The epilogue to this book zooms in on a telling and difficult conversation between two highly influential friends at the transatlantic Anglo-Saxon epicentre of the extraordinary period in the history of the West, Europe, and European integration which this book is about (George Kennan and Isaiah Berlin). In doing so, the epilogue, in a more essayistic way, reconnects to the prologue and reflects upon the conclusion of this book and its deeper meaning for present-day Europe.

In response to events such as the Exodus affair, and to the UN Special Committee support for partition of Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state, American and British diplomatic and military officials met at the Pentagon in early fall 1947. Organized by Loy Henderson and George Kennan in the US State Department, the participants agreed that a “cornerstone” of US policy was to support continued British presence in the Middle East, including in Palestine both to preserve access to Arab oil resources and to prevent expanded Soviet influence in the region. As the participants thought a Jewish state in Palestine would enhance Soviet prospects and harm Western access to Arab oil, they concluded that the Zionist project undermined US national security interests.

The debates of the UN Security Council in the weeks of May and June 1948 illustrated the strong support given to the new state of Israel by the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Ukrainian SSR, a support that was more emphatic than that offered by the United States. American and British truce resolutions tended to push back Israeli advances and diminish Arab defeats. The chapter documents this contrast in the UN statements of Andrei Gromyko (USSR), Vasyl Tarasenko (Ukrainian SSR), Warren Austin (USA), Moshe Shertok and Abba Eban (Israel), and representatives of the Arab Higher Committee and Syria. While Florimond Bonté, a leader of the French Communist Party, extolled Israel’s cause in the French National Assembly, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff continued to associate the new state of Israel with Soviet expansion, and damage to American strategic interests in the Middle East.

This conclusion makes two arguments. First, it contends that containment strategies need sound “theories of change,” which are predictions about how the pressures of containment will compel the target state to change its behavior without the need for war. A robust theory of change is crucial for maintaining both strategic coherence and domestic political support for containment strategies. I explore this point with a comparison of Cold War and Iraqi containment strategies in which I show that the former policy had a robust theory of change while the latter did not. Second, the conclusion argues that US foreign policy-makers, politicians, and intellectuals have long interpreted the ultimate cause of other states' behavior as stemming from the nature of their political regimes. This type of thinking, inherent to certain strains of liberalism, has often pushed the United States to pursue total solutions by seeking to fundamentally change other states' regimes, as it did with Iraq.