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Description of  Why Containment Works: Power, Proliferation, and Preventive War (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs)

Why Containment Works examines the conduct of American foreign policy during and after the Cold War through the lens of applied policy analysis. Wallace J. Thies argues that the Bush Doctrine after 2002 was a theory of victorya coherent strategic view that tells a state how best to transform scarce resources into useful military assets, and how to employ those assets in conflicts. He contrasts prescriptions derived from the Bush Doctrine with an alternative theory of victory, one based on containment and deterrence, which US presidents employed for much of the Cold War period. There are, he suggests, multiple reasons for believing that containment was working well against Saddam Hussein's Iraq after the first Gulf War and that there was no need to invade Iraq in 2003. Read more