Brent Scowcroft Center Resident Senior Fellow Robert A. Manning cowrites for The National Interest on how a strategy of containment could help manage China’s rise:
Since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, foreign policy wonks of all stripes have cast about searching for the Silver Bullet: What is the grand strategy to succeed containment? Where is the George Kennan of the Brave New 21st Century world?
The search began early on with the Department Of Defense’s 1992 Defense Planning Guidance which aimed at preventing “the re-emergence of a new rival … in the order posed formerly by the Soviet Union… from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power;” It continue through the 1990s’s with Madeleine Albright’s “indispensable nation.” That nobody has won the Kennan sweepstakes is not an indictment of the Leisure of the Theory Class. Rather, it reflects the extraordinary complexity of a world of increasing disorder and uncertainty, one where threats are many, but none rise to the level of existential threat posed by the USSR (though Putin is not doing a bad imitation).