A DOCTRINE PASSES.(George F. Kennan on containment and Bush's doctrine of preemptive strikes)(Brief Article)(Interview)

For more than fifty years, the security of the world has been kept in fragile balance by an elegant idea, shaped in large part by a man who is a skeptic about big ideas. George F. Kennan, who is now ninety-eight years old, coined the phrase "containment," and with it the doctrine of deterrence designed to keep the world's superpowers poised in a perpetual standoff, relegated to their separate spheres of influence, forced into peace by the threat of a nuclear war too terrible to win.

Kennan, who lives in Princeton, where he has been affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Study for the past half century (he served as Ambassador to the Soviet Union in the fifties and Ambassador to Yugoslavia in the sixties), is still remarkably vital and engaged by current affairs. But his doctrine of containment, in the face of President Bush's new policy of preemptive self-defense, is suddenly endangered. Last week, Kennan, who became famous for the clarity of his dire alarms about Stalin, spoke out for the first time about what he sees as the perils of the interventionist approach to Iraq. Asked his opinion of the new Bush doctrine, Kennan fired off the equivalent of one of his bleak foreign-service cables, choosing each word with the care of an old-school diplomat.

"I deplore doctrines," Kennan said. "They purport to define one's behavior in future situations where it may or may not be suitable." He said that "containment" was merely a word he chose, in a letter in 1946, in answer to a particular situation. "This being the case, I could no more approve of a doctrine of preemption than any other."

As for the Bush Administration's proposed preemptive strike on Iraq, Kennan sees grave peril and little justification. "I could see justification only if the absence of it would involve a major and imminent danger to our own country, or, at worst, to our most intimate and traditional allies. Of this I see no evidence."

If Iraq has cultivated weapons of mass destruction, Kennan argued, the greatest threat would probably be to its neighbors, particularly Israel, rather than to the United States, and so "it would be up to the government of that country to estimate the extent of the danger and to find the most fitting answer to it."

He went on, "The apparently imminent use of American armed forces to drive Saddam Hussein from power, from what I know of our government's state of preparedness for such an involvement, seems ...