Is Containment Moral?

D.F. Fleming
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D.F. Fleming: Vanderbilt University

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1965, vol. 362, issue 1, 18-27

Abstract: The Dulles idea that nonalignment in the Cold War is immoral voiced the view that all the world must choose between the pure white of our cold-war crusade and the total evil of Soviet communism. This absolutist doctrine failed to convince any nonaligned people and had to be abandoned. Even our allies condemned its rigidity. However, its propa gation and failure inevitably raised the issue of the morality of our containment policy. Was it moral to go to the other side of the earth to build many-sided hostile walls around the two largest peoples in the world; to deplete our own economy and society dangerously by nearly a trillion dollars of cold-war military expenditures, while verging upon international finan cial bankruptcy; to proscribe all revolutions in the world, lest they turn Communist, and ally ourselves with socially oppres sive and obsolete groups everywhere; to ignore the mounting evidence of social evolution and achievement in Communist lands; to maneuver the Congress into giving four blank checks for world war; and to violate both the United Nations and Or ganization of American States (OAS) charters as well as the oldest rules of international law? Is it moral, also, to force corrupt governments on the people of South Vietnam and to inch toward a nuclear war on China, in order to maintain our selves in the trap of deep involvement around China's frontiers? Will the acute dangers created by our encirclement rings, to those living in the rings and to those outside, boomerang upon us? Will President Johnson's proclamation of Pax Americana end in an involuntary Fortress America?

Date: 1965
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DOI: 10.1177/000271626536200103

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