For much of the 20th century, U.S. foreign policy had one pronounced goal: to contain communism. But after 9/11, international terrorist groups presented a fundamentally new kind of threat that pushed the Bush administration to reject America’s previous strategy of containment. “It’s a lot tougher to deter enemies who have no country to defend,” Vice President Dick Cheney explained in August 2003. “And containment is not possible when dictators obtain weapons of mass destruction and are prepared to share them with terrorists, who intend to inflict catastrophic casualties on the United States.

While the logic of “new threat, new foreign policy” seems sound, the United States’ experience with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, human rights controversies in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, and a general rise in anti-American sentiment around the world over the past six years raise questions about this strategy. In light of these military and diplomatic failures, Ian Shapiro, director of the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale, thinks the Bush administration may have abandoned its former strategy too soon. In his latest book, Containment: Rebuilding a Strategy against Global Terror, released in January of this year, Shapiro calls for the Bush administration to revive America’s Cold War foreign policy of containment to combat terrorism.

According to Shapiro, Bush’s policy response to 9/11 was a radical departure from previous American policy because it asserted the United States’ right to act preemptively and unilaterally with military force and initiated an indefinitely long war. Shapiro criticizes this doctrine as unsustainable because it makes excessive demands on monetary and military capacity while draining the legitimacy of American democracy with what he terms “haphazard unilateralism.

Shapiro avoids making ad hominem and superficial attacks and instead gives reasoned and well-supported arguments as to why the current policy does more harm than good. Taking care to stay balanced, he also censures the Democrats for failing to challenge the Bush administration on the principles used to justify war and for not presenting a substantive alternative to Bush’s strategy.

While combating non-state actors with a strategy that traditionally deals specifically with states may seem counterintuitive, Shapiro persuasively argues that transnational terror networks depend on states to fund their training and equipment. Thus, by isolating or “containing” states that support terrorist groups, the U.S. can effectively fight terrorism.

Arguing against claims that containment is obsolete because it targets countries and not rogue organizations, Shapiro cites Al Qaeda’s consistent need for state support and how it falters when it lacks it. When Saudi Arabia withdrew its support, the organization fled to Sudan, where again Saudi Arabia ousted it. Al Qaeda finally settled in Afghanistan but relied on the Taliban’s support. After making it clear that non-state actors cannot survive, let alone prosper, without a state behind them, Shapiro argues it would be much more effective if the U.S. would simply cut them off at the source.

While Shapiro’s argument for containing states that both indirectly and directly support terrorists makes sense in theory, he vaguely glosses over the means by which the U.S. could contain states without being imperialistic. Shapiro suggests a few standard “soft power” punitive measures like economic sanctions, divestment, and international tribunals, accompanied by material support for democratic resistance movements. However, he does not explain why nations would be receptive to these actions, especially without any hard power behind them. This makes Shapiro’s argument for containment much harder to buy. It seems doubtful that such measures alone could curb the widespread international terrorist threat.

Shapiro clearly and convincingly elucidates the general notion that America’s current foreign policy is ill-conceived, but by the end of the book most readers are still skeptical about whether economic sanctions could really stop international terrorist organizations. While containment no doubt has its merits, it would be better employed as part of a general strategy to combat terror, rather than an entire policy. Perhaps Shapiro’s next book can be more holistic, containing a chapter on containment but not looking to containment as a solution in and of itself.

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