IN 1947, Walter Lippmann wrote a small book called The Cold War: A Study in U.S. Foreign Policy. Based on a series of newspaper columns, it was hardly an endorsement of American strategy in the U.S.-Soviet rivalry. Lippmann, rather, wrote his volume in response to George Kennan’s “X Article,” published in Foreign Affairs earlier that year, in which Kennan outlined the concept of containment. Lippmann, at the time perhaps America’s most prominent pundit, issued a blistering critique of that concept, calling it a “strategic monstrosity” that would fail at an exorbitant price. Containment, he wrote, “cannot be made to work” and “the attempt to make it work will cause us to squander our substance and our prestige.” One of the first prophets of American defeat in the Cold War was the man who gave that conflict its name.

Today, Kennan’s essay is part of the pantheon of great American papers of state, even though Kennan himself quickly lost faith in his own prescriptions. Lippmann’s rejoinder has been mostly forgotten, except by historians. Yet Lippmann’s critique is worth revisiting, as Washington once again embarks on a contest with an authoritarian competitor.

The fact that America’s most famous columnist trained his fire on what would become America’s most famous strategy reminds us that containment didn’t always look as impressive as it came to appear in hindsight. It illustrates many of the undeniable dangers and tragedies that accompany global rivalry. Not least, understanding what Lippmann ultimately got wrong about America’s prospects in the Cold War illuminates the factors that made the United States such an effective competitor against the Soviet Union—as well as key attributes of good strategy in any long-term rivalry. Lippmann was right that the Cold War would expose America to great evils. He was wrong to think that America could not, or should not, accept them as the price of avoiding even greater ones.

THE COLD War was a book written to refute an essay. In July 1947, Kennan—then head of the State Department’s policy planning staff and one of America’s top Soviet hands—published an anonymous article in Foreign Affairs. The article explained that Washington could not expect cooperation from the Soviet Union because the combination of Russian history and Communist ideology made the Kremlin unappeasably hostile to the capitalist world. The Soviets were not, however, bent on war or a climactic showdown. Joseph Stalin realized that America possessed superior overall power, Kennan wrote; he would back down when met with firm resistance. And while the Soviet Union looked formidable, its power was inherently fragile because of the absurdities of its command economy, the exhaustion of its population, and the inherent instabilities associated with totalitarian rule.

The best course for the United States, then, was a policy of “containment.” By consistently denying Moscow the fruits of expansion, America could shatter the Kremlin’s faith that communism would eventually overtake capitalism and intensify the internal strains on the Soviet system itself. If America held the line for ten to fifteen years, Kennan predicted, it might win a decisive strategic victory by causing the “break-up or gradual mellowing of Soviet power.” Containment could eventually bring about the transformation of the Soviet regime.

Kennan’s anonymity didn’t last long after his article was published. And his arguments quickly came in for challenge, most prominently from Lippmann. Lippmann was no isolationist: he had made the case, during World War II, for a deeply engaged American role in global affairs. He agreed with Kennan that there was little hope “that our conflict with the Soviet government is imaginary or that it can be avoided, or ignored, or easily disposed of.” Yet he believed that the “X Article” offered a dangerous prescription for a geopolitical malady.

For one thing, Lippmann argued that Kennan misjudged the nature of the Cold War. Kennan’s article stressed the ideological roots of the antagonism: Communist dogma led the Soviet regime to expect the unalterable hostility and eventual collapse of the capitalist world. Lippmann, however, saw the conflict in geopolitical terms. Stalin was primarily a Russian imperialist, he argued; the basic problem was that World War II had ended with the Red Army occupying positions deep in Europe. It was to this challenge, “and not to ideologies, elections, forms of government … that a correctly conceived and soundly planned policy should be directed.” If the United States instead embarked on an ideological crusade, he warned, it risked closing off any potential settlement with the Soviets—and taking on the impossible task of making “Jeffersonian Democrats out of the peasants of eastern Europe, the tribal chieftains, the feudal lords, the pashas, and the warlords of the Middle East and Asia.”

Lippmann predicted, moreover, that a policy of containment—of meeting Soviet influence, Kennan had written, at “a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and maneuvers of Soviet policy”—was beyond America’s ability to execute. Containment would force Washington to react to Soviet thrusts, thereby losing all initiative. It would require defending vulnerable positions everywhere, instead of focusing on those that were most valuable or easily held. It would inevitably lead the United States into partnerships with unsavory clients whose allegiance was a source of weakness rather than strength. Containment, wrote Lippmann, would make America the patron of “satellite states, puppet governments and agents which had been subsidized and supported, though their effectiveness is meager and their reliability uncertain.” The strategy would carry Washington onto unfavorable competitive terrain—which would, in turn, make the strategy unsustainable.

Lippmann was also pessimistic about containment for a third reason: he doubted that democracy was suited to long-term rivalry. Protracted competition required great strategic persistence and great operational agility. It required deploying economic, diplomatic, and military resources with surgical precision, while sticking to a difficult task over many years. It demanded, in other words, just those characteristics commonly associated with nimble, purposeful autocracies rather than plodding, inconsistent democracies. “A policy of shifts and maneuvers may be suited to the Soviet system of government,” Lippmann wrote. “It is not suited to the American system of government.”

Lippmann’s final critique took aim at the fundamental premise of containment—that time was on America’s side. The idea that “Soviet power is inherently weak and impermanent,” he explained, was “wishful thinking.” The Soviet Union had, after all, beaten back Adolf Hitler during World War II; it had industrialized at breakneck speed. It was foolish to assume that such a power would ultimately collapse, and even more so to adopt a policy that required ongoing rivalry and tension until that happened. “The policy cannot be made to work unless there are miracles and we get all the breaks,” Lippmann contended. “There is no margin of safety for back luck, bad management, error and the unforeseen.”

Washington’s goal, then, should be not strategic stalemate but diplomatic settlement. The United States should seek a mutual military withdrawal from Europe, which would “redress the balance of power which has been upset by the war.” If Stalin refused, then at least he would have shown his hand. If he agreed, then a long cold war might be averted. “The history of diplomacy is the history of relations among rival powers,” he wrote. “There would be little for diplomats to do if the world consisted of partners, enjoying political intimacy, and responding to common appeals.” Better an imperfect peace than an indefinite struggle America could not win.

LIPPMANN’S ASSESSMENT was harsh, but he was hardly alone in decrying the flaws of containment. The policy of firmly but patiently confronting Soviet power came under fire from all sides during the late 1940s and after. We now think of containment as one of the most brilliant strategies in American history. At the time, it often attracted more criticism than praise.

On the Left, former Vice President Henry Wallace deemed containment a reckless crusade that would only invite a spiral of hostility—“the tougher we get, the tougher the Russians will get”—and argued instead for reassuring Moscow through unilateral concessions. On the Right, old isolationists such as Robert Taft and Herbert Hoover opposed the expanding strategic and military commitments that containment brought with it. Other commentators (including Bertrand Russell and Winston Churchill) shared Lippmann’s view that time was not on America’s side and called for the United States to start World War III while it still possessed an atomic monopoly. Even relatively friendly observers were deeply pessimistic about the future. “If one is honest,” said Robert Oppenheimer in early 1950, “the most probable view of the future is that of war, exploding atomic bombs, death, and the end of most freedom.” Containment, it often seemed, was a strategy that offered only an indefinite, draining standoff in an age of nuclear peril.

Many of the critiques that Lippmann and others offered were cogent enough. Kennan was quite right that Soviet power contained the seeds of its own destruction, but Lippmann saw that this process would take far longer than ten to fifteen years to unfold. In the meantime, containment did often put the United States in a reactive posture, responding to enemy thrusts rather than dictating the pace and direction of the competition. As the conflict spilled into the Third World, Washington would find itself defending weak positions and abhorrent allies at rising costs, while the Soviets—as Lippmann had forecast—weaponized the disorder that followed the breakdown of colonial rule. As the contest went global, it became harder to set limits on Washington’s sprawling—and, periodically, exhausting—involvement in an unruly world. Lippmann was onto something when he worried that containment would tax America financially and deplete it morally.

The Vietnam War in particular seemed to vindicate Lippmann: the effort to hold an untenable position in Southeast Asia imposed horrendous costs on the United States, nearly unraveling its larger strategic position and causing severe unrest at home. Meanwhile, a forty-year arms race required the United States to build an unprecedented peacetime military establishment while enduring repeated crises that threatened to bring on nuclear catastrophe. Containment did prove to be a form of “trench warfare,” requiring a vast investment of resources and leading to many of the perils Lippmann had identified. And if Kennan had initially bridled at Lippmann’s critique, this “architect of containment” quickly lost faith in his own strategy—and began to emulate his erstwhile intellectual opponent in calling for a de-escalation of the Cold War.

In 1948–49, Kennan privately urged the U.S. government to seek a mutual superpower withdrawal from Central Europe, meant to avoid a “congealment” of the strategic faceoff there. As a disillusioned former official in the 1950s, he made the same proposal publicly, in hopes of breaking a bipolar status quo that was becoming all the more dangerous as nuclear arsenals grew. During the 1960s and 1970s, a series of presidents would try to negotiate something along the lines of what Lippmann had recommended—a détente that would reduce tensions, ease the danger of war, and drain the Cold War of its ideological passion.

Yet if Lippmann had looked prescient in the wake of Vietnam, it was ultimately Kennan—the 1947 version, anyway—who proved more prophetic. The Cold War ended not as Lippmann had anticipated, in mutual de-escalation, but as Kennan had initially predicted—in a Soviet mellowing that produced concessions the West had been seeking for decades, and then a Soviet breakup that eliminated the enemy altogether. The Soviet system failed, moreover, due to many of the built-in irrationalities and obstacles to reform that Kennan had identified.

Containment often appeared to be failing up until the moment when it succeeded completely. So why did Lippmann, who got a great deal about the Cold War correct, ultimately get the biggest issues wrong? The answer reveals a great deal about long-term competition and what made the United States, during the postwar era, so capable in waging it.

First, Lippmann made the error of forgetting that the competitive weaknesses of democracies are often more evident—but less damaging—than those of autocracies. A longtime observer of American politics and policy, Lippmann easily spotted the ways in which the perpetual low-grade disorder of the U.S. system might undermine the country’s aptitude for long global rivalry. Yet he missed the fact that the dynamism of the American economy and the legitimacy of American democracy actually equipped the United States well for a geopolitical war of attrition. And he failed to see, as the Sovietologist Kennan had, the deep-seated frailties of the adversary. The fragility of the Soviet growth model, the disillusionment of its people in the empty slogans mouthed by party apparatchiks, and the difficulty of political and intellectual renewal within a vicious yet sclerotic polity were flaws that could be concealed, for a time, by a deliberately opaque system. Yet they would eventually reveal themselves in ways that challenged the Kremlin’s competitiveness and ultimately its survival. The everyday failings of the American system were there for all to see. The more profound debilities of the Soviet system only became evident with time.

Second, American democracy was far better suited to rivalry than Lippmann had appreciated. Yes, electoral politics and separation of powers made American policy less purposeful and more volatile than Lippmann (and Kennan) would have liked. But the Cold War showed that democracies could wield powerful strategic advantages over authoritarian competitors. America’s combination of democratic politics and free-market economics generated a degree of wealth and innovation that a stifling Soviet system could never match. It made the United States better suited to managing alliances—with all the give-and-take that requires—than Communist leaders used to ruling by decree could ever be. Most important, it ensured that the United States had built-in mechanisms for the strategic course-correction—elections and changes of administration—that are vital in any long rivalry. Democracy was, from time to time, a tactical disadvantage, but it was a long-run strategic blessing for the United States.

Third, Lippmann failed to foresee how a successful strategy might combine purpose with flexibility. Containment was never a fixed collection of policies: It was a basic concept that provided direction while permitting flexibility and strategic choice. In the late 1940s, for instance, the Truman administration chose to hold the line in Western Europe, which mattered tremendously to the balance of power, but not in China, which at that point did not. Over the subsequent decades, U.S. leaders would periodically shift the precise mix of tools and policies used to contain Soviet influence—investing more or fewer resources, expanding or contracting America’s obligations, adjusting the role of nuclear weapons in the free world’s defense. And when the Vietnam War showed that containment was becoming unsustainable, the United States shifted to a strategy that involved limiting its liability in Third-World conflicts, using covert action to punish Soviet overextension, and steering the arms race into new, high-tech areas to show that Moscow could not forever survive competition with Washington. This protean nature of containment frustrated Kennan, who saw “his” strategy evolve in ways he neither expected nor desired. But that quality allowed containment to endure and triumph.

Fourth, Lippmann underestimated the extent to which the best American strategies combine ideology and realpolitik. The ideological dimensions of containment were critical: Absent an emphasis on defending American values and a free way of life, U.S. policy never would have commanded sustained public support. Nor would it have been as appealing to America’s most important allies: those countries, particularly in Western Europe, linked to the United States not just by common geopolitical interests but by common political values. Yet the emphasis on democracy versus authoritarianism, capitalism versus communism didn’t prevent American officials from cutting realpolitik deals with communist devils—whether Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito or China’s Mao Zedong—where U.S. interests required. Much less did it prevent them from displaying an extremely flexible morality when it came to fighting communism in the Third World. Ideology was a useful guide to Cold War statecraft; it was rarely a straitjacket.

Fifth, Kennan divined that successful diplomacy would follow, rather than precede, a policy of strength. In part, this was because ideology played a bigger role in Soviet policy than Lippmann admitted: for decades, Soviet leaders really did think socialism was destined to bury capitalism. In part, it was because Kremlin leaders could conceivably see a path to victory in the Cold War into the 1970s. It wasn’t until the cancers of the Communist system began to metastasize, a free world that the United States had protected and nurtured began to leave the Soviet Union behind, and Washington dramatically turned up the pressure on Moscow during the 1980s that a new generation of Kremlin leaders realized that the only way out of the Cold War was to deescalate it on American terms. The superpower struggle did end in a diplomatic settlement of sorts—a negotiated Soviet surrender on nearly all issues of dispute. But that settlement came after, not before, a long period of competition.

These issues related to a final point: that even prolonged, dangerous competition can be a way of avoiding something worse. In focusing on the balance of power, Lippmann miscalculated the balance of evils. Although the columnist was hardly naïve when it came to the nature of the Soviet regime, he focused his critique on the evils that containing that regime would entail—proxy wars, distasteful partnerships, massive expenditures, dangers of war. Many of those problems did materialize, but looking back, it is hard to argue that they were greater than the evils of pursuing a diplomatic settlement that would have provided only the illusion of peace, or of permitting the emergence of a world in which the power of a terrible totalitarian regime was not contained. Containment was indeed a highly unappealing strategy—just not compared to the realistic alternatives.

THERE ARE myriad differences between today’s U.S.-China rivalry and the Cold War. China is as integrated into the global economy as the Soviet Union was isolated from it. Key aspects of the U.S.-China rivalry—the value of possessing vast quantities of digital data and the struggle over the world’s telecommunications networks, to give two examples—lack obvious Cold War parallels. Yet the United States is once again entering into a dangerous, prolonged competition against a potent authoritarian rival, and once again it must define a strategy that will carry it through that trial. Here, the Kennan-Lippmann debate and the subsequent trajectory of containment offer useful insights.

For starters, no one should view the return of great-power competition with enthusiasm. It is tempting to look back on the Cold War as an epochal triumph of American statecraft and a bloodless, glorious victory over a tyrannical rivalry. But it wasn’t for nothing that Lippmann and others were so skeptical of containment. That strategy incurred high costs and extreme dangers over many decades; it led the United States into moral and strategic traps on the global periphery, where the superpower rivalry was rarely glorious or bloodless; it taxed America’s democratic system and periodically empowered profoundly illiberal influences, notably McCarthyism, at home.

Today, the U.S.-China competition is playing out against the backdrop of a world that is far less broken than in 1945. But it would be foolish to think that competition with China—which is stronger than the Soviet Union ever was economically, even if it remains weaker than the Kremlin was, militarily, at its peak—will be dramatically easier or morally cleaner than the Cold War was. Great power rivalry is not the worst of all evils; waging it may be the only way to protect the international system from the predations of aggressive authoritarians. Nevertheless, Lippmann’s warnings about one twilight struggle remind us not to romanticize what such contests entail.

Fortunately, the Kennan-Lippmann debate also reminds us not to deprecate America’s prospects in such a competition. During the Cold War, the United States was ultimately a far sharper competitor than Lippmann and other sophisticated observers gave it credit for. It proved that many of its supposed weaknesses—its democratic politics, free-market economy, and noisy policy debates—were actually among its greatest strengths. It pursued a relatively coherent strategy over two generations. It harnessed the ideological and geopolitical benefits of its democratic values while making necessary concessions to expediency. As a result, the United States often stumbled but never collapsed in a long race against a dangerous rival; an imperfect democracy outperformed an enemy that often seemed to epitomize authoritarian discipline.

There is no guarantee that America can replicate this feat against China, a country more economically and technologically dynamic than the Soviet Union. But neither does it seem wise to bet that a country with all of China’s internal and geopolitical challenges will ultimately be a world-beater. And if America were to surprise some of its own elites with its competitive prowess, it wouldn’t be the first time.

Last, the most successful strategies don’t always look like winners at the time. Containment never received, in the moment, the veneration it has received in hindsight, largely because it seemed to fuse perpetual danger with perpetual indecision. We can now see, however, that containment boasted attributes that counted for a great deal. It blended relative simplicity of concept with considerable flexibility of execution. It was based on a shrewd understanding of what made one’s rival dangerous, as well as what made that rival manageable. It married strategic purpose with strategic patience. Above all, it offered the possibility of avoiding catastrophic retreat as well as catastrophic escalation. Indeed, the fact that containment was assailed by some for being too weak, and by others for being too provocative, might indicate that it got the balance about right. Middle-ground strategies like containment are inherently dissatisfying. But in a long-term rivalry where the costs of war and the costs of appeasement could both be horrific, a strategy that blends strength with sobriety, ambition with equanimity, is the right approach.

Hal Brands is the Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a Bloomberg Opinion Columnist. This essay draws on his forthcoming book, The Twilight Struggle, about the lessons of the Cold War.

Image: Reuters.