Differentiated Containment: U.S. Policy Toward Iran and Iraq

by Zbigniew Brzeziński, Richard W. Murphy

The Council on Foreign Relations sponsored Task Force concluded that only a new course of differentiated containment in the Middle East will provide the United States with a sustainable policy and achieve the long-term goals of ensuring the security of its allies and protecting the flow of oil.

156 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1997

About the author

Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzezinski was a Polish-American political scientist, geostrategist, and statesman who served as United States National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1981. Known for his hawkish foreign policy at a time when the Democratic Party was increasingly dovish, he is a foreign policy realist and considered by some to be the Democrats' response to Republican realist Henry Kissinger.

Major foreign policy events during his term of office included the normalization of relations with the People's Republic of China (and the severing of ties with the Republic of China), the signing of the second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II), the brokering of the Camp David Accords, the transition of Iran to an anti-Western Islamic state, encouraging reform in Eastern Europe, emphasizing human rights in U.S. foreign policy, the arming of the mujaheddin in Afghanistan to fight against the Soviet-friendly Afghan government, increase the probability of Soviet invasion and later entanglement in a Vietnam-style war, and later to counter the Soviet invasion, and the signing of the Torrijos-Carter Treaties relinquishing U.S. control of the Panama Canal after 1999.

He was a professor of American foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and a member of various boards and councils. He appeared frequently as an expert on the PBS program The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.

Reviews

[Joseph Stieb · Rating 2 out of 5]

Fairly disappointing, wonky little book featuring a series of recommendations about how to shore up Iraq and Iran policy. They make a good recommendation for separating Iran and Iraq policy and moving away from dual containment, which wasn't really working. As for the containment of Iraq, they do very little out of the box thinking. They recommend some tweaks to the policy, such as a shift to more targeted sanctions, but don't advise anything that could have ended the impasse. They don't solve the endgame problem that plagued Iraq policy throughout the decade, and they fall into the view that only regime change can bring about any improvement in relations between the US and Iraq. On the other hand, it was refreshing to see them point out that containment, for all its flaws, had served American goals in the region pretty well.

There is literally no reason anyone who isn't researching Iraq policy in the 1990's to read this book.