

However, the strategy was inherently incongruous: it assumed a controlled nuclear war was possible — a relatively unrealistic premise — while simultaneously promoting improved conventional capabilities. A controlled nuclear conflict, combined with stronger conventional forces, was expected to settle disputes, yet the provision of flexible nuclear options to the president undercut the strategy's internal coherence.

Implementing Flexible Response in Vietnam

On one hand, flexible response gave the president flexible nuclear options and focused on improving traditional capabilities; on the other, it sought to promote deterrence by signaling that any potential attack would be futile. The inconsistencies in this approach became starkly evident in its application during the Vietnam War. Vietnam is a particularly instructive case for two major reasons as identified by Lewis (2005). First, U.S. foreign policy in Southeast Asia practically demonstrated all components of this strategy. Second, President Kennedy, President Johnson, and their advisers regarded Vietnam as a fair test of the approach. Therefore, the implementation of flexible response in Vietnam carried serious implications for its application elsewhere.

American leaders were fully aware of the probable difficulties but remained confident in their ability to overcome them. For them, a successful implementation would stand as an indictment of Eisenhower's inability to handle similar problems; any failures, conversely, would indicate the strategy's fundamental ineffectiveness.

The inherent inconsistencies of flexible response came into play during the Vietnam War through its varied outcomes relative to intended objectives. Lewis (2005) identifies several failures: the strategy could not deter future aggression, did not save South Vietnam, failed to improve the credibility of America's global commitments, and did not prevent domestic political recriminations — despite insistence from both administrations that it aligned with the overall direction of national foreign policy.

Lewis (2005) discusses the specific features of flexible response applied in Vietnam. One such feature was calibration, or fine-tuning, through which the U.S. sought to deter aggression without embarrassment by implementing a series of precisely calculated actions — moving military forces in a limited, measured, deliberate, and controlled manner. Several factors contributed to the failure of flexible response in Vietnam: a lack of clarity regarding who or what was being deterred, an inability to control risks posed by potential attackers, and a failure to ensure that applied force would function as a precise and discriminating policy tool.

Lewis (2005) ultimately concludes his assessment of flexible response by characterizing it as a strategic vacuum. The failures in Vietnam exposed the inconsistencies within the policy and highlighted the erroneousness of its underlying assumptions. According to Witteried (n.d.), the basic concepts of flexible response were inconsistent and should be rejected. The strategy failed in Vietnam largely because of its misplaced emphasis on deterrence, and its implementation amounted to an inept overreaction characterized by a lack of coordination. Based on the Vietnam case, flexible response was destined to fail regardless of whether it was applied in a fully conventional war or through a defense-based use of tactical nuclear weapons. A conventional war — the foundation of building traditional capabilities under this strategy — was not feasible in that theater. A tactical nuclear war would be unacceptable to Europeans, as it risked triggering Soviet nuclear retaliation, and the cost of establishing an adequate tactical nuclear defense was unjustified given the low probability of such a conflict. Flexible response was, therefore, a strategy fundamentally doomed to fail during the Cold War, despite its significance as a shift in U.S. foreign policy.

References

Burn, A. E. (2010). From containment to détente: Aspects of American foreign policy under Johnson and Nixon. Australian National University.

Gavin, F. J. (2001). The myth of flexible response: United States strategy in Europe during the 1960s. The International History Review, 23(4), 847–875.

Lewis, J. L. (2005). Strategies of containment: A critical appraisal of American national security policy during the Cold War. Oxford University Press.

Witteried, P. F. (n.d.). A strategy of flexible responses. Retrieved May 3, 2022, from https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA511036.pdf

Zakaria, F. (2010). The Reagan strategy of containment. Political Science Quarterly, 105(3), 373–395.