The Future of Containment: America's Options for Depending Its Interests on the Soviet Periphery

This report addresses the U.S. strategy for defending our interests in the security of countries on the periphery of the Soviet Union. Since World War II, the protection of those U.S. interests have been the primary motivation for this countrys national security policies, the major source of the adversarial relation between the United States and the Soviet Union, and a primary determinant of our military posture. Yet much of the U.S. discussion on strategy and on possible conflict with the Soviet Union has had a strongly bipolar focus. That is, there is a tendency to assume that in a war with the Soviet Union the United States would be engaged only with the Soviet Union and vice versa or at least, implicitly, that the role of other countries would be relatively unimportant. This bipolar paradigm fits few contingencies and not the ones arguably most likely to occur. More likely, these are conflicts on the periphery of the Soviet Union, or ones in the Third World into which the Soviet Union and the United States could get drawn. In such cases, regional factors would necessarily be prominent and probably predominant, and most of the military forces engaged are likely to be ones from the area in contention.