Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

And if you look still closer at the scholarship on “containment,” it’s even more intriguing. For example, in another book Gaddis discusses the American military intervention in the Soviet Union right after the Bolshevik Revolution—when we tried to overthrow the new Bolshevik government by force—and he says that was defensive and that was containment: our invasion of the Russian land mass. And remember, I’m not talking about some right-wing historian; this is the major, most respected, liberal diplomatic historian, the dean of the field: he says the military intervention by 13 Western nations in the Soviet Union in 1918 was a “defensive” act. And why was it defensive? Well, there’s a sense in which he’s right. He says it was “defensive” because the Bolsheviks had declared a challenge to the existing order throughout the West, they had offered a challenge to Western capitalism—and naturally we had to defend ourselves. And the only way we could defend ourselves was by sending troops to Russia, so that’s a “defensive” invasion, that’s “defense.”