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A Thought Experiment on Iran: Why not try diplomacy
Monday, February 20, 2012 – Political Potpourri by Luke Montgomery
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KLONDIKE, TX, February 20, 2012 – The fixation that the conservative movement in particular and the US government in general has with Iran raises important questions about US foreign policy and our understanding of the Middle East. More importantly, this obsession suggests something is out of balance. We are not nearly so consumed with North Korea, a rogue state with nuclear weapons.
Perhaps thinking people should be asking why. In a world ruled by thirty-second sound bites, too many of us seem to believe that there are tidy, succinct solutions to thorny problems. The facts rarely bear this out, which is why we must first examine what the ‘Iranian problem’ is. This requires that we understand the Iranian mind.
First of all, in some ways, the Iranian problem is an ‘Aryan’ problem – and no I’m not saying they are neo-Nazis, but they are a proud Indo-European people with a rich and glorious past. They have ruled that part of the world through various empires for over 2500 years. That is not the sort of legacy that dissipates with the morning dew in the bright dawn of the 21st century.
This rich heritage gives the nation vision and purpose. It makes them dream of grandeur and yearn for respect – the same respect they enjoyed until the late 18th century. They were respected not only for their military might but because they possessed an advanced civilization, with centers of learning, trade, craftsmanship, literature and art.
They were a major power-broker in the Middle East, and they were the primary reason the Sunni Ottoman Empire was prevented from expanding further east. To ignore how the country views itself in the light of its past achievements is like starting calculus without basic arithmetic.
It is a critical part of the equation and must be thoroughly understood if we are to get inside the Iranian mind.
Another important part of culture is religion. In 651 AD, when the country had been devastated by a 100-year war with the Byzantine Empire, their nationwas invaded by Arabs driven by a religious fervor to spread the new religion of Islam. The Iranians were defeated and, over time, most of them abandoned their Zoroastrian religion and converted to Islam, but even in this matter they have retained a significant national identity as they refused to accept the Sunni teachings. The Iranians are Shiites, whereas ninety percent of the world’s Muslim’s are Sunnis.
Historically, the Shiites have faced severe persecution from their “fellow” Muslims, much like the Orthodox or Protestants were persecuted by the Catholics. Rivers of blood were shed as this religious conflict morphed into military campaigns and war.
For centuries, the Iranians have been a ‘persecuted’ Shiite minority in a sea of Sunnis. This is the second key to understanding their national psychology. They are not only ethnically different from the nations around them – Arab and Turkic tribes – but they follow a different religion.
Finally, we must consider their relations with other states in the modern era. Early on, Iran’s natural resources, primarily petroleum, drew the attention of competing foreign powers. Russia, Great Britain and, to a lesser degree, the United States, all competed for influence andpower.
When, in 1953, the democratically elected president of Iran, Mosaddegh, moved to take greater control over the nation’s natural resources, the CIA orchestrated a coup to overthrow him at the behest of British Petroleum. The president was replaced by the Shah, a very oppressive ruler.
What lesson did Iran learn from this? If you try to exercise your right to self-determination through a democratically elected government, Western powers will bring you to your knees. The Iranians have never forgotten this. They felt, and justifiably so, that their rights and national sovereignty had been trampled underfoot. Indeed, would Americans be willing to quickly forgive and trust any foreign government if it had overthrown Jefferson and restored the King of England as our sovereign lord?
This is the proper context for viewing the events of 1979, when the Iranians overthrew their ‘King George.’ They stormed the American Embassy for revenge, to send a signal that they would not tolerate Western interference in their affairs. Unfortunately, Western support for the brutal Shah drove even modern Iranians into the arms of the mullahs led by Khomeini as he was the only one who had the courage to lead opposition to the Shah. In no insignificant way, the West was responsible for this development.
If we had supported government ‘of the people, by the people and for the people’ instead of playing the hypocrite, the Iranian people would have almost certainly been less radical and would have integrated into the community of nations more fully.
The West’s determination to have black gold on its own terms, even when it belongs to others, will always make enemies. To make matters worse, in an effort to oppose the radical mullahs, we supported Saddam Hussein’s war against Iran in the 80s, thus confirming the suspicions of the Iranian people that the West was their enemy.
With these three simple and uncontested facts as a backdrop, let us ask a series of questions.
Number One: Is Iranian support for the Palestinians and the Lebanese through Hezbollah logical in this context? The answer, unfortunately, is yes. The West demonstrated that it could not be trusted to exercise good faith unless the Iranians were willing to be subservient vassals, something a nation with such a proud heritage would never accept. The expansionist intentions of first imperial Russia and then the Soviet Union were always a clear threat. The Sunni nations surrounding them have historically been their enemies. Their list of allies grows thin.
Enter ostentatious support for the Palestinians coupled with opposition to Israel and the West, and suddenly they have millions of Muslims in the Middle East joining their fan club.
They needed friends and attempted to win them by helping those who had a grievance with the West, namely the Palestinians and Shiite Lebanese, and by developing relations with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. One can hardly blame them for this.
Number Two: Is it illogical for the Iranians to desire a nuclear weapon? Absolutely not! See number one above. They have no natural allies and recent history has only served to emphasize their vulnerability. After all, they couldn’t prevent a coup by a foreign government on their own soil just half a century ago, or a spate of assassinations directed against nuclear scientists and chemists in recent years.
Add to this the fact that no nuclear power has ever been attacked by another nation state, and it is suddenly very logical for them to desire this deterrent. (Remember this is a thought experiment.
The Iranians deny claims that they are pursuing a nuclear weapon. They are voluntary signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act, which Pakistan, India, North Korea and Israel have refused to join. Each of these countries, like Iran, has a short list of allies or significant perceived threats to national security).
Number Three: Even if it were to pursue nuclear weapons, would a nuclear Iran pose a threat to Israel or world peace? Highly unlikely. Pakistan is a nuclear power and one of the most radical Sunni states in the world. They supported the Taliban and appear to have aided Bin Laden.
Yet, they have not launched an attack on Israel or any other country. Why?
For the same reason that the US and the USSR never did: MADD (Mutually Assured Destruction). North Korea was ruled by an unstable, aggressive and deranged leader, yet they never used their nuclear weapons either. Israel is said to have several hundred nuclear bombs, enough to wipe out every Muslim country in the Middle East. Why would Iran attack Israel when it knows it would be totally annihilated?
Americans are very familiar with Iran’s opposition to the state of Israel. This anti-Semitic rhetoric coming from Ahmadinejad is probably sincere. But it could be just rhetoric used to curry favor with countries and peoples in the region.
So, let’s look for evidence beyond the rhetoric. Are the Iranian people anti-Semitic? Most Westerners believe they are and yet, surprisingly, the second largest Jewish community in the Middle East after Israel is found in Iran, where Jews have been treated much better than they are in the Arab countries.
In fact, the Iranian parliament reserves one seat for a Jew. Could it be that Iran mostly uses the ‘Israel’ issue to garner support in their corner of the globe from aggrieved Sunnis?
In spite of all this, I knew there are still some people who insist that Iran is mad enough to ignore MADD and that their religiously motivated leaders have some apocalyptic vision of the Mahdi’s return, which would spur them to use the bomb if they had it. Are these claims to be taken seriously? Perhaps, the Iranian leaders are crazy enough to try something like that, or maybe they are just blustering buffoons.
I don’t know how anyone could be sure. What is clear though, is that our current approach of imposing sanctions when other sovereign nations disagree with us has a dismal record of success. When has it ever worked? Cuba? North Korea? Syria? Iran? But then, therapy is for quitters, right?
Over the last twenty years, there have been numerous oppressive Middle Eastern regimes with human rights records just as dismal as that of Iran, e.g. Saudi Arabia, but they have been treated with respect. They have been cuddled and human rights abuses have been swept under the rug while every abuse by Iran makes headline news here in the West.
An objective and thoughtful person must wonder why.
Consider this: the Arab Sunnis hate and fear the Shiites, the Sunnis control most of the oil in the Middle East and wield far more “diplomatic” clout in the world than the Iranians ever could, due to their vast holdings of US Treasuries and willingness to grant the US military bases on their soil. Could this be the reason?
Is it not strange that US policy regarding Iran lines up exactly with the interests of the corrupt and intolerant Sunni regimes in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf? Would anybody be surprised if the Sunnis were conspiring with the West against their ancient Shiite rivals?
This is, in fact, the unspoken truth of the Middle East. Last week, Leon Panetta made yet another announcement that Israel was months away from striking Iran. These announcements have been trotted out with surprisingly regularity over the last several years. Psychological warfare?
Then we have the constant talk about sanctions, US military options still being on the table, etc. etc. The rhetoric seems to be very two-sided.
If we talked to the Soviets and the Chinese during the Cold War, why is talking with the Iranians such a bad idea? Obama promised to do that very thing, so how did this vision get sidelined? What happened to his promise of foreign policy based on dialogue, free trade, and mutual respect?
Disclaimer: I am not a friend of Ahmadinejad, did not receive compensation of any kind from groups associated with the Iranian regime in return for writing this article, have no vested interest in companies doing business with Iran, am not shorting the stocks of US defense companies, and I believe that Israel has a right to self-determination and statehood in the land of her forefathers as well as the right to protect itself against all enemies foreign and domestic.
Above all, I love America, which is why I want us to return a foreign policy that is statesman-like instead of one that makes us look like a school-yard bully.
Luke Montgomery is an author (A Deceit to Die For) and researcher who lived in the Middle East for over a decade. He holds an MA in Linguistics, speaks fluent Turkish and writes on foreign policy, religion and culture. You can view his work at www.freedombunker.com and www.lukemontgomery.net or follow on Twitter at LukeM_author
This article is the copywritten property of the writer and Communities @ WashingtonTimes.com. Written permission must be obtained before reprint in online or print media.
REPRINTING TWTC CONTENT WITHOUT PERMISSION AND/OR PAYMENT IS THEFT AND PUNISHABLE BY LAW.
Perhaps thinking people should be asking why. In a world ruled by thirty-second sound bites, too many of us seem to believe that there are tidy, succinct solutions to thorny problems. The facts rarely bear this out, which is why we must first examine what the ‘Iranian problem’ is. This requires that we understand the Iranian mind.
First of all, in some ways, the Iranian problem is an ‘Aryan’ problem – and no I’m not saying they are neo-Nazis, but they are a proud Indo-European people with a rich and glorious past. They have ruled that part of the world through various empires for over 2500 years. That is not the sort of legacy that dissipates with the morning dew in the bright dawn of the 21st century.
This rich heritage gives the nation vision and purpose. It makes them dream of grandeur and yearn for respect – the same respect they enjoyed until the late 18th century. They were respected not only for their military might but because they possessed an advanced civilization, with centers of learning, trade, craftsmanship, literature and art.
They were a major power-broker in the Middle East, and they were the primary reason the Sunni Ottoman Empire was prevented from expanding further east. To ignore how the country views itself in the light of its past achievements is like starting calculus without basic arithmetic.
It is a critical part of the equation and must be thoroughly understood if we are to get inside the Iranian mind.
Another important part of culture is religion. In 651 AD, when the country had been devastated by a 100-year war with the Byzantine Empire, their nationwas invaded by Arabs driven by a religious fervor to spread the new religion of Islam. The Iranians were defeated and, over time, most of them abandoned their Zoroastrian religion and converted to Islam, but even in this matter they have retained a significant national identity as they refused to accept the Sunni teachings. The Iranians are Shiites, whereas ninety percent of the world’s Muslim’s are Sunnis.
Historically, the Shiites have faced severe persecution from their “fellow” Muslims, much like the Orthodox or Protestants were persecuted by the Catholics. Rivers of blood were shed as this religious conflict morphed into military campaigns and war.
For centuries, the Iranians have been a ‘persecuted’ Shiite minority in a sea of Sunnis. This is the second key to understanding their national psychology. They are not only ethnically different from the nations around them – Arab and Turkic tribes – but they follow a different religion.
Finally, we must consider their relations with other states in the modern era. Early on, Iran’s natural resources, primarily petroleum, drew the attention of competing foreign powers. Russia, Great Britain and, to a lesser degree, the United States, all competed for influence andpower.
When, in 1953, the democratically elected president of Iran, Mosaddegh, moved to take greater control over the nation’s natural resources, the CIA orchestrated a coup to overthrow him at the behest of British Petroleum. The president was replaced by the Shah, a very oppressive ruler.
What lesson did Iran learn from this? If you try to exercise your right to self-determination through a democratically elected government, Western powers will bring you to your knees. The Iranians have never forgotten this. They felt, and justifiably so, that their rights and national sovereignty had been trampled underfoot. Indeed, would Americans be willing to quickly forgive and trust any foreign government if it had overthrown Jefferson and restored the King of England as our sovereign lord?
This is the proper context for viewing the events of 1979, when the Iranians overthrew their ‘King George.’ They stormed the American Embassy for revenge, to send a signal that they would not tolerate Western interference in their affairs. Unfortunately, Western support for the brutal Shah drove even modern Iranians into the arms of the mullahs led by Khomeini as he was the only one who had the courage to lead opposition to the Shah. In no insignificant way, the West was responsible for this development.
If we had supported government ‘of the people, by the people and for the people’ instead of playing the hypocrite, the Iranian people would have almost certainly been less radical and would have integrated into the community of nations more fully.
The West’s determination to have black gold on its own terms, even when it belongs to others, will always make enemies. To make matters worse, in an effort to oppose the radical mullahs, we supported Saddam Hussein’s war against Iran in the 80s, thus confirming the suspicions of the Iranian people that the West was their enemy.
With these three simple and uncontested facts as a backdrop, let us ask a series of questions.
Number One: Is Iranian support for the Palestinians and the Lebanese through Hezbollah logical in this context? The answer, unfortunately, is yes. The West demonstrated that it could not be trusted to exercise good faith unless the Iranians were willing to be subservient vassals, something a nation with such a proud heritage would never accept. The expansionist intentions of first imperial Russia and then the Soviet Union were always a clear threat. The Sunni nations surrounding them have historically been their enemies. Their list of allies grows thin.
Enter ostentatious support for the Palestinians coupled with opposition to Israel and the West, and suddenly they have millions of Muslims in the Middle East joining their fan club.
They needed friends and attempted to win them by helping those who had a grievance with the West, namely the Palestinians and Shiite Lebanese, and by developing relations with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. One can hardly blame them for this.
Number Two: Is it illogical for the Iranians to desire a nuclear weapon? Absolutely not! See number one above. They have no natural allies and recent history has only served to emphasize their vulnerability. After all, they couldn’t prevent a coup by a foreign government on their own soil just half a century ago, or a spate of assassinations directed against nuclear scientists and chemists in recent years.
Add to this the fact that no nuclear power has ever been attacked by another nation state, and it is suddenly very logical for them to desire this deterrent. (Remember this is a thought experiment.
The Iranians deny claims that they are pursuing a nuclear weapon. They are voluntary signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act, which Pakistan, India, North Korea and Israel have refused to join. Each of these countries, like Iran, has a short list of allies or significant perceived threats to national security).
Number Three: Even if it were to pursue nuclear weapons, would a nuclear Iran pose a threat to Israel or world peace? Highly unlikely. Pakistan is a nuclear power and one of the most radical Sunni states in the world. They supported the Taliban and appear to have aided Bin Laden.
Yet, they have not launched an attack on Israel or any other country. Why?
For the same reason that the US and the USSR never did: MADD (Mutually Assured Destruction). North Korea was ruled by an unstable, aggressive and deranged leader, yet they never used their nuclear weapons either. Israel is said to have several hundred nuclear bombs, enough to wipe out every Muslim country in the Middle East. Why would Iran attack Israel when it knows it would be totally annihilated?
Americans are very familiar with Iran’s opposition to the state of Israel. This anti-Semitic rhetoric coming from Ahmadinejad is probably sincere. But it could be just rhetoric used to curry favor with countries and peoples in the region.
So, let’s look for evidence beyond the rhetoric. Are the Iranian people anti-Semitic? Most Westerners believe they are and yet, surprisingly, the second largest Jewish community in the Middle East after Israel is found in Iran, where Jews have been treated much better than they are in the Arab countries.
In fact, the Iranian parliament reserves one seat for a Jew. Could it be that Iran mostly uses the ‘Israel’ issue to garner support in their corner of the globe from aggrieved Sunnis?
In spite of all this, I knew there are still some people who insist that Iran is mad enough to ignore MADD and that their religiously motivated leaders have some apocalyptic vision of the Mahdi’s return, which would spur them to use the bomb if they had it. Are these claims to be taken seriously? Perhaps, the Iranian leaders are crazy enough to try something like that, or maybe they are just blustering buffoons.
I don’t know how anyone could be sure. What is clear though, is that our current approach of imposing sanctions when other sovereign nations disagree with us has a dismal record of success. When has it ever worked? Cuba? North Korea? Syria? Iran? But then, therapy is for quitters, right?
Over the last twenty years, there have been numerous oppressive Middle Eastern regimes with human rights records just as dismal as that of Iran, e.g. Saudi Arabia, but they have been treated with respect. They have been cuddled and human rights abuses have been swept under the rug while every abuse by Iran makes headline news here in the West.
An objective and thoughtful person must wonder why.
Consider this: the Arab Sunnis hate and fear the Shiites, the Sunnis control most of the oil in the Middle East and wield far more “diplomatic” clout in the world than the Iranians ever could, due to their vast holdings of US Treasuries and willingness to grant the US military bases on their soil. Could this be the reason?
Is it not strange that US policy regarding Iran lines up exactly with the interests of the corrupt and intolerant Sunni regimes in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf? Would anybody be surprised if the Sunnis were conspiring with the West against their ancient Shiite rivals?
This is, in fact, the unspoken truth of the Middle East. Last week, Leon Panetta made yet another announcement that Israel was months away from striking Iran. These announcements have been trotted out with surprisingly regularity over the last several years. Psychological warfare?
Then we have the constant talk about sanctions, US military options still being on the table, etc. etc. The rhetoric seems to be very two-sided.
If we talked to the Soviets and the Chinese during the Cold War, why is talking with the Iranians such a bad idea? Obama promised to do that very thing, so how did this vision get sidelined? What happened to his promise of foreign policy based on dialogue, free trade, and mutual respect?
Disclaimer: I am not a friend of Ahmadinejad, did not receive compensation of any kind from groups associated with the Iranian regime in return for writing this article, have no vested interest in companies doing business with Iran, am not shorting the stocks of US defense companies, and I believe that Israel has a right to self-determination and statehood in the land of her forefathers as well as the right to protect itself against all enemies foreign and domestic.
Above all, I love America, which is why I want us to return a foreign policy that is statesman-like instead of one that makes us look like a school-yard bully.
Luke Montgomery is an author (A Deceit to Die For) and researcher who lived in the Middle East for over a decade. He holds an MA in Linguistics, speaks fluent Turkish and writes on foreign policy, religion and culture. You can view his work at www.freedombunker.com and www.lukemontgomery.net or follow on Twitter at LukeM_author
This article is the copywritten property of the writer and Communities @ WashingtonTimes.com. Written permission must be obtained before reprint in online or print media.
REPRINTING TWTC CONTENT WITHOUT PERMISSION AND/OR PAYMENT IS THEFT AND PUNISHABLE BY LAW.
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Policy-makers wrestling with foreign policy decisions that will have very long-lasting repercussions often turn to experts to inform them of the likely outcomes.
Through the lens of the current international dilemma over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, foreign policy historian (and former SALT speaker) Francis Gavin offers his thoughts on the relationship between policy-makers and experts in an article for Foreign Policy written with James B. Steinberg.
Crafting policy requires a certain amount of implicit prediction about the future, which is – to put it lightly – notoriously difficult to do right:
International politics in theory and practice… and some other stuff
Kennan at Tempelhof airport, in Berlin, in 1952, en route to Moscow. Five months later, he was declared persona non grata by Stalin.
Diplomat, grand strategist, historian, memoirist, cultural critic, antiwar activist: George F. Kennan assumed myriad roles throughout his long and storied life. Best known as a pivotal player in Cold War politics, this remarkable figure came, in Henry Kissinger’s words, “as close to authoring the diplomatic doctrine of his era as any diplomat in our history.” Drawing on extensive interviews with Kennan and exclusive access to his archives, an eminent scholar of the Cold War delivers a revelatory biography of its troubled mastermind.
In the late 1940s, Kennan wrote two documents, the “Long Telegram” and the “X Article,” which set forward the strategy of containment that would define U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union for the next four decades. This achievement alone would qualify him as the most influential American diplomat of the Cold War era. But he was also an architect of the Marshall Plan, and a prize-winning historian, who would become one of the most outspoken critics of American diplomacy, politics and culture during the last half of the 20th century.
Historian John Lewis Gaddis began this magisterial history almost 30 years ago, interviewing Kennan frequently and gaining complete access to his voluminous diaries and other personal papers. So frank and detailed were these materials that Kennan and Gaddis agreed that the book would not appear until after Kennan’s death. It was well worth the wait: the journals give this book a breathtaking candor and intimacy that match its century-long sweep.
We see Kennan’s insecurity as a Midwesterner among elites at Princeton, his budding dissatisfaction with authority and the status quo, his struggles with depression, his gift for satire, and his sharp insights on the policies and people he encountered. Kennan turned these sharp analytical gifts upon himself, even to the point of regularly recording dreams. The result is a remarkably revealing view of how this greatest of Cold War strategists came to doubt his strategy—and always doubted himself.
Kennan exhibited the rare ability to reassess his positions, and he became disillusioned with the policy of containment as it took on a more militaristic stance under the Truman administration. By the mid-1970s, he began to view the United States, not the Soviet Union, as the greatest threat to international stability. But his forward-looking vision—that the Soviet Union would eventually defeat itself—was eventually realized with the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1991. Ultimately, as Gaddis contends, “Kennan’s strategy…was more robust than his own faith in it.”
This is a landmark work of history and biography that reveals the vast influence and rich inner landscape of a life that both mirrored and shaped the century it spanned.
One of the best researched books I have ever read. Author certainly “brings out” Kenan’s remarkable,even poetic, writing ability. Author poses contradictions in Kenan’s personality: an absolute genius and a gentleman, yet one tormented by a pessimistic outlook for the world.
Reviewer: David W
07L
13307201202ADFL
In the late 1940s, his writings inspired the Truman Doctrine and the U.S. foreign policy of “containing” the Soviet Union, thrusting him into a lifelong role as a leading authority on the Cold War. His “Long Telegram“[1] from Moscow in 1946 and the subsequent 1947 article “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” argued that the Soviet regime was inherently expansionist and that its influence had to be “contained” in areas of vital strategic importance to the United States. These texts quickly emerged as foundation texts of the Cold War, expressing the Truman administration‘s new anti-Soviet Union policy. Kennan also played a leading role in the development of definitive Cold War programs and institutions, notably the Marshall Plan.
Soon after his concepts had become US policy, Kennan began to criticize the foreign policies that he had seemingly helped launch. Subsequently, prior to the end of 1948, Kennan was confident the state of affairs in Western Europe had developed to the point where positive dialogue could commence with the Soviet Union. His proposals were discounted by the Truman administration and Kennan’s influence was marginalized, particularly after Dean Acheson was appointed Secretary of State in 1949. Soon thereafter, U.S. Cold War strategy assumed a more assertive and militaristic quality, causing Kennan to lament over what he believed was as an aberration of his previous assessments.
In 1950, Kennan left the Department of State, except for two brief ambassadorial stints in Moscow and Yugoslavia and became a leading realist critic of U.S. foreign policy. He continued to be a leading thinker in international affairs as a faculty member of the Institute for Advanced Study from 1956 until his death at age 101 in March 2005.
In 1929, Kennan began his program on history, politics, culture and the Russian language at the University of Berlin‘s Oriental Institute. In doing so, he would follow in the footsteps of his grandfather’s younger cousin, George Kennan (explorer), who had been a leading 19th-century expert on Imperial Russia and author of Siberia and the Exile System, a well-received 1891 account of the Czarist prison system.[6] During the course of his diplomatic career, Kennan would master a number of other languages, including German, French, Polish, Czech, Portuguese, and Norwegian.[5]
In 1931, Kennan was stationed at the legation in Riga, Latvia, where, as Third Secretary, he worked on Soviet economic affairs. From his post, Kennan “grew to mature interest in Russian affairs”.[7] When the U.S. opened diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union in 1933 following the election of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Kennan accompanied U.S. ambassador William C. Bullitt to Moscow. By the mid-1930s, Kennan was among the core of professionally-trained Russian experts on the staff of the U.S. embassy in Moscow, along with Charles E. Bohlen, and Loy W. Henderson. These officials had been influenced by the long-time head of the State Department’s division of East European Affairs, Robert F. Kelley.[8] They believed that there was little basis for cooperation with the Soviet Union, even against potential adversaries.[9] Meanwhile, Kennan closely followed Stalin’s Great Purge, which would profoundly affect his outlook on the internal dynamics of the Soviet regime for the rest of his life.[7]
Kennan found himself in strong disagreement with Joseph E. Davies, Bullitt’s successor as Ambassador to the Soviet Union, who was indifferent to the Great Purge and other aspects of Stalin’s rule. Kennan carried no sway over Davies’ decisions, and the ambassador even suggested that Kennan be transferred out of Moscow for “his health”.[7] Kennan again contemplated resigning from the service, but instead decided to accept the Russian desk at State Department in Washington.[10] By September 1938, Kennan had been reassigned to a post at the legation in Prague. Following the fall of the Czechoslovak Republic to Nazi Germany at the outbreak of World War II, Kennan was assigned to Berlin. There, he supported the U.S.’s Lend-Lease policy, but warned against displaying any notion of American support for the Soviet Union, which he considered to be an unfit ally. He was interned in Germany for six months after the United States had entered the war in December 1941.[11]
In September 1942, Kennan was assigned as a counselor in Lisbon, where he begrudgingly took on an administrative role handling intelligence and base operations. In January 1944, he was sent to London, where he served as counselor of the U.S. delegation to the European Advisory Commission, which worked to prepare Allied policy in Europe. There, Kennan even grew more disenchanted with the State Department, which he believed was ignoring his qualifications as a trained specialist. However, within months of entering the post, he was appointed deputy chief of the U.S. mission in Moscow, upon request by W. Averell Harriman, the Ambassador to the Soviet Union.[12]
Kennan served as deputy head of the U.S. mission in Moscow until April 1946. Near the end of that term, the Treasury Department requested that the State Department explain recent Soviet behavior, such as its disinclination to support the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.[5] Kennan responded on February 22, 1946 by sending a lengthy 5,500-word telegram (sometimes cited as being over 8,000 words) from Moscow to Secretary of State James Byrnes outlining a new strategy on how to handle diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union.[1] At the “bottom of the Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs is the traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity”. Following the Russian Revolution, this sense of insecurity became mixed with communist ideology and “Oriental secretiveness and conspiracy”.[14]
Soviet behavior on the international stage depended chiefly on the internal necessities of Joseph Stalin‘s regime; according to Kennan, Stalin needed a hostile world in order to legitimize his autocratic rule. Stalin thus used Marxism-Leninism as a “justification for [the Soviet Union's] instinctive fear of the outside world, for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not dare not to inflict, for sacrifice they felt bound to demand… Today they cannot dispense with it. It is the fig leaf of their moral and intellectual respectability.”[14]
The solution was to strengthen Western institutions in order to render them invulnerable to the Soviet challenge, while awaiting the mellowing of the Soviet regime.[15]
His new policy of containment was that Soviet pressure had to “be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points.” [16]
This dispatch brought Kennan to the attention of Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, a leading advocate among Truman’s inner circle of a hard-line approach to relations with the Soviets, the United States’ former wartime ally. Forrestal helped bring him back to Washington, where Kennan served as the first deputy for foreign affairs at the National War College and then strongly influenced his decision to publish the “X” article.[5][17]
The goal of his policy was to withdraw all the US forces from Europe. “The settlement reached would give the Kremlin sufficient reassurance against the establishment of regimes in Eastern Europe hostile to the Soviet Union, tempering the degree of control over that area that the Soviet leaders felt it necessary to exercise.[18]
Meanwhile, in March 1947, Truman appeared before Congress and used Kennan’s warnings in the “long telegram” as the basis of what became known as the Truman Doctrine. “I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures”.[19]
Kennan in 1947
Kennan further argued that the United States would have to undertake this containment alone but if it could do so without undermining its own economic health and political stability, the Soviet party structure would undergo a period of immense strain eventually resulting in “either the break-up or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power”.[22]
The publication of the “X” article soon triggered one of the more intense debates of the Cold War. Walter Lippmann, a leading U.S. journalist and commentator on international affairs, strongly criticized the “X” article.[23] Lippmann argued that Kennan’s strategy of containment was “a strategic monstrosity” that could “be implemented only by recruiting, subsidizing and supporting a heterogeneous array of satellites, clients, dependents and puppets”.[24] Lippmann argued that diplomacy was the key towards improving relations with the Soviets; he suggested that the US withdraw its forces from Europe and reunify and demilitarize Germany.[25] Meanwhile, word soon leaked out that “X” was indeed Kennan. This information gave the “X” article the status of an official document expressing the Truman administration’s new policy toward Moscow.[26]
Kennan had not intended the “X” article as a prescription for policy.[27] For the rest of his life, Kennan continued to reiterate that the article did not imply an automatic commitment to resist Soviet ‘expansionism’ wherever it occurred, with little distinction of primary and secondary interests. The article did not make it clear that Kennan favored employing political and economic rather than military methods as the chief agent of containment.[28] “My thoughts about containment” said Kennan in a 1996 interview to CNN, “were of course distorted by the people who understood it and pursued it exclusively as a military concept; and I think that that, as much as any other cause, led to [the] 40 years of unnecessary, fearfully expensive and disoriented process of the Cold War.”[29]
In addition, the administration made few attempts to explain the distinction between Soviet influence and the international Communist movement to the U.S. public. “In part, this failure reflected the belief of many in Washington”, writes historian John Lewis Gaddis, “that only the prospect of an undifferentiated global threat could shake Americans out of their isolationist tendencies that remained latent among them”.[30]
In a PBS television interview with David Gergen in 1996, Kennan again reiterated that he did not regard the Soviets as primarily a military threat. “They were not like Hitler“, noted Kennan. In Kennan’s view, this misunderstanding:
As an intellectual architect of the Marshall Plan, Kennan helped launch the pillar of economic and political containment of the Soviet Union. Although Kennan regarded the Soviet Union as too weak to risk war, he nonetheless considered it an enemy capable of expanding into Western Europe through subversion, given the popular support for Moscow-controlled Communist parties in Western Europe, which remained demoralized by the devastation of the Second World War. To counter this potential source of Soviet influence, Kennan’s solution was to direct economic aid and covert political help to Japan and Western Europe to revive Western governments and prop up international capitalism; by doing so the U.S. would help to rebuild the balance of power. In June 1948, Kennan proposed covert support of left-wing parties not oriented toward Moscow and to labor unions in Western Europe in order to engineer a rift between Moscow and working class movements in Western Europe.[37]
As the U.S. was launching the Marshall Plan, Kennan and the Truman administration hoped that the Soviet Union’s rejection of Marshall aid would place strains on its relations with its Communist allies in Eastern Europe.[37] Kennan was proposing a series of efforts to exploit the schism between Moscow and Josip Broz Tito‘s Yugoslavia. Kennan proposed conducting covert action in the Balkans aimed at further eroding Moscow’s influence.[38]
The administration’s new vigorously anti-Soviet policy also became evident when, at Kennan’s suggestion, the U.S. changed its long-standing hostility to Francisco Franco‘s fascist regime in Spain in order to secure U.S. influence in the Mediterranean. Kennan had observed in 1947 that the Truman Doctrine implied a new view of Franco. His suggestion heralded the turn in U.S.-Spanish relations, which ended in close military cooperation after 1950.[39]
This policy was written as NSC-68, a classified report issued by the United States National Security Council in April 1950 and written by Paul Nitze, Kennan’s successor as Director of Policy Planning.[42] Kennan and Charles Bohlen another State Department expert on Russia, fought over the wording of NSC-68, which emerged as the blueprint for waging the Cold War.[43] Kennan rejected the idea that Stalin had a grand design for world conquest implicit in Nitze’s report and argued that he actually feared overextending Russian power. Kennan even argued that NSC-68 should not have been drafted at all, as it would make U.S. policies too rigid, simplistic and militaristic. Acheson overruled Kennan and Bohlen, backing up the view of the Soviet menace in NSC-68.[44]
Kennan opposed the building of the hydrogen bomb and the rearmament of Germany, which were policies backed up by the assumptions of NSC-68.[45][46] During the Korean War (which began when North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950), when rumors started circulating in the State Department that plans were being made to advance beyond the 38th parallel into North Korea, a move that Kennan considered highly dangerous, he engaged in intense arguments with Assistant Secretary of State for the Far East Dean Rusk, who apparently supported Acheson’s goal to forcibly unite the Koreas.[47]
Kennan lost influence with Acheson, who in any case relied much less on his staff than Marshall had. Kennan resigned as director of policy planning in December 1949 but stayed in the department as counselor until June 1950.[48] Acheson replaced Kennan with Nitze in January 1950, who was far more comfortable with the calculus of military power. Afterwards, Kennan accepted an appointment as Visitor to the Institute for Advanced Study from fellow moderate Robert Oppenheimer, Director of the Institute.[49]
Despite his influence, Kennan was never really comfortable in government. He always regarded himself as an outsider and had little patience with critics. W. Averell Harriman, the U.S. ambassador in Moscow when Kennan was deputy between 1944 and 1946, remarked that Kennan was “a man who understood Russia but not the United States”.[50]
At the time U.S.-Soviet tensions had moved beyond the point at which diplomacy could play a significant role. In many measures (to Kennan’s consternation) the priorities of the administration focused more on solidifying alignments against the Soviets than negotiating differences with them.[51] In his memoirs, Kennan recalled, “So far as I could see, we were expecting to be able to gain our objectives… without making any concessions though, only ‘if we were really all-powerful, and could hope to get away with it’. I very much doubted that this was the case.”[52]
At Moscow, Kennan found the atmosphere even more regimented than on his previous trips, with police guards following him everywhere, discouraging contact with Soviet citizens.[53] At the time, Soviet propaganda charged the U.S. with preparing for war, which Kennan did not wholly dismiss. “I began to ask myself whether… we had not contributed… by the overmilitarization of our policies and statements… to a belief in Moscow that it was war we were after, that we had settled for its inevitability, that it was only a matter of time before we would unleash it.”[54]
In September 1952, Kennan made a misstatement that cost him his ambassadorship. In an answer to a question at a press conference, Kennan compared his conditions at the ambassador’s residence in Moscow to those he had encountered while interned in Berlin during the first few months of the Second World War. While his statement was not unfounded, the Soviets took it as an implied analogy with Nazi Germany. The Soviets then declared Kennan persona non grata and refused to allow him to re-enter the Soviet Union. Kennan acknowledged in retrospect that it was a “foolish thing for me to have said.”[55]
By lending his prestige to Kennan’s position, the president tacitly signaled his intention to formulate the strategy of his administration within the framework of its predecessor’s, despite the misgivings of some within the Republican Party.[59] The critical difference between the Truman and Eisenhower approaches to containment had to do with Eisenhower’s concerns that the U.S. could not indefinitely afford high military spending.[60] The new president thus sought to minimize costs not by acting whenever and wherever the Soviets acted (a strategy designed to avoid risk) but rather whenever and wherever the U.S. could afford to act.
Kennan was tasked with trying to strengthen Yugoslavia’s stance against the Soviets and to encourage other states in the Eastern Bloc to pursue autonomy from the Soviets. Kennan found his ambassadorship in Belgrade to be much improved from his experiences in Moscow a decade earlier. He commented, “I was favored in being surrounded with a group of exceptionally able and loyal assistants, whose abilities I myself admired, whose judgment I valued, and whose attitude toward myself was at all times … enthusiastically cooperative. … Who was I to complain?”[62] Kennan found the Yugoslav government treated the American diplomats politely and warmly, a sharp contrast from the way in which he was treated in Moscow. He wrote that the Yugoslavs “considered me, rightly or wrongly, a distinguished person in the US, and they were pleased that someone whose name they had heard before was being sent to Belgrade.”[63]
Kennan found it difficult to conduct his job in Belgrade. President Josip Broz Tito and his foreign minister Koča Popović began to suspect that Kennedy would embrace an anti-Yugoslav policy during his term. Tito and Popović saw Kennedy’s decision to observe Captive Nations Week as an indication that the U.S. would support anti-communist liberation efforts in Yugoslavia. Tito also believed that the CIA and the Pentagon were the true directors of American foreign policy. Kennan attempted to restore Tito’s confidence in the American foreign policy establishment but his efforts were compromised by a series of diplomatic blunders and crimes, the Bay of Pigs Invasion and the U-2 spy incident.[63]
Relations between Yugoslavia and the United States quickly began to break down. In September 1961, Tito held a conference of nonaligned nations, where he delivered speeches that the U.S. government interpreted as being pro-Soviet. According to historian David Mayers, Kennan argued that Tito’s perceived pro-Soviet position was in fact a ploy to “buttress Khrushchev’s position within the Politburo against hardliners opposed to improving relations with the West and against China, which was pushing for a major Soviet-US showdown.” This position also earned Tito “credit in the Kremlin to be drawn upon against future Chinese attacks on his communist credentials.”[64] While politicians and government officials expressed growing concern over Yugoslavia’s relationship with the Soviet Union, Kennan believed that the country had an “anomalous position in the Cold War that objectively suited US purposes”.[65] Kennan also believed that within a few years, Yugoslavia’s example would lead states in the Eastern bloc to demand more social and economic autonomy from the Soviets.[65]
By 1962, Congress had passed legislation to deny financial aid grants to Yugoslavia, to withdraw the sale of spare parts for Yugoslav warplanes and to revoke the country’s most favored nation status. Kennan strongly protested the legislation, arguing that it would only result in a straining of relations between Yugoslavia and the U.S.[66] Kennan came to Washington in the summer of 1962 to lobby against the legislation but was unable to elicit a change from Congress. President Kennedy supported Kennan in private but remained noncommittal in public, as he did not want to jeopardize his slim majority support in Congress on a potentially contentious issue.[66] With the outlook of U.S.–Yugoslav relations getting progressively worse, Kennan tendered his resignation as ambassador in late July 1963.[67]
After the end of his brief ambassadorial post in Yugoslavia in 1963, Kennan spent the rest of his life in academe, becoming a leading realist critic of U.S. foreign policy.[48] Having spent 18 months as a scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study between 1950 and 1952, Kennan permanently joined the faculty of the Institute’s School of Historical Studies in 1956.[68] During his career there, Kennan wrote seventeen books and scores of articles on international relations. He won the Pulitzer Prize for history, the National Book Award, the Bancroft Prize and the Francis Parkman Prize for Russia Leaves the War, published in 1956.[50] He again won a Pulitzer and a National Book Award in 1968 for Memoirs, 1925–1950.[69] A second volume, taking his reminiscences up to 1963 was published in 1972. Among his other works were American Diplomacy 1900–1950, Sketches from a Life, published in 1989 and Around the Cragged Hill in 1993.[70]
His properly historical works amount to a six-volume account of the relations between Russia and the West from 1875 to his own time; the period from 1894 to 1914 was planned but not completed. He was chiefly concerned with:
In his historical writings and memoirs, Kennan laments in great detail the failings of democratic foreign policymakers and those of the United States in particular. According to Kennan, when American policymakers suddenly confronted the Cold War, they had inherited little more than rationale and rhetoric “utopian in expectations, legalistic in concept, moralistic in [the] demand it seemed to place on others, and self-righteous in the degree of high-mindedness and rectitude… to ourselves”.[72] The source of the problem is the force of public opinion, a force that is inevitably unstable, unserious, subjective, emotional, and simplistic. Kennan has insisted that the U.S. public can only be united behind a foreign policy goal on the “primitive level of slogans and jingoistic ideological inspiration”.[73]
Containment in 1967, when he published the first volume of his memoirs, involved something other than the use of military “counterforce”. He was never pleased that the policy he influenced was associated with the arms build-up of the Cold War. In his memoirs, Kennan argued that containment did not demand a militarized U.S. foreign policy. “Counterforce” implied the political and economic defense of Western Europe against the disruptive effect of the war on European society.[74] Exhausted by war, the Soviet Union posed no serious military threat to the United States or its allies at the beginning of the Cold War but rather an ideological and political rival.[75]
In the 1960s, Kennan criticized U.S. involvement in Vietnam, arguing that the United States had little vital interest in the region.[76] In Kennan’s view, the Soviet Union, Britain, Germany, Japan and North America remained the arenas of vital U.S. interests. In the 1970s and 1980s, he emerged as a leading critic of the renewed arms race as détente was scrapped.[77]
In 1989 President George H. W. Bush awarded Kennan the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. Yet, he remained a realist critic of recent U.S. presidents, urging the U.S. government to “withdraw from its public advocacy of democracy and human rights”. “This whole tendency to see ourselves as the center of political enlightenment and as teachers to a great part of the rest of the world strikes me as unthought-through, vainglorious and undesirable”, he said in an interview with the New York Review of Books in 1999. “I would like to see our government gradually withdraw from its public advocacy of democracy and human rights. I submit that governments should deal with other governments as such, and should avoid unnecessary involvement, particularly personal involvement, with their leaders.”[50] These ideas were particularly applicable to U.S. relations with China and Russia. Kennan opposed the Clinton administration’s war in Kosovo and its expansion of NATO (the establishment of which he had also opposed half a century earlier), expressing fears that both policies would worsen relations with Russia.[78] He described NATO enlargement as a “strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions”.[79]
Kennan remained vigorous and alert in the last years of his life, although arthritis had him using a wheelchair. In his later years, Kennan concluded that “the general effect of Cold War extremism was to delay rather than hasten the great change that overtook the Soviet Union”.[80] At 98 he warned of the unforeseen consequences of waging war against Iraq. He warned that launching an attack on Iraq would amount to waging a second war that “bears no relation to the first war against terrorism” and declared efforts by the Bush administration to link al Qaeda with Saddam Hussein “pathetically unsupportive and unreliable”. Kennan went on to warn:
In an obituary in The New York Times, Kennan was described as “the American diplomat who did more than any other envoy of his generation to shape United States policy during the cold war” to whom “the White House and the Pentagon turned when they sought to understand the Soviet Union after World War II”.[5] Of Kennan, historian Wilson D. Miscamble remarked that “[o]ne can only hope that present and future makers of foreign policy might share something of his integrity and intelligence”.[78] Foreign Policy described Kennan as “the most influential diplomat of the 20th century”. Henry Kissinger said that Kennan “came as close to authoring the diplomatic doctrine of his era as any diplomat in our history”, while Colin Powell called Kennan “our best tutor” in dealing with the foreign policy issues of the 21st century.[85]
During his career, Kennan received a number of awards and honors. As a scholar and writer, Kennan was a two-time recipient of both the Pulitzer Prizes and the National Book Award, and had also received the Francis Parkman Prize, the Ambassador Book Award and the Bancroft Prize. Among Kennan’s numerous other awards and distinctions were the Testimonial of Loyal and Meritorious Service from the Department of State (1953), Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Nation’s Service (1976), the Order of the Pour le Mérite (1976), the Albert Einstein Peace Prize (1981), the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (1982), the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal (1984), the Franklin D. Roosevelt Foundation Freedom from Fear Medal (1987), the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1989), the Distinguished Service Award from the Department of State (1994), and the Library of Congress Living Legend (2000). Kennan had also received 29 honorary degrees and was honored in his name with the George F. Kennan Chair in National Security Strategy at the National War College and the George F. Kennan Professorship at the Institute for Advanced Study.[86][87][88]
Historian Wilson D. Miscamble argues that Kennan played a critical role in shaping the foreign policies of the Truman administration. He also states that Kennan did not hold a vision for either global or strongpoint containment; he simply wanted to restore the balance of power between the United States and the Soviet Union.[89] Like historian John Lewis Gaddis, Miscamble concedes that although Kennan personally preferred political containment, his recommendations ultimately resulted in a policy directed more towards strongpoint than to global containment.[90]
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Francis Gavin On the Use (and Misuse) of History in Political Decision-Making
February 20th, 02012 by Austin BrownPolicy-makers wrestling with foreign policy decisions that will have very long-lasting repercussions often turn to experts to inform them of the likely outcomes.
Through the lens of the current international dilemma over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, foreign policy historian (and former SALT speaker) Francis Gavin offers his thoughts on the relationship between policy-makers and experts in an article for Foreign Policy written with James B. Steinberg.
Crafting policy requires a certain amount of implicit prediction about the future, which is – to put it lightly – notoriously difficult to do right:
“In fact, as Philip Tetlock demonstrated in Expert Political Judgment, a 20-year study that looked at over 80,000 forecasts about world affairs, self-proclaimed authorities are no better at making accurate predictions than monkeys throwing darts at a dart board, and they are rarely held accountable for their errors.”While exploring some of the past decisions made as part of US nonproliferation efforts, he shows that historians can easily choose individual precedents that belie the larger portfolio of issues faced during their time and the broader strategy into which they may have fit. Taking the full context of the time, the issues and the decision-makers is necessary to properly extracting any useful historical knowledge from past events:
“If Vietnam is understood at least in part as a function of the Johnson administration’s successful efforts to encourage nuclear nonproliferation, seek détente and cooperation with the Soviets, and manage the German question, the policy — if still disastrous in its consequences — makes more sense. The difficulty inherent in assessing U.S. foreign policy is made clear by the fact that all three policies were crafted by the same policymakers in the same administration at the same time.”But, rather than simply taking “experts” down a peg for ignoring the broader range of issues policy-makers must consider, he suggests a way to make better use of their specialties:
“We believe that if different types of experts — the best strategists and historians, for example — were brought together with statesmen in an environment that encouraged honest debate and collaboration and not point-scoring, where participants were encouraged to acknowledge how little anyone can actually know about the future effects of U.S. actions, the possibility to achieve both greater coherence and greater humility in the U.S. foreign-policymaking process would be greatly enhanced.”This entry was posted on Monday, February 20th, 02012 at 9:40 am and is filed under Futures, Long Term Thinking.
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20 February 2012
In Defense of Particularism in American Foreign policy
[This is a cross-posting from Dart-Throwing Chimp.]
I’ve just finished reading John Lewis Gaddis’s terrific biography of George Frost Kennan, a towering figure in American foreign policy after World War II whom Henry Kissinger described as “one of the most important, complex, moving, challenging and exasperating American public servants.” Apart from recommending to the book, which I do without hesitation to anyone with an interest in world affairs, I wanted to talk about how Gaddis’ distillation of Kennan’s ideas helped me clarify some of my own thinking on the conduct of foreign policy.
Nowadays, discussions of grand strategy in U.S. foreign policy are usually framed as a battle between realism, which emphasizes power and encourages statesmen to focus shrewdly on their national self-interest, and liberal institutionalism, which emphasizes cooperation and encourages statesmen to build institutions that facilitate it. Kennan–who was not trained as an academic and apparently didn’t care much for formal theories of international relations–saw the same terrain from a different perspective, and I think his map may be the more useful one.
For Kennan, the crucial divide lay between universalists and particularists. Gaddis spells out this theme most clearly in his discussion of Kennan’s thinking about how the United States ought to respond to the successes of Communist revolutionaries in China in 1947. Mao’s gains posed an early test of the recently pronounced Truman doctrine, which had seemed to pledge the United States to do all it could to prevent Communist advances anywhere in the world. While Kennan was dismayed by that doctrine’s absolutist language, it overlapped with the containment strategy he had begun to advocate as a response to the global ambitions and aggressive nature he saw in the Soviet Union.
Even so, and despite loud calls in the U.S. to do whatever was necessary to defend Chiang’s regime, Kennan convinced Truman to provide only a bare minimum of support to the Nationalists. According to Gaddis (p. 299), Kennan had thought that
In this history, I hear echoes of contemporary debates over the “responsibility to protect” (R2P) doctrine and whether or not the U.S. should intervene militarily in Syria to stop the mass atrocities occurring there. As in the arguments over China policy in the 1940s, universalists often make the case for intervention in Syria on both moral and strategic grounds. Mass atrocities are morally abhorrent, of course, but acting to stop or prevent them is also an essential function of America’s role as the producer and defender of a liberal global order, a universalist might argue, just as stopping Communism in its tracks was during the Cold War. In a recent call for more forceful U.S. action against Syria, Anne Marie Slaughter, a successor of Kennan’s as director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, made just such a case. She wrote:
To universalists, that kind of equivocation may seem immoral. Kennan, whom Gaddis portrays as a religious person and a philosopher, was not insensitive to these concerns. His rejection of universalism was not meant as a rejection of moral thinking. Instead, Kennan’s commitment to particularism was informed by his judgment that stark views about right and wrong were poor guides to foreign policy-making.
Kennan saw himself as more of a “prophet” (his word) than a theorist or practitioner, and his views on “liberation” illustrate how he often thought about international relations on time scales that most people either don’t consider or consider a luxury. His containment policy was founded on the prescient expectation that the Soviet Union’s internal flaws would eventually lead to its own disintegration, but he did not expect to live long enough to see that happen.
When contemplating the plight of actual people suffering under actual dictatorships, the idea that democracy will eventually prevail can seem a little too convenient, like it’s just a way to absolve us of any responsibility for the injustices of the here and now. Is it really more convenient, though, than the belief that righteousness is always right? Where Kennan’s view is materially convenient, implying that we can achieve the desired result through inaction, the liberationist’s view is morally convenient, presuming that well-intentioned actions will always bring good results.
And there’s the matter of the historical record. Long-term trends clearly support Kennan’s expectation that democracy would keep expanding, albeit fitfully and with many reversals. More important, these advances have usually come either without direct U.S. support, or in places where U.S. involvement was incidental to the eventual outcome. The events that precipitated the collapse of the USSR and the end of Communist rule in Eastern Europe mostly caught the U.S. by surprise, and the U.S. response to them was generally modest and ambivalent.
Likewise with the Arab Spring. The wave of uprisings that swept the Arab world in 2011 started in Tunisia, where the U.S. had done virtually nothing to promote democracy. It soon spread to Egypt and Bahrain, where U.S. support for military “deep states” vastly outweighed its material and verbal commitments to opposition groups, and to Libya, where the U.S. had actually warmed to the dictator in recent years in response to his decision to give up weapons of mass destruction. In other words, theses revolutions were hardly American-made; if anything, they occurred in spite of American indifference and support for the status quo. In this sense, the Arab Spring supports Kennan’s expectation that American intervention is hardly a prerequisite for democratic revolution, and that democracy will advance on its own through the “longer and deeper workings of history.”
If universal principles aren’t the way to go, how, then, should foreign policy be conducted? For most of his adult life, Kennan owned and worked a small farm in southern Pennsylvania, and he often did the yardwork at his home in Princeton, too. It’s not surprising, then, that he may have best expressed his commitment to particularism and penchant for thinking on long time scales in a horticultural metaphor that envisioned a patient, process-oriented approach as the best way to strike a balance between moral ambitions and animal interests. This metaphor was offered up during a series of four lectures Kennan delivered at Princeton in 1954–lectures that became the book Realities of American Foreign Policy, and I think Gaddis’ summation of those lectures (pp. 494-495) it makes a proper coda to this post.
I’ve just finished reading John Lewis Gaddis’s terrific biography of George Frost Kennan, a towering figure in American foreign policy after World War II whom Henry Kissinger described as “one of the most important, complex, moving, challenging and exasperating American public servants.” Apart from recommending to the book, which I do without hesitation to anyone with an interest in world affairs, I wanted to talk about how Gaddis’ distillation of Kennan’s ideas helped me clarify some of my own thinking on the conduct of foreign policy.
Nowadays, discussions of grand strategy in U.S. foreign policy are usually framed as a battle between realism, which emphasizes power and encourages statesmen to focus shrewdly on their national self-interest, and liberal institutionalism, which emphasizes cooperation and encourages statesmen to build institutions that facilitate it. Kennan–who was not trained as an academic and apparently didn’t care much for formal theories of international relations–saw the same terrain from a different perspective, and I think his map may be the more useful one.
For Kennan, the crucial divide lay between universalists and particularists. Gaddis spells out this theme most clearly in his discussion of Kennan’s thinking about how the United States ought to respond to the successes of Communist revolutionaries in China in 1947. Mao’s gains posed an early test of the recently pronounced Truman doctrine, which had seemed to pledge the United States to do all it could to prevent Communist advances anywhere in the world. While Kennan was dismayed by that doctrine’s absolutist language, it overlapped with the containment strategy he had begun to advocate as a response to the global ambitions and aggressive nature he saw in the Soviet Union.
Even so, and despite loud calls in the U.S. to do whatever was necessary to defend Chiang’s regime, Kennan convinced Truman to provide only a bare minimum of support to the Nationalists. According to Gaddis (p. 299), Kennan had thought that
Americans had clung too long to the idea of remaking China, an end far beyond their means. The [State Department's] Policy Planning Staff [which Kennan headed] should determine what parts of East Asia are ‘absolutely vital to our security,’ and the United States should then ensure that these remain ‘in hands which we can control or rely on.’Kennan’s recommendation on China seemed to contradict his own grand strategy, but this contradiction reflected his deeper beliefs about the importance of particularism. He understood that a Communist victory in China would be a setback for the U.S., but he didn’t think it would be a disaster, and he believed that even massive American assistance was unlikely to stop the Communists from winning.
Kennan framed this recommendation within the need to choose between universal and particularist approaches in foreign policy. Universalism sought to apply the same principles everywhere. It favored procedures embodied in the United Nations and in other international organizations. It smoothed over the national peculiarities and conflicting ideologies that confused and irritated so many Americans. Its appeal lay in its promise to ‘relieve us of the necessity of dealing with the world as it is.’ Particularism, in contrast, questioned ‘legalistic concepts.’ It assumed appetites for power that only ‘counter-force’ could control. It valued alliances, but only if based on communities of interest, not on the ‘abstract formalism’ of obligations that might preclude pursuing national defense and global stability. Universalism entangled interests in cumbersome parliamentarism. Particularism encouraged purposefulness, coordination, and economy of effort–qualities the nation would need ‘if we are to be sure of accomplishing our purposes.’
In this history, I hear echoes of contemporary debates over the “responsibility to protect” (R2P) doctrine and whether or not the U.S. should intervene militarily in Syria to stop the mass atrocities occurring there. As in the arguments over China policy in the 1940s, universalists often make the case for intervention in Syria on both moral and strategic grounds. Mass atrocities are morally abhorrent, of course, but acting to stop or prevent them is also an essential function of America’s role as the producer and defender of a liberal global order, a universalist might argue, just as stopping Communism in its tracks was during the Cold War. In a recent call for more forceful U.S. action against Syria, Anne Marie Slaughter, a successor of Kennan’s as director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, made just such a case. She wrote:
If you believe, as I do, that R2P is a foundation for increased peace and respect for human rights over the long term, that each time it is invoked successfully to authorize the prevention of genocide, crimes against humanity, grave and systematic war crimes, and ethnic cleansing as much as the protection of civilians from such atrocities once they are occurring, it becomes a stronger deterrent against the commission of those acts in the first place…If the U.S. says it stands behind R2P but then does nothing in a case where it applies, not only will dictators around the world draw their own conclusions, but belief in the U.S. commitment to other international norms and obligations also weakens, just at a time when the U.S. grand strategy is to expand and strengthen an effective international order. The credibility of the U.S. commitment to its own proclaimed values will also take yet another critical hit with every young person in the Middle East fighting for liberty, democracy, and justice.After reading about his approach to China, it’s easy to imagine Kennan responding to this universalist argument by asking: “Yes, but how likely are we to succeed, and at what cost?”
To universalists, that kind of equivocation may seem immoral. Kennan, whom Gaddis portrays as a religious person and a philosopher, was not insensitive to these concerns. His rejection of universalism was not meant as a rejection of moral thinking. Instead, Kennan’s commitment to particularism was informed by his judgment that stark views about right and wrong were poor guides to foreign policy-making.
Could governments behave as individuals should? His preliminary conclusion, sketched out in his diary, was that politics, whether within or among nations, would always be a struggle for power. It could never in itself be a moral act…Foreign policy was not, therefore, a contest of good versus evil. To condemn negotiations as appeasement, Kennan told a Princeton University audience early in October [1953], was to end a Hollywood movie with the villain shot. To entrust diplomacy to lawyers was to relegate power, ‘like sex, to a realm in which we see it only occasionally, and then in highly sublimated and presentable form.’ Both approaches ignored the fact that most international conflicts were ‘jams that people have gotten themselves into.’ Trying to resolve them through rigid standards risked making things worse.” (p. 492)As a frequent critic of the U.S. government’s attempts to provoke and promote democratic revolutions elsewhere–here and here are some blogged examples–I was particularly interested in how Kennan’s commitment to particularism was evidenced in his frustration with policies aimed at supporting the “liberation” Communist-ruled countries during the Cold War. In Kennan’s view,
“[A policy seeking 'liberation' in Communist-ruled countries] is not consistent with our international obligations. It is not consistent with a common membership with other countries in the United Nations. It is not consistent with the maintenance of formal diplomatic relations with another country. It is replete with possibilities for misunderstanding and bitterness. To the extent that it might be successful, it would involve us in heavy responsibilities. Finally the prospects for success would be very small indeed; since the problem of civil disobedience is not a great problem to the modern police dictatorship.” (p. 479)Those concerns may sound cold, but Kennan was not indifferent to the liberationists’ cause. In fact, his views on the subject were also informed by a conviction that democracy would prevail in the end without active American support. According to Gaddis (p. 495), Kennan believed that
Democracy had the advantage over Communism in this respect, because it did not rely on violence to reshape society. Its outlook was ‘more closely attuned to the real nature of man…[so] we can afford to be patient and even occasionally to suffer reverses, placing our confidence in the longer and deeper workings of history.’Like Churchill, who famously remarked that “democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried,” Kennan saw many faults in Western society in the 20th century, but he saw the available alternatives as even worse. Nevertheless, he firmly believed that any gains realized by pushing for liberation were not worth the entanglements, lost opportunities, and even wars that might result, especially when war could be nuclear.
Kennan saw himself as more of a “prophet” (his word) than a theorist or practitioner, and his views on “liberation” illustrate how he often thought about international relations on time scales that most people either don’t consider or consider a luxury. His containment policy was founded on the prescient expectation that the Soviet Union’s internal flaws would eventually lead to its own disintegration, but he did not expect to live long enough to see that happen.
When contemplating the plight of actual people suffering under actual dictatorships, the idea that democracy will eventually prevail can seem a little too convenient, like it’s just a way to absolve us of any responsibility for the injustices of the here and now. Is it really more convenient, though, than the belief that righteousness is always right? Where Kennan’s view is materially convenient, implying that we can achieve the desired result through inaction, the liberationist’s view is morally convenient, presuming that well-intentioned actions will always bring good results.
And there’s the matter of the historical record. Long-term trends clearly support Kennan’s expectation that democracy would keep expanding, albeit fitfully and with many reversals. More important, these advances have usually come either without direct U.S. support, or in places where U.S. involvement was incidental to the eventual outcome. The events that precipitated the collapse of the USSR and the end of Communist rule in Eastern Europe mostly caught the U.S. by surprise, and the U.S. response to them was generally modest and ambivalent.
Likewise with the Arab Spring. The wave of uprisings that swept the Arab world in 2011 started in Tunisia, where the U.S. had done virtually nothing to promote democracy. It soon spread to Egypt and Bahrain, where U.S. support for military “deep states” vastly outweighed its material and verbal commitments to opposition groups, and to Libya, where the U.S. had actually warmed to the dictator in recent years in response to his decision to give up weapons of mass destruction. In other words, theses revolutions were hardly American-made; if anything, they occurred in spite of American indifference and support for the status quo. In this sense, the Arab Spring supports Kennan’s expectation that American intervention is hardly a prerequisite for democratic revolution, and that democracy will advance on its own through the “longer and deeper workings of history.”
If universal principles aren’t the way to go, how, then, should foreign policy be conducted? For most of his adult life, Kennan owned and worked a small farm in southern Pennsylvania, and he often did the yardwork at his home in Princeton, too. It’s not surprising, then, that he may have best expressed his commitment to particularism and penchant for thinking on long time scales in a horticultural metaphor that envisioned a patient, process-oriented approach as the best way to strike a balance between moral ambitions and animal interests. This metaphor was offered up during a series of four lectures Kennan delivered at Princeton in 1954–lectures that became the book Realities of American Foreign Policy, and I think Gaddis’ summation of those lectures (pp. 494-495) it makes a proper coda to this post.
Americans could no longer afford economic advances that depleted natural resources and devastated natural beauty, Kennan insisted. Nor could they tolerate dependency, for critical raw materials, on unreliable foreign governments. Nor could they tear their democracy apart internally because threats to democracy existed externally. Nor could they entrust defenses against such dangers to the first use of nuclear weapons, for what would be left after a nuclear war had taken place? These were all single policies, pursued without regard to how each related to the others, or to the larger ends the state was supposed to serve. They neglected ‘the essential unity’ of national problems, thus demonstrating the ‘danger implicit in any attempt to compartmentalize our thinking about foreign policy.’
That lack of coordination ill-suited the separate ‘planes of international reality’ upon which the United States had to compete. The first was a ‘sane and rational one, in which we felt comfortable, in which we were surrounded by people to whom we were accustomed and on whose reactions we could at least depend.’ The second was ‘a nightmarish one, where we were like a hunted beast, oblivious of everything but survival; straining every nerve and muscle in the effort to remain alive.’ Within the first arena, traditional conceptions of morality applied; ‘We could still be guided…by the American dream.’ Within the second, ‘there was only the law of the jungle; and we had to do violence to our own traditional principles–or many of us felt we did–to fit ourselves for the relentless struggle.’ The great question, then, was whether the two could ever be brought into a coherent relationship with one another.
They could, Kennan suggested, through a kind of geopolitical horticulture. ‘We must be gardeners and not mechanics in our approach to world affairs.’ International life was an organic process, not a static system. Americans had inherited it, not designed it. Their preferred standards of behavior, therefore, could hardly govern it. But it should be possible ‘to take these forces for what they are and to induce them to work with us and for us by influencing the environmental stimuli to which they are subjected.’ That would have to be done ‘gently and patiently, with understanding and sympathy, not trying to force growth by mechanical means, not tearing the plants up by the roots when they fail to behave as we wish them to. The forces of nature will generally be on the side of him who understands them best and respects them most scrupulously.’
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Cliffordbob2Great post! I will read the book. You have linked it very nicely to contemporary debates.
- Jay UlfelderThank you. One warning on the book: it’s long and dense. It took me about a month to get through it. Approach accordingly.
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The one puzzle in John Lewis Gaddis’s first-rate biography of the diplomat George Kennan, which Gaddis began in 1982, when his subject was seventy-eight, and waited nearly thirty years to complete, since Kennan lived to be a hundred and one, is the subtitle. The book is called “George F. Kennan: An American Life” (The Penguin Press; $39.95), and the most peculiar thing about Kennan, a man not short on peculiarities, is that he had little love for, or even curiosity about, the country whose fortunes he devoted his life to safeguarding.
Between 1926, the year he began his Foreign Service career, in Geneva, and 1946, when he made a heroic return from Moscow as the author of the primal document of Cold War foreign policy, the Long Telegram, Kennan lived mostly abroad. The woman he married, in 1931, Annelise Sørensen, was Norwegian, and when he and his family resettled in the United States—where he remained, apart from two prematurely terminated appointments as Ambassador, first to the Soviet Union (1952), and then to Yugoslavia (1961-63)—he spent almost all of his time in the State Department, or at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, or on the secluded farm he owned in Pennsylvania, outside a town it amused some god of geopolitics to have named East Berlin.
Kennan thought that Americans were shallow, materialistic, and self-centered—he had the attitude of a typical mid-century European—and the more he saw of them the less fond of them he grew. “You have despaired of yourself,” he wrote in his diary after a visit to Chicago; “now despair of your country!” He had a special distaste for what he called “the Latin-American fringe”—Florida, Texas, and California. “Before us stretches the whole great Pacific Coast,” he wrote in the diary on a plane trip West, “and my only thought, as we approach it, is: throughout the length and breadth of it not one single thing of any importance is being said or done.”
He was firmly anti-majoritarian, not only in foreign affairs, where he considered public opinion a menace, but in governmental decision-making generally. “I hate the rough and tumble of our political life,” he wrote, in 1935, to a sister, Jeanette, to whom he was close. “I hate democracy; I hate the press. . . . I hate the ‘peepul’; I have become clearly un-American.” In the draft of an unfinished book, begun in the nineteen-thirties, he advocated restricting the vote to white males, and other measures designed to create government by an élite.
Many people gave up on liberal democracy in the nineteen-thirties, but Kennan, even after the war, and in his most widely read books—“American Diplomacy,” published in 1951, and the first volume of his “Memoirs,” which came out in 1967 and won a Pulitzer Prize—was blunt about his estrangement from American life and his antipathy to democracy. He believed that a nation’s form of government has little to do with the quality of life, and he admired conservative autocracies such as prewar Austria and Portugal under António Salazar. In the second volume of the “Memoirs,” published in 1972, he proposed that one of the few times American diplomacy had been conducted with integrity, and without political pandering, was the period from 1945 to 1949—which happened to be the years of his own greatest influence.
The country he felt closest to—just to make the irony complete—was Russia. Russia was “in my blood,” he says in the “Memoirs.” “There was some mysterious affinity which I could not explain even to myself.” He wondered whether he had lived in St. Petersburg in a previous life. The Russia he loved, or fantasized about, was, of course, a pre-Bolshevik and pre-industrial Russia—the Russia of Tolstoy, whose estate, Yasnaya Polyana, he visited in 1952, feeling, he said later, “close to a world to which, I always thought, I could really have belonged,” and of Chekhov, whose biography he several times contemplated writing.
He had no sympathy for, or much interest in, Marxism, and he had no illusions about Stalin. He despised the whole Soviet apparat—in part because its minions prevented him from associating with ordinary Russians when he was stationed in Moscow. But he thought that even under Communism Russians cultivated a resilience of character that was disappearing in the West. After running across a Danish youth festival in the nineteen-seventies, a scene, as he described it, “swarming with hippies—motorbikes, girl-friends, drugs, pornography, drunkenness, noise,” he remarked, in an interview, “I looked at this mob and thought how one company of robust Russian infantry would drive it out of town.”
And when he imagined the day the Iron Curtain lifted, a day that his own policy recommendations were intended to bring about, he dreaded what would happen to the Russians after being exposed to “the wind of material plenty” and its “debilitating and insidious breath.” Although he long advocated the reunification of Germany, he took little satisfaction when it happened. It was just the result, he thought, of agitation by young East Germans motivated by the hope of “getting better jobs, making more money, and bathing in the fleshpots of the West.” He wondered whether this was what we had really wanted when we set out, more than forty years before, to wage a Cold War.
Yet he is commonly regarded as the wisest of the Wise Men. That was the name, semi-facetious, that Lyndon Johnson’s national-security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, gave to the members of the old Cold War foreign-policy establishment whom Johnson called upon, long after their time in office had passed, to help extricate his Administration from the quagmire in which it was eventually consumed, Vietnam. Among the elders Johnson consulted were Averell Harriman, who had been Roosevelt’s Ambassador to the Soviet Union and Kennan’s boss in Moscow; Dean Acheson, Truman’s Secretary of State and Kennan’s boss in Washington; and Charles Bohlen, Kennan’s oldest and closest friend in the Foreign Service and his successor as Ambassador to the Soviet Union.
Between 1926, the year he began his Foreign Service career, in Geneva, and 1946, when he made a heroic return from Moscow as the author of the primal document of Cold War foreign policy, the Long Telegram, Kennan lived mostly abroad. The woman he married, in 1931, Annelise Sørensen, was Norwegian, and when he and his family resettled in the United States—where he remained, apart from two prematurely terminated appointments as Ambassador, first to the Soviet Union (1952), and then to Yugoslavia (1961-63)—he spent almost all of his time in the State Department, or at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, or on the secluded farm he owned in Pennsylvania, outside a town it amused some god of geopolitics to have named East Berlin.
Kennan thought that Americans were shallow, materialistic, and self-centered—he had the attitude of a typical mid-century European—and the more he saw of them the less fond of them he grew. “You have despaired of yourself,” he wrote in his diary after a visit to Chicago; “now despair of your country!” He had a special distaste for what he called “the Latin-American fringe”—Florida, Texas, and California. “Before us stretches the whole great Pacific Coast,” he wrote in the diary on a plane trip West, “and my only thought, as we approach it, is: throughout the length and breadth of it not one single thing of any importance is being said or done.”
He was firmly anti-majoritarian, not only in foreign affairs, where he considered public opinion a menace, but in governmental decision-making generally. “I hate the rough and tumble of our political life,” he wrote, in 1935, to a sister, Jeanette, to whom he was close. “I hate democracy; I hate the press. . . . I hate the ‘peepul’; I have become clearly un-American.” In the draft of an unfinished book, begun in the nineteen-thirties, he advocated restricting the vote to white males, and other measures designed to create government by an élite.
Many people gave up on liberal democracy in the nineteen-thirties, but Kennan, even after the war, and in his most widely read books—“American Diplomacy,” published in 1951, and the first volume of his “Memoirs,” which came out in 1967 and won a Pulitzer Prize—was blunt about his estrangement from American life and his antipathy to democracy. He believed that a nation’s form of government has little to do with the quality of life, and he admired conservative autocracies such as prewar Austria and Portugal under António Salazar. In the second volume of the “Memoirs,” published in 1972, he proposed that one of the few times American diplomacy had been conducted with integrity, and without political pandering, was the period from 1945 to 1949—which happened to be the years of his own greatest influence.
The country he felt closest to—just to make the irony complete—was Russia. Russia was “in my blood,” he says in the “Memoirs.” “There was some mysterious affinity which I could not explain even to myself.” He wondered whether he had lived in St. Petersburg in a previous life. The Russia he loved, or fantasized about, was, of course, a pre-Bolshevik and pre-industrial Russia—the Russia of Tolstoy, whose estate, Yasnaya Polyana, he visited in 1952, feeling, he said later, “close to a world to which, I always thought, I could really have belonged,” and of Chekhov, whose biography he several times contemplated writing.
He had no sympathy for, or much interest in, Marxism, and he had no illusions about Stalin. He despised the whole Soviet apparat—in part because its minions prevented him from associating with ordinary Russians when he was stationed in Moscow. But he thought that even under Communism Russians cultivated a resilience of character that was disappearing in the West. After running across a Danish youth festival in the nineteen-seventies, a scene, as he described it, “swarming with hippies—motorbikes, girl-friends, drugs, pornography, drunkenness, noise,” he remarked, in an interview, “I looked at this mob and thought how one company of robust Russian infantry would drive it out of town.”
And when he imagined the day the Iron Curtain lifted, a day that his own policy recommendations were intended to bring about, he dreaded what would happen to the Russians after being exposed to “the wind of material plenty” and its “debilitating and insidious breath.” Although he long advocated the reunification of Germany, he took little satisfaction when it happened. It was just the result, he thought, of agitation by young East Germans motivated by the hope of “getting better jobs, making more money, and bathing in the fleshpots of the West.” He wondered whether this was what we had really wanted when we set out, more than forty years before, to wage a Cold War.
Yet he is commonly regarded as the wisest of the Wise Men. That was the name, semi-facetious, that Lyndon Johnson’s national-security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, gave to the members of the old Cold War foreign-policy establishment whom Johnson called upon, long after their time in office had passed, to help extricate his Administration from the quagmire in which it was eventually consumed, Vietnam. Among the elders Johnson consulted were Averell Harriman, who had been Roosevelt’s Ambassador to the Soviet Union and Kennan’s boss in Moscow; Dean Acheson, Truman’s Secretary of State and Kennan’s boss in Washington; and Charles Bohlen, Kennan’s oldest and closest friend in the Foreign Service and his successor as Ambassador to the Soviet Union.
PHOTOGRAPH: AKG Pressebild-ullstein bild/Granger Collection
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The Age of Kennan
By HENRY A. KISSINGER
Published: November 10, 2011
While writing this essay, I asked several young men and women what George F. Kennan meant to them. As it turned out, nearly all were essentially oblivious of the man or his role in shaping American foreign policy. Yet Kennan had fashioned the concept of containment in the name of which the cold war was conducted and won and almost concurrently had also expressed some of the most trenchant criticism of the way his own theory was being implemented. To the present generation, Kennan has receded into a vague past as has their parents’ struggle to bring forth a new international order amid the awesome, unprecedented power of nuclear weapons.
GEORGE F. KENNAN
An American Life
John Lewis Gaddis
Illustrated. 784 pp. The Penguin Press. $39.95.
An American Life
John Lewis Gaddis
Illustrated. 784 pp. The Penguin Press. $39.95.
Bettmann/Corbis
George F. Kennan in 1952, after the Soviet Union demanded his recall as ambassador. For the surviving participants in the emotions of that period, this state of affairs inspires melancholy reflections about the relevance of history in the age of the Internet and the 24-hour news cycle. Fortunately, John Lewis Gaddis, a distinguished professor of history and strategy at Yale, has brought again to life the dilemmas and aspirations of those pivotal decades of the mid-20th century. His magisterial work, “George F. Kennan: An American Life,” bids fair to be as close to the final word as possible on one of the most important, complex, moving, challenging and exasperating American public servants. The reader should know that for the past decade, I have occasionally met with the students of the Grand Strategy seminar John Gaddis conducts at Yale and that we encounter each other on social occasions from time to time. But Gaddis’s work is seminal and beyond personal relationships.
George Kennan’s thought suffused American foreign policy on both sides of the intellectual and ideological dividing lines for nearly half a century. Yet the highest position he ever held was ambassador to Moscow for five months in 1952 and to Yugoslavia for two years in the early 1960s. In Washington, he never rose above director of policy planning at the State Department, a position he occupied from 1947 to 1950. Yet his precepts helped shape both the foreign policy of the cold war as well as the arguments of its opponents after he renounced — early on — the application of his maxims.
A brilliant analyst of long-term trends and a singularly gifted prose stylist, Kennan, as a relatively junior Foreign Service officer, served in the entourages of Secretaries of State George C. Marshall and Dean Acheson. His fluency in German and Russian, as well as his knowledge of those countries’ histories and literary traditions, combined with a commanding, if contradictory, personality. Kennan was austere yet could also be convivial, playing his guitar at embassy events; pious but given to love affairs (in the management of which he later instructed his son in writing); endlessly introspective and ultimately remote. He was, a critic once charged, “an impressionist, a poet, not an earthling.”
For all these qualities — and perhaps because of them — Kennan was never vouchsafed the opportunity actually to execute his sensitive and farsighted visions at the highest levels of government. And he blighted his career in government by a tendency to recoil from the implications of his own views. The debate in America between idealism and realism, which continues to this day, played itself out inside Kennan’s soul. Though he often expressed doubt about the ability of his fellow Americans to grasp the complexity of his perceptions, he also reflected in his own person a very American ambivalence about the nature and purpose of foreign policy.
When his analytical brilliance was rewarded with ambassadorial appointments, to the Soviet Union and then to Yugoslavia, Kennan self-destructed while disregarding his own precepts. The author of trenchant analyses of Soviet morbid sensitivity to slights and of the Kremlin’s penchant for parsing every word of American diplomats, he torpedoed his Moscow mission after just a few months. Offended by the constrictions of everyday living in Stalin’s Moscow, Kennan compared his hosts to Nazi Germany in an offhand comment to a journalist at Tempelhof airport in Berlin. As a result, he was declared persona non grata — the only American ambassador to Russia to suffer this fate. Similarly, in Belgrade a decade later, Kennan reacted to Tito’s affirmation of neutrality on the issue of the Soviet threat to Berlin as if it were a personal slight. Yet Tito’s was precisely the kind of neutralist balancing act Kennan had brilliantly analyzed when it had been directed against the Soviet Union. Shortly afterward, Kennan resigned.
Nonetheless, no other Foreign Service officer ever shaped American foreign policy so decisively or did so much to define the broader public debate over America’s world role. This process began with two documents remembered as the Long Telegram (in 1946) and the X article (in 1947). At this stage, Kennan served a country that had not yet learned the distinction between the conversion and the evolution of an adversary — if indeed it ever will. Conversion entails inducing an adversary to break with its past in one comprehensive act or gesture. Evolution involves a gradual process, a willingness to pursue one’s ultimate foreign policy goal in imperfect stages.
America had conducted its wartime diplomacy on the premise that Stalin had abandoned Soviet history. The dominant view in policy-making circles was that Moscow had embraced peaceful coexistence with the United States and would adjust differences that might arise by quasi-legal or diplomatic processes. At the apex of that international order would be the newly formed United Nations. The United States, the Soviet Union and Great Britain were to be the joint guardians. (China and France were later additions.)
Kennan had rejected the proposition of an inherent American-Soviet harmony from the moment it was put forward and repeatedly criticized what he considered Washington’s excessively accommodating stance on Soviet territorial advances. In February 1946, the United States Embassy in Moscow received a query from Washington as to whether a doctrinaire speech by Stalin inaugurated a change in the Soviet commitment to a harmonious international order. The ambassador was away, and Kennan, at that time 42 and deputy chief of mission, replied in a five-part telegram of 19 single-spaced pages. The essence of the so-called Long Telegram was that Stalin, far from changing policy, was in fact implementing a particularly robust version of traditional Russian designs. These grew out of Russia’s strategic culture and its centuries-old distrust of the outside world, onto which the Bolsheviks had grafted an implacable revolutionary doctrine of global sweep. Soviet leaders would not be swayed by good-will gestures. They had devoted their lives (and sacrificed millions of their compatriots) to an ideology positing a fundamental conflict between the Communist and capitalist worlds. Marxist dogma rendered even more truculent by the Leninist interpretation was, Kennan wrote, “justification for their instinctive fear of the outside world, for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not dare not to inflict, for sacrifice they felt bound to demand. In the name of Marxism they sacrificed every single ethical value. . . . Today they cannot dispense with it.”
The United States, Kennan insisted (sometimes in telegramese), was obliged to deal with this inherent hostility. With many of the world’s traditional power centers devastated and the Soviet leadership controlling vast natural resources and “the energies of one of world’s greatest peoples,” a contest about the nature of world order was inevitable. This would be “undoubtedly greatest task our diplomacy has ever faced and probably greatest it will ever have to face.”
In 1947, Kennan went public in a briefly anonymous article published in Foreign Affairs, signed by “X.” Among the thousands of articles produced on the subject, Kennan’s stands in a class by itself. Lucidly written, passionately argued, it elevated the debate to a philosophy of history.
The X article condensed the Long Telegram and gave it an apocalyptic vision. Soviet foreign policy represented “a cautious, persistent pressure toward the disruption and weakening of all rival influence and rival power.” The only way to deal with Moscow was by “a policy of firm containment designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counterforce at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world.”
So far this was a doctrine of equilibrium much like what a British foreign secretary in the 19th century might have counseled in dealing with a rising power — though the British foreign secretary would not have felt the need to define a final outcome. What conferred a dramatic quality on the X article was the way Kennan combined it with the historic American dream of the ultimate conversion of the adversary. Victory would come not on the battlefield nor even by diplomacy but by the implosion of the Soviet system. It was “entirely possible for the United States to influence by its actions” this eventuality. At some point in Moscow’s futile confrontations with the outside world — so long as the West took care they remained futile — some Soviet leader would feel the need to achieve additional support by reaching down to the immature and inexperienced masses. But if “the unity and efficacy of the Party as a political instrument” was ever so disrupted, “Soviet Russia might be changed over night from one of the strongest to one of the weakest and most pitiable of national societies.”
No other document forecast so presciently what would in fact occur under Mikhail Gorbachev. But that was four decades away. It left a number of issues open: How was a situation of strength to be defined? How was it to be built and then conveyed to the adversary? And how would it be sustained in the face of Soviet challenges?
Kennan never dealt with these issues. It took Dean Acheson to translate Kennan’s concept into the design that saw America through the cold war. As under secretary to George Marshall, Acheson worked on the Marshall Plan and, as secretary of state, created NATO, encouraged European unification and brought Germany into the Atlantic structure. In the Eisenhower administration, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles extended the alliance system through the Baghdad Pact for the Middle East and SEATO for Southeast Asia. In effect, containment came to be equated with constructing military alliances around the entire Soviet periphery over two continents.
The practical consequence was to shelve East-West diplomacy while the positions of strength were being built. The diplomatic initiative was left to the Soviet Union, which concentrated on Western weak points, or where it calculated that it had an inherent advantage (as in the exposed position of Berlin). Paradoxically containment, while hardheaded in its absolute opposition to the further expansion of the Soviet sphere, failed to reflect the real balance of forces. For with the American atomic monopoly — and the huge Soviet losses in the world war — that actual balance was never more favorable for the West than at the beginning of the cold war. A situation of strength did not need to be built; it already existed.
The most illustrious advocate of this point of view was Winston Churchill. In a series of speeches between 1946 and 1952, he called for diplomatic initiatives to produce a European settlement while American strength was still preponderant. The American policy based on the X article appealed for endurance so that history could display its inevitable tendencies. Churchill warned of the psychological strain of a seemingly endless strategic stalemate.
At the same time that Churchill was urging an immediate diplomatic confrontation, Kennan was growing impatient with Washington’s tendency to equate containment with a largely military strategy. He disavowed the global application of his principles. As he so often did, he pushed them to their abstract extreme, arguing that there were some regions “where you could perfectly well let people fall prey to totalitarian domination without any tragic consequences for world peace in general.” We could not bomb the Soviets into submission, nor convince them to see things our way; we had, in fact, no direct means to change the Soviet regime. We had instead to wait out an unsettled situation and occasionally mitigate it with diplomacy.
The issue became an aspect of the perennial debate between a realism stressing the importance of assessing power relationships and an idealism conflating moral impulses with historical inevitability. It was complicated by Kennan’s tendency to defend on occasion each side of the issue — leading to incisive and quite unsentimental essays and diary entries analyzing the global balance of power, followed by comparable reflections questioning the morality of practicing traditional power politics in the nuclear age.
Stable orders require elements of both power and morality. In a world without equilibrium, the stronger will encounter no restraint, and the weak will find no means of vindication. At the same time, if there is no commitment to the essential justice of existing arrangements, constant challenges or else a crusading attempt to impose value systems are inevitable.
The challenge of statesmanship is to define the components of both power and morality and strike a balance between them. This is not a one-time effort. It requires constant recalibration; it is as much an artistic and philosophical as a political enterprise. It implies a willingness to manage nuance and to live with ambiguity. The practitioners of the art must learn to put the attainable in the service of the ultimate and accept the element of compromise inherent in the endeavor. Bismarck defined statesmanship as the art of the possible. Kennan, as a public servant, was exalted above most others for a penetrating analysis that treated each element of international order separately, yet his career was stymied by his periodic rebellion against the need for a reconciliation that could incorporate each element only imperfectly.
At the beginning of his career, Kennan’s view of the European order was traditional. America should seek, he argued, an equilibrium based on enlightened self-interest and sustained by the permanent introduction of American power. “Heretofore, in our history, we had to take the world pretty much as we found it,” he wrote during the war. “From now on we will have to take it pretty much as we leave it when the crisis is over.” And that required “the firm, consistent and unceasing application of sheer power in accordance with a long-term policy.”
In pursuit of that European equilibrium, Kennan urged Washington and its democratic allies to oblige the Soviet Union to accept borders as far east as possible. In 1944, he proposed that Poland be placed under international trusteeship to prevent its domination by the Soviet Union. But when this was rejected by Roosevelt, who did not want to risk alienating Moscow in the last phase of the war, Kennan adjusted his view to the new realities as he saw them. If the United States was unwilling to force the Soviet Union into acceptable limits, “we should gather together at once into our hands all the cards we hold and begin to play them for their full value.” That meant dividing Europe into spheres of influence with the line of division running through Germany. The Western half of Germany should be integrated into a European federation. He called this a “bitterly modest” program, but “beggars can’t be choosers.”
Six years later, Acheson was building an Atlantic partnership in essentially the manner Kennan had proposed. But Kennan rejected it for three reasons: his innate perfectionism, his growing concern about the implications of nuclear war and his exclusion from a role in government.
The irony of Kennan’s thought was that his influence in government arose from his advocacy of what today’s debate would define as realism, while his admirers outside government were on the whole motivated by what they took to be his idealistic objections to the prevalent, essentially realistic policy. His vision of peace involved a balance of power of a very special American type, an equilibrium that was not to be measured by military force alone. It arose as well from the culture and historical evolution of a society whose ultimate power would be measured by its vigor and its people’s commitment to a better world. In the X article, he called on his countrymen to meet the “test of the overall worth of the United States as a nation among nations.”
Kennan saw clearly — more so than a vast majority of his contemporaries — the ultimate outcome of the division of Europe, but less clearly the road to get there. He was too intellectually rigorous to countenance the partial steps needed to reach the vistas he envisioned. Yet policy practice — as opposed to pure analysis — almost inevitably involves both compromise and risk.
This is why Kennan often shrank from the application of his own theories. In 1948, with an allied government in China crumbling, Kennan — at some risk to his career — advanced the minority view that a Communist victory would not necessarily be catastrophic. In a National War College lecture, he argued that “our safety depends on our ability to establish a balance among the hostile or undependable forces of the world.” A wise policy would induce these forces to “spend in conflict with each other, if they must spend it at all, the intolerance and violence and fanaticism which might otherwise be directed against us,” so “that they are thus compelled to cancel each other out and exhaust themselves in internecine conflict in order that the constructive forces, working for world stability, may continue to have the possibility of life.” But when, in 1969, the Nixon administration began to implement almost exactly that policy, Kennan called on me at the White House, in the company of a distinguished group of former ambassadors to the Soviet Union, to warn against proceeding with overtures to China lest the Soviet Union respond by war.
So emphatically did Kennan sometimes reject the immediately feasible that he destroyed his usefulness in the conduct of day-to-day diplomacy. This turned his life into a special kind of tragedy. Until his old age, he yearned for the role in public service to which his brilliance and vision should have propelled him, but that was always denied him by his refusal to modify his perfectionism.
A major element in this refusal was Kennan’s growing repugnance at the prospect of nuclear war. From the beginning of the nuclear age, he emphasized that the new weapons progressively destroyed the relationship between military and political objectives. Historically, wars had been fought because the prospect of accommodation seemed more onerous than the consequences of defeat. But when nuclear war implied tens of millions of casualties — and arguably the end of civilization — that equation was turned on its head.
The most haunting problem for modern policy makers became what they would in fact do when the limit of diplomatic options had been reached: Did any leader or group of leaders have the right to assume the moral responsibility for taking risks capable of destroying civilized order? But by the same calculus, could any leader or group of leaders assume the responsibility for abandoning nuclear deterrence and turn the world over to groups with possibly genocidal tendencies? Acheson chose the risk of deterrence, probably convinced that he would never have to implement it. Kennan abandoned deterrence and the nuclear option, at one stage even seeking to organize a no-first-use pledge from American policy makers and musing publicly in an interview whether Soviet dominance over Western Europe might not be preferable to nuclear war.
When Kennan was operating in the realm of philosophy, he tended to push matters to passionate and abstract conclusions. Yet under pressure of concrete events, he would swing back to the role of a hard-nosed advocate of specific operational policies. After the Chinese offensive across the Yalu in 1950, he overcame his distaste for Acheson’s more militant policy to urge him to refuse any attempt at diplomacy with the Communist world and instead adopt a Churchillian posture of defiance. Similarly, in 1968, his decade-long advocacy of military disengagement in Europe did not keep him from urging President Johnson to respond to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia by sending another 100,000 troops to Europe.
It was my good fortune to know both Acheson and Kennan at or near the height of their intellectual powers. Acheson was the greatest secretary of state of the postwar period. He designed the application of the concepts for which Kennan was the earliest and most eloquent spokesman. The growing estrangement between these two giants of American foreign policy was as sad as it was inevitable. Acheson was indispensable for the architecture of the immediate postwar decade; Kennan’s view raised the issues of a more distant future. Acheson considered Kennan more significant for literature than for policy making and wholly impractical. Kennan’s reaction was frustration at his growing irrelevance to policy making and his inability to convey his long-term view.
On the issues of the day, I sided with Acheson and have not changed my views in retrospect. If Europe was to be secured, America did not have the choice between postponing the drawing of dividing lines or implementing a diplomatic process to determine whether dividing lines needed to be drawn at all. The application of Kennan’s evolving theories in the immediate postwar decades (particularly his opposition to NATO, his critique of the Truman doctrine and his call for a negotiated American disengagement from Europe) would have proved as unsettling as Acheson predicted.
At the same time, Kennan deserves recognition for raising the key issues of the long-term future. He warned of a time in which America might strain its domestic resilience by goals beyond the physical and psychological capacity of even the most exceptional society.
Kennan was eloquent in emphasizing the transient nature of a division of the world into military blocs and the ultimate need to transcend it by diplomacy. He came up with remedies that were both too early in the historical process and occasionally too abstract. He at times neglected the importance of timing. Gaddis quotes him as pointing out that he had problems with sequencing: “I have the habit of seeing two opposing sides of a question, both of them wrong, and then overstating myself, so that I appear to be inconsistent.”
In a turbulent era, Kennan’s consistent themes were balance and restraint. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he applied these convictions to his side of the debate as well. He testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee against the Vietnam War but on the limited ground that there was no strategic need for it. He emphasized that the threat posed by Hanoi was exaggerated and that the alleged unity of the Communist world was a myth. But he also warned elsewhere against “violent objection to what exists, unaccompanied by any constructive concept of what, ideally ought to exist in its place.” He questioned the policy makers’ judgment but not their intent; he understood their dilemmas even as he both criticized and sought to join them.
Oscillating between profound perceptions of both the world of ideas and the world of power, Kennan often found himself caught between them. Out of his inward turmoil emerged themes that, like the movements of a great symphony, none of us who followed could ignore, even when they were occasionally discordant.
s time went on, Kennan retreated into writing history. He did so less as a historian than as a teacher to policy makers, hoping to instruct America in the importance of moderation in objectives and restraint in the use of power. He took as an example the collapse of the European order that led to the outbreak of World War I. He produced two works of exemplary scholarship and elegant writing, “Russia Leaves the War” and “The Decision to Intervene.” He published a book of lectures and essays about the making of American foreign policy in the first half of the 20th century, “American Diplomacy: 1900-1950,” which remains the best short summary of the subject.
Yet Kennan did not derive genuine satisfaction from the accolades that so fulsomely came his way from the nonpolicy world. His partly self-created exile from policy making was accompanied by permanent nostalgia for his calling. In his diary he meticulously recorded the tribute that was paid to him by the American chargé d’affaires at an embassy dinner in Moscow in 1981, noting that no secretary of state had ever paid him comparable attention.
Policy makers, even when respectful, shied away from employing him because the sweep of his vision was both uncomfortable (even when right) and beyond the outer limit of their immediate concerns on the tactical level. And the various protest movements, which took up some of his ideas, added to his discomfort because he could never share their single-minded self-righteousness.
Dean Acheson wrote that separation from high office is like the end of a great love affair — a void left by the disappearance of heightened sensitivities and focused concerns. What is poignant about Kennan’s fate is that his parting came before he reached the pinnacle. He spent the rest of his life as an observer at the threshold of political influence, confined to what he called “the unbroken loneliness of pure research and writing.”
Though he lived until the age of 101 (dying in 2005) and saw many of his prophecies come into being, even the collapse of the Soviet Union did not confer on him the elation of vindication. Rather, it marked in his mind the end of his literary vocation. The need for his influence on policy making had irrevocably disappeared. “Reconcile yourself to the inevitable,” he confided to his diary, “you are never again, in the short remainder of your life, to be permitted to do anything significant.” He put aside the third volume of his majestic history of pre-World War I diplomacy. He had no further lessons to teach his country.
We can be grateful to John Lewis Gaddis for bringing Kennan back to us, thoughtful, human, self-centered, contradictory, inspirational — a permanent spur as consciences are wont to be. Masterfully researched, exhaustively documented, Gaddis’s moving work gives us a figure with whom, however one might differ on details, it was a privilege to be a contemporary.
Early in his career, Kennan wrote that he was resigned to “the lonely pleasure of one who stands at long last on a chilly and inhospitable mountaintop where few have been before, where few can follow and where few will consent to believe he has been.” Gaddis had the acumen to follow Kennan’s tortured quest and to convince us that Kennan had indeed reached his mountaintop.
George Kennan’s thought suffused American foreign policy on both sides of the intellectual and ideological dividing lines for nearly half a century. Yet the highest position he ever held was ambassador to Moscow for five months in 1952 and to Yugoslavia for two years in the early 1960s. In Washington, he never rose above director of policy planning at the State Department, a position he occupied from 1947 to 1950. Yet his precepts helped shape both the foreign policy of the cold war as well as the arguments of its opponents after he renounced — early on — the application of his maxims.
A brilliant analyst of long-term trends and a singularly gifted prose stylist, Kennan, as a relatively junior Foreign Service officer, served in the entourages of Secretaries of State George C. Marshall and Dean Acheson. His fluency in German and Russian, as well as his knowledge of those countries’ histories and literary traditions, combined with a commanding, if contradictory, personality. Kennan was austere yet could also be convivial, playing his guitar at embassy events; pious but given to love affairs (in the management of which he later instructed his son in writing); endlessly introspective and ultimately remote. He was, a critic once charged, “an impressionist, a poet, not an earthling.”
For all these qualities — and perhaps because of them — Kennan was never vouchsafed the opportunity actually to execute his sensitive and farsighted visions at the highest levels of government. And he blighted his career in government by a tendency to recoil from the implications of his own views. The debate in America between idealism and realism, which continues to this day, played itself out inside Kennan’s soul. Though he often expressed doubt about the ability of his fellow Americans to grasp the complexity of his perceptions, he also reflected in his own person a very American ambivalence about the nature and purpose of foreign policy.
When his analytical brilliance was rewarded with ambassadorial appointments, to the Soviet Union and then to Yugoslavia, Kennan self-destructed while disregarding his own precepts. The author of trenchant analyses of Soviet morbid sensitivity to slights and of the Kremlin’s penchant for parsing every word of American diplomats, he torpedoed his Moscow mission after just a few months. Offended by the constrictions of everyday living in Stalin’s Moscow, Kennan compared his hosts to Nazi Germany in an offhand comment to a journalist at Tempelhof airport in Berlin. As a result, he was declared persona non grata — the only American ambassador to Russia to suffer this fate. Similarly, in Belgrade a decade later, Kennan reacted to Tito’s affirmation of neutrality on the issue of the Soviet threat to Berlin as if it were a personal slight. Yet Tito’s was precisely the kind of neutralist balancing act Kennan had brilliantly analyzed when it had been directed against the Soviet Union. Shortly afterward, Kennan resigned.
Nonetheless, no other Foreign Service officer ever shaped American foreign policy so decisively or did so much to define the broader public debate over America’s world role. This process began with two documents remembered as the Long Telegram (in 1946) and the X article (in 1947). At this stage, Kennan served a country that had not yet learned the distinction between the conversion and the evolution of an adversary — if indeed it ever will. Conversion entails inducing an adversary to break with its past in one comprehensive act or gesture. Evolution involves a gradual process, a willingness to pursue one’s ultimate foreign policy goal in imperfect stages.
America had conducted its wartime diplomacy on the premise that Stalin had abandoned Soviet history. The dominant view in policy-making circles was that Moscow had embraced peaceful coexistence with the United States and would adjust differences that might arise by quasi-legal or diplomatic processes. At the apex of that international order would be the newly formed United Nations. The United States, the Soviet Union and Great Britain were to be the joint guardians. (China and France were later additions.)
Kennan had rejected the proposition of an inherent American-Soviet harmony from the moment it was put forward and repeatedly criticized what he considered Washington’s excessively accommodating stance on Soviet territorial advances. In February 1946, the United States Embassy in Moscow received a query from Washington as to whether a doctrinaire speech by Stalin inaugurated a change in the Soviet commitment to a harmonious international order. The ambassador was away, and Kennan, at that time 42 and deputy chief of mission, replied in a five-part telegram of 19 single-spaced pages. The essence of the so-called Long Telegram was that Stalin, far from changing policy, was in fact implementing a particularly robust version of traditional Russian designs. These grew out of Russia’s strategic culture and its centuries-old distrust of the outside world, onto which the Bolsheviks had grafted an implacable revolutionary doctrine of global sweep. Soviet leaders would not be swayed by good-will gestures. They had devoted their lives (and sacrificed millions of their compatriots) to an ideology positing a fundamental conflict between the Communist and capitalist worlds. Marxist dogma rendered even more truculent by the Leninist interpretation was, Kennan wrote, “justification for their instinctive fear of the outside world, for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not dare not to inflict, for sacrifice they felt bound to demand. In the name of Marxism they sacrificed every single ethical value. . . . Today they cannot dispense with it.”
The United States, Kennan insisted (sometimes in telegramese), was obliged to deal with this inherent hostility. With many of the world’s traditional power centers devastated and the Soviet leadership controlling vast natural resources and “the energies of one of world’s greatest peoples,” a contest about the nature of world order was inevitable. This would be “undoubtedly greatest task our diplomacy has ever faced and probably greatest it will ever have to face.”
In 1947, Kennan went public in a briefly anonymous article published in Foreign Affairs, signed by “X.” Among the thousands of articles produced on the subject, Kennan’s stands in a class by itself. Lucidly written, passionately argued, it elevated the debate to a philosophy of history.
The X article condensed the Long Telegram and gave it an apocalyptic vision. Soviet foreign policy represented “a cautious, persistent pressure toward the disruption and weakening of all rival influence and rival power.” The only way to deal with Moscow was by “a policy of firm containment designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counterforce at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world.”
So far this was a doctrine of equilibrium much like what a British foreign secretary in the 19th century might have counseled in dealing with a rising power — though the British foreign secretary would not have felt the need to define a final outcome. What conferred a dramatic quality on the X article was the way Kennan combined it with the historic American dream of the ultimate conversion of the adversary. Victory would come not on the battlefield nor even by diplomacy but by the implosion of the Soviet system. It was “entirely possible for the United States to influence by its actions” this eventuality. At some point in Moscow’s futile confrontations with the outside world — so long as the West took care they remained futile — some Soviet leader would feel the need to achieve additional support by reaching down to the immature and inexperienced masses. But if “the unity and efficacy of the Party as a political instrument” was ever so disrupted, “Soviet Russia might be changed over night from one of the strongest to one of the weakest and most pitiable of national societies.”
No other document forecast so presciently what would in fact occur under Mikhail Gorbachev. But that was four decades away. It left a number of issues open: How was a situation of strength to be defined? How was it to be built and then conveyed to the adversary? And how would it be sustained in the face of Soviet challenges?
Kennan never dealt with these issues. It took Dean Acheson to translate Kennan’s concept into the design that saw America through the cold war. As under secretary to George Marshall, Acheson worked on the Marshall Plan and, as secretary of state, created NATO, encouraged European unification and brought Germany into the Atlantic structure. In the Eisenhower administration, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles extended the alliance system through the Baghdad Pact for the Middle East and SEATO for Southeast Asia. In effect, containment came to be equated with constructing military alliances around the entire Soviet periphery over two continents.
The practical consequence was to shelve East-West diplomacy while the positions of strength were being built. The diplomatic initiative was left to the Soviet Union, which concentrated on Western weak points, or where it calculated that it had an inherent advantage (as in the exposed position of Berlin). Paradoxically containment, while hardheaded in its absolute opposition to the further expansion of the Soviet sphere, failed to reflect the real balance of forces. For with the American atomic monopoly — and the huge Soviet losses in the world war — that actual balance was never more favorable for the West than at the beginning of the cold war. A situation of strength did not need to be built; it already existed.
The most illustrious advocate of this point of view was Winston Churchill. In a series of speeches between 1946 and 1952, he called for diplomatic initiatives to produce a European settlement while American strength was still preponderant. The American policy based on the X article appealed for endurance so that history could display its inevitable tendencies. Churchill warned of the psychological strain of a seemingly endless strategic stalemate.
At the same time that Churchill was urging an immediate diplomatic confrontation, Kennan was growing impatient with Washington’s tendency to equate containment with a largely military strategy. He disavowed the global application of his principles. As he so often did, he pushed them to their abstract extreme, arguing that there were some regions “where you could perfectly well let people fall prey to totalitarian domination without any tragic consequences for world peace in general.” We could not bomb the Soviets into submission, nor convince them to see things our way; we had, in fact, no direct means to change the Soviet regime. We had instead to wait out an unsettled situation and occasionally mitigate it with diplomacy.
The issue became an aspect of the perennial debate between a realism stressing the importance of assessing power relationships and an idealism conflating moral impulses with historical inevitability. It was complicated by Kennan’s tendency to defend on occasion each side of the issue — leading to incisive and quite unsentimental essays and diary entries analyzing the global balance of power, followed by comparable reflections questioning the morality of practicing traditional power politics in the nuclear age.
Stable orders require elements of both power and morality. In a world without equilibrium, the stronger will encounter no restraint, and the weak will find no means of vindication. At the same time, if there is no commitment to the essential justice of existing arrangements, constant challenges or else a crusading attempt to impose value systems are inevitable.
The challenge of statesmanship is to define the components of both power and morality and strike a balance between them. This is not a one-time effort. It requires constant recalibration; it is as much an artistic and philosophical as a political enterprise. It implies a willingness to manage nuance and to live with ambiguity. The practitioners of the art must learn to put the attainable in the service of the ultimate and accept the element of compromise inherent in the endeavor. Bismarck defined statesmanship as the art of the possible. Kennan, as a public servant, was exalted above most others for a penetrating analysis that treated each element of international order separately, yet his career was stymied by his periodic rebellion against the need for a reconciliation that could incorporate each element only imperfectly.
At the beginning of his career, Kennan’s view of the European order was traditional. America should seek, he argued, an equilibrium based on enlightened self-interest and sustained by the permanent introduction of American power. “Heretofore, in our history, we had to take the world pretty much as we found it,” he wrote during the war. “From now on we will have to take it pretty much as we leave it when the crisis is over.” And that required “the firm, consistent and unceasing application of sheer power in accordance with a long-term policy.”
In pursuit of that European equilibrium, Kennan urged Washington and its democratic allies to oblige the Soviet Union to accept borders as far east as possible. In 1944, he proposed that Poland be placed under international trusteeship to prevent its domination by the Soviet Union. But when this was rejected by Roosevelt, who did not want to risk alienating Moscow in the last phase of the war, Kennan adjusted his view to the new realities as he saw them. If the United States was unwilling to force the Soviet Union into acceptable limits, “we should gather together at once into our hands all the cards we hold and begin to play them for their full value.” That meant dividing Europe into spheres of influence with the line of division running through Germany. The Western half of Germany should be integrated into a European federation. He called this a “bitterly modest” program, but “beggars can’t be choosers.”
Six years later, Acheson was building an Atlantic partnership in essentially the manner Kennan had proposed. But Kennan rejected it for three reasons: his innate perfectionism, his growing concern about the implications of nuclear war and his exclusion from a role in government.
The irony of Kennan’s thought was that his influence in government arose from his advocacy of what today’s debate would define as realism, while his admirers outside government were on the whole motivated by what they took to be his idealistic objections to the prevalent, essentially realistic policy. His vision of peace involved a balance of power of a very special American type, an equilibrium that was not to be measured by military force alone. It arose as well from the culture and historical evolution of a society whose ultimate power would be measured by its vigor and its people’s commitment to a better world. In the X article, he called on his countrymen to meet the “test of the overall worth of the United States as a nation among nations.”
Kennan saw clearly — more so than a vast majority of his contemporaries — the ultimate outcome of the division of Europe, but less clearly the road to get there. He was too intellectually rigorous to countenance the partial steps needed to reach the vistas he envisioned. Yet policy practice — as opposed to pure analysis — almost inevitably involves both compromise and risk.
This is why Kennan often shrank from the application of his own theories. In 1948, with an allied government in China crumbling, Kennan — at some risk to his career — advanced the minority view that a Communist victory would not necessarily be catastrophic. In a National War College lecture, he argued that “our safety depends on our ability to establish a balance among the hostile or undependable forces of the world.” A wise policy would induce these forces to “spend in conflict with each other, if they must spend it at all, the intolerance and violence and fanaticism which might otherwise be directed against us,” so “that they are thus compelled to cancel each other out and exhaust themselves in internecine conflict in order that the constructive forces, working for world stability, may continue to have the possibility of life.” But when, in 1969, the Nixon administration began to implement almost exactly that policy, Kennan called on me at the White House, in the company of a distinguished group of former ambassadors to the Soviet Union, to warn against proceeding with overtures to China lest the Soviet Union respond by war.
So emphatically did Kennan sometimes reject the immediately feasible that he destroyed his usefulness in the conduct of day-to-day diplomacy. This turned his life into a special kind of tragedy. Until his old age, he yearned for the role in public service to which his brilliance and vision should have propelled him, but that was always denied him by his refusal to modify his perfectionism.
A major element in this refusal was Kennan’s growing repugnance at the prospect of nuclear war. From the beginning of the nuclear age, he emphasized that the new weapons progressively destroyed the relationship between military and political objectives. Historically, wars had been fought because the prospect of accommodation seemed more onerous than the consequences of defeat. But when nuclear war implied tens of millions of casualties — and arguably the end of civilization — that equation was turned on its head.
The most haunting problem for modern policy makers became what they would in fact do when the limit of diplomatic options had been reached: Did any leader or group of leaders have the right to assume the moral responsibility for taking risks capable of destroying civilized order? But by the same calculus, could any leader or group of leaders assume the responsibility for abandoning nuclear deterrence and turn the world over to groups with possibly genocidal tendencies? Acheson chose the risk of deterrence, probably convinced that he would never have to implement it. Kennan abandoned deterrence and the nuclear option, at one stage even seeking to organize a no-first-use pledge from American policy makers and musing publicly in an interview whether Soviet dominance over Western Europe might not be preferable to nuclear war.
When Kennan was operating in the realm of philosophy, he tended to push matters to passionate and abstract conclusions. Yet under pressure of concrete events, he would swing back to the role of a hard-nosed advocate of specific operational policies. After the Chinese offensive across the Yalu in 1950, he overcame his distaste for Acheson’s more militant policy to urge him to refuse any attempt at diplomacy with the Communist world and instead adopt a Churchillian posture of defiance. Similarly, in 1968, his decade-long advocacy of military disengagement in Europe did not keep him from urging President Johnson to respond to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia by sending another 100,000 troops to Europe.
It was my good fortune to know both Acheson and Kennan at or near the height of their intellectual powers. Acheson was the greatest secretary of state of the postwar period. He designed the application of the concepts for which Kennan was the earliest and most eloquent spokesman. The growing estrangement between these two giants of American foreign policy was as sad as it was inevitable. Acheson was indispensable for the architecture of the immediate postwar decade; Kennan’s view raised the issues of a more distant future. Acheson considered Kennan more significant for literature than for policy making and wholly impractical. Kennan’s reaction was frustration at his growing irrelevance to policy making and his inability to convey his long-term view.
On the issues of the day, I sided with Acheson and have not changed my views in retrospect. If Europe was to be secured, America did not have the choice between postponing the drawing of dividing lines or implementing a diplomatic process to determine whether dividing lines needed to be drawn at all. The application of Kennan’s evolving theories in the immediate postwar decades (particularly his opposition to NATO, his critique of the Truman doctrine and his call for a negotiated American disengagement from Europe) would have proved as unsettling as Acheson predicted.
At the same time, Kennan deserves recognition for raising the key issues of the long-term future. He warned of a time in which America might strain its domestic resilience by goals beyond the physical and psychological capacity of even the most exceptional society.
Kennan was eloquent in emphasizing the transient nature of a division of the world into military blocs and the ultimate need to transcend it by diplomacy. He came up with remedies that were both too early in the historical process and occasionally too abstract. He at times neglected the importance of timing. Gaddis quotes him as pointing out that he had problems with sequencing: “I have the habit of seeing two opposing sides of a question, both of them wrong, and then overstating myself, so that I appear to be inconsistent.”
In a turbulent era, Kennan’s consistent themes were balance and restraint. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he applied these convictions to his side of the debate as well. He testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee against the Vietnam War but on the limited ground that there was no strategic need for it. He emphasized that the threat posed by Hanoi was exaggerated and that the alleged unity of the Communist world was a myth. But he also warned elsewhere against “violent objection to what exists, unaccompanied by any constructive concept of what, ideally ought to exist in its place.” He questioned the policy makers’ judgment but not their intent; he understood their dilemmas even as he both criticized and sought to join them.
Oscillating between profound perceptions of both the world of ideas and the world of power, Kennan often found himself caught between them. Out of his inward turmoil emerged themes that, like the movements of a great symphony, none of us who followed could ignore, even when they were occasionally discordant.
s time went on, Kennan retreated into writing history. He did so less as a historian than as a teacher to policy makers, hoping to instruct America in the importance of moderation in objectives and restraint in the use of power. He took as an example the collapse of the European order that led to the outbreak of World War I. He produced two works of exemplary scholarship and elegant writing, “Russia Leaves the War” and “The Decision to Intervene.” He published a book of lectures and essays about the making of American foreign policy in the first half of the 20th century, “American Diplomacy: 1900-1950,” which remains the best short summary of the subject.
Yet Kennan did not derive genuine satisfaction from the accolades that so fulsomely came his way from the nonpolicy world. His partly self-created exile from policy making was accompanied by permanent nostalgia for his calling. In his diary he meticulously recorded the tribute that was paid to him by the American chargé d’affaires at an embassy dinner in Moscow in 1981, noting that no secretary of state had ever paid him comparable attention.
Policy makers, even when respectful, shied away from employing him because the sweep of his vision was both uncomfortable (even when right) and beyond the outer limit of their immediate concerns on the tactical level. And the various protest movements, which took up some of his ideas, added to his discomfort because he could never share their single-minded self-righteousness.
Dean Acheson wrote that separation from high office is like the end of a great love affair — a void left by the disappearance of heightened sensitivities and focused concerns. What is poignant about Kennan’s fate is that his parting came before he reached the pinnacle. He spent the rest of his life as an observer at the threshold of political influence, confined to what he called “the unbroken loneliness of pure research and writing.”
Though he lived until the age of 101 (dying in 2005) and saw many of his prophecies come into being, even the collapse of the Soviet Union did not confer on him the elation of vindication. Rather, it marked in his mind the end of his literary vocation. The need for his influence on policy making had irrevocably disappeared. “Reconcile yourself to the inevitable,” he confided to his diary, “you are never again, in the short remainder of your life, to be permitted to do anything significant.” He put aside the third volume of his majestic history of pre-World War I diplomacy. He had no further lessons to teach his country.
We can be grateful to John Lewis Gaddis for bringing Kennan back to us, thoughtful, human, self-centered, contradictory, inspirational — a permanent spur as consciences are wont to be. Masterfully researched, exhaustively documented, Gaddis’s moving work gives us a figure with whom, however one might differ on details, it was a privilege to be a contemporary.
Early in his career, Kennan wrote that he was resigned to “the lonely pleasure of one who stands at long last on a chilly and inhospitable mountaintop where few have been before, where few can follow and where few will consent to believe he has been.” Gaddis had the acumen to follow Kennan’s tortured quest and to convince us that Kennan had indeed reached his mountaintop.
Henry A. Kissinger’s latest book, “On China,” was published in May.
A version of this review appeared in print on November 13, 2011, on page BR1 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Mr. X.
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George F. Kennan
In the late 1940s, Kennan wrote two documents, the “Long Telegram” and the “X Article,” which set forward the strategy of containment that would define U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union for the next four decades. This achievement alone would qualify him as the most influential American diplomat of the Cold War era. But he was also an architect of the Marshall Plan, and a prize-winning historian, who would become one of the most outspoken critics of American diplomacy, politics and culture during the last half of the 20th century.
Historian John Lewis Gaddis began this magisterial history almost 30 years ago, interviewing Kennan frequently and gaining complete access to his voluminous diaries and other personal papers. So frank and detailed were these materials that Kennan and Gaddis agreed that the book would not appear until after Kennan’s death. It was well worth the wait: the journals give this book a breathtaking candor and intimacy that match its century-long sweep.
We see Kennan’s insecurity as a Midwesterner among elites at Princeton, his budding dissatisfaction with authority and the status quo, his struggles with depression, his gift for satire, and his sharp insights on the policies and people he encountered. Kennan turned these sharp analytical gifts upon himself, even to the point of regularly recording dreams. The result is a remarkably revealing view of how this greatest of Cold War strategists came to doubt his strategy—and always doubted himself.
Kennan exhibited the rare ability to reassess his positions, and he became disillusioned with the policy of containment as it took on a more militaristic stance under the Truman administration. By the mid-1970s, he began to view the United States, not the Soviet Union, as the greatest threat to international stability. But his forward-looking vision—that the Soviet Union would eventually defeat itself—was eventually realized with the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1991. Ultimately, as Gaddis contends, “Kennan’s strategy…was more robust than his own faith in it.”
This is a landmark work of history and biography that reveals the vast influence and rich inner landscape of a life that both mirrored and shaped the century it spanned.
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February 15, 2012
One of the best researched books I have ever read. Author certainly “brings out” Kenan’s remarkable,even poetic, writing ability. Author poses contradictions in Kenan’s personality: an absolute genius and a gentleman, yet one tormented by a pessimistic outlook for the world.Reviewer: David W
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George F. Kennan
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| George F. Kennan | |
|---|---|
 | |
| United States Ambassador to the Soviet Union | |
| In office May 14, 1952 – September 19, 1952 | |
| Preceded by | Alan G. Kirk |
| Succeeded by | Charles E. Bohlen |
| United States Ambassador to Yugoslavia | |
| In office May 16, 1961 – July 28, 1963 | |
| Preceded by | Karl L. Rankin |
| Succeeded by | Charles Burke Elbrick |
| Personal details | |
| Born | February 16, 1904 Milwaukee, Wisconsin |
| Died | March 17, 2005 (aged 101) Princeton, New Jersey |
- This article is about the US diplomat and historian. For the explorer and war correspondent, see George Kennan (explorer).
In the late 1940s, his writings inspired the Truman Doctrine and the U.S. foreign policy of “containing” the Soviet Union, thrusting him into a lifelong role as a leading authority on the Cold War. His “Long Telegram“[1] from Moscow in 1946 and the subsequent 1947 article “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” argued that the Soviet regime was inherently expansionist and that its influence had to be “contained” in areas of vital strategic importance to the United States. These texts quickly emerged as foundation texts of the Cold War, expressing the Truman administration‘s new anti-Soviet Union policy. Kennan also played a leading role in the development of definitive Cold War programs and institutions, notably the Marshall Plan.
Soon after his concepts had become US policy, Kennan began to criticize the foreign policies that he had seemingly helped launch. Subsequently, prior to the end of 1948, Kennan was confident the state of affairs in Western Europe had developed to the point where positive dialogue could commence with the Soviet Union. His proposals were discounted by the Truman administration and Kennan’s influence was marginalized, particularly after Dean Acheson was appointed Secretary of State in 1949. Soon thereafter, U.S. Cold War strategy assumed a more assertive and militaristic quality, causing Kennan to lament over what he believed was as an aberration of his previous assessments.
In 1950, Kennan left the Department of State, except for two brief ambassadorial stints in Moscow and Yugoslavia and became a leading realist critic of U.S. foreign policy. He continued to be a leading thinker in international affairs as a faculty member of the Institute for Advanced Study from 1956 until his death at age 101 in March 2005.
Contents[hide] |
[edit] Biography
[edit] Early life and career
Kennan was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Kossuth Kent Kennan, a lawyer specializing in tax law, and Florence James Kennan. Mrs. Kennan died three days after giving birth to Kennan. The boy always lamented not having a mother; he was never close to his father or stepmother. However he was close to his older sisters. He attended St. John’s Military Academy in Delafield, Wisconsin and arrived at Princeton University in the second half of 1921.[2] Unaccustomed to the “elite” atmosphere of the Ivy League, the shy and introverted Kennan found his undergraduate years difficult and lonely.[3] After receiving his bachelor’s degree in 1925, Kennan considered applying to law school, but decided it was too expensive and instead opted to apply to the newly formed Foreign Service.[4][5] He passed the qualifying examination, and after seven months of studying at the Foreign Service School in Washington, he took on his first post, as a vice consul in Geneva, Switzerland. Within a year, he was transferred to a post in Hamburg, Germany. In 1928, Kennan considered leaving the Foreign Service to go back to school when he was selected for a linguist training program that would give him three years of graduate level study without having to leave the service.[4]In 1929, Kennan began his program on history, politics, culture and the Russian language at the University of Berlin‘s Oriental Institute. In doing so, he would follow in the footsteps of his grandfather’s younger cousin, George Kennan (explorer), who had been a leading 19th-century expert on Imperial Russia and author of Siberia and the Exile System, a well-received 1891 account of the Czarist prison system.[6] During the course of his diplomatic career, Kennan would master a number of other languages, including German, French, Polish, Czech, Portuguese, and Norwegian.[5]
In 1931, Kennan was stationed at the legation in Riga, Latvia, where, as Third Secretary, he worked on Soviet economic affairs. From his post, Kennan “grew to mature interest in Russian affairs”.[7] When the U.S. opened diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union in 1933 following the election of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Kennan accompanied U.S. ambassador William C. Bullitt to Moscow. By the mid-1930s, Kennan was among the core of professionally-trained Russian experts on the staff of the U.S. embassy in Moscow, along with Charles E. Bohlen, and Loy W. Henderson. These officials had been influenced by the long-time head of the State Department’s division of East European Affairs, Robert F. Kelley.[8] They believed that there was little basis for cooperation with the Soviet Union, even against potential adversaries.[9] Meanwhile, Kennan closely followed Stalin’s Great Purge, which would profoundly affect his outlook on the internal dynamics of the Soviet regime for the rest of his life.[7]
Kennan found himself in strong disagreement with Joseph E. Davies, Bullitt’s successor as Ambassador to the Soviet Union, who was indifferent to the Great Purge and other aspects of Stalin’s rule. Kennan carried no sway over Davies’ decisions, and the ambassador even suggested that Kennan be transferred out of Moscow for “his health”.[7] Kennan again contemplated resigning from the service, but instead decided to accept the Russian desk at State Department in Washington.[10] By September 1938, Kennan had been reassigned to a post at the legation in Prague. Following the fall of the Czechoslovak Republic to Nazi Germany at the outbreak of World War II, Kennan was assigned to Berlin. There, he supported the U.S.’s Lend-Lease policy, but warned against displaying any notion of American support for the Soviet Union, which he considered to be an unfit ally. He was interned in Germany for six months after the United States had entered the war in December 1941.[11]
In September 1942, Kennan was assigned as a counselor in Lisbon, where he begrudgingly took on an administrative role handling intelligence and base operations. In January 1944, he was sent to London, where he served as counselor of the U.S. delegation to the European Advisory Commission, which worked to prepare Allied policy in Europe. There, Kennan even grew more disenchanted with the State Department, which he believed was ignoring his qualifications as a trained specialist. However, within months of entering the post, he was appointed deputy chief of the U.S. mission in Moscow, upon request by W. Averell Harriman, the Ambassador to the Soviet Union.[12]
[edit] Cold War
[edit] The “long telegram”
In Moscow, Kennan again felt that his opinions were being ignored by Harry S. Truman and policy makers in Washington. Kennan tried repeatedly to persuade policymakers to abandon plans for cooperation with the Soviet Union in favor of a sphere of influence approach in Europe to reduce the Soviets’ power there. Kennan believed that a federation needed to be established in western Europe to counter Soviet influence and power in the region and to compete against the Soviet stronghold in eastern Europe.[13]Kennan served as deputy head of the U.S. mission in Moscow until April 1946. Near the end of that term, the Treasury Department requested that the State Department explain recent Soviet behavior, such as its disinclination to support the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.[5] Kennan responded on February 22, 1946 by sending a lengthy 5,500-word telegram (sometimes cited as being over 8,000 words) from Moscow to Secretary of State James Byrnes outlining a new strategy on how to handle diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union.[1] At the “bottom of the Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs is the traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity”. Following the Russian Revolution, this sense of insecurity became mixed with communist ideology and “Oriental secretiveness and conspiracy”.[14]
Soviet behavior on the international stage depended chiefly on the internal necessities of Joseph Stalin‘s regime; according to Kennan, Stalin needed a hostile world in order to legitimize his autocratic rule. Stalin thus used Marxism-Leninism as a “justification for [the Soviet Union's] instinctive fear of the outside world, for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not dare not to inflict, for sacrifice they felt bound to demand… Today they cannot dispense with it. It is the fig leaf of their moral and intellectual respectability.”[14]
The solution was to strengthen Western institutions in order to render them invulnerable to the Soviet challenge, while awaiting the mellowing of the Soviet regime.[15]
His new policy of containment was that Soviet pressure had to “be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points.” [16]
This dispatch brought Kennan to the attention of Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, a leading advocate among Truman’s inner circle of a hard-line approach to relations with the Soviets, the United States’ former wartime ally. Forrestal helped bring him back to Washington, where Kennan served as the first deputy for foreign affairs at the National War College and then strongly influenced his decision to publish the “X” article.[5][17]
The goal of his policy was to withdraw all the US forces from Europe. “The settlement reached would give the Kremlin sufficient reassurance against the establishment of regimes in Eastern Europe hostile to the Soviet Union, tempering the degree of control over that area that the Soviet leaders felt it necessary to exercise.[18]
Meanwhile, in March 1947, Truman appeared before Congress and used Kennan’s warnings in the “long telegram” as the basis of what became known as the Truman Doctrine. “I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures”.[19]
[edit] “X”
Main article: X Article
Unlike the “long telegram”, Kennan’s well-timed article appearing in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs under the pseudonym “X”, entitled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct“, did not begin by emphasizing “traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity”;[14] instead it asserted that Stalin’s policy was shaped by a combination of Marxist-Leninist ideology, which advocated revolution to defeat the capitalist forces in the outside world and Stalin’s determination to use the notion of “capitalist encirclement” as a fig leaf legitimizing his regimentation of Soviet society so that he could consolidate his political power.[20] Kennan argued that Stalin would not (and moreover could not) moderate the supposed Soviet determination to overthrow Western governments. Thus,“the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies… Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the Western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and manoeuvers of Soviet policy, but which cannot be charmed or talked out of existence.”[21]His new policy of containment declared that Soviet pressure had to “be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points.” [16] The goal of his policy was to withdraw all the US forces from Europe. “The settlement reached would give the Kremlin sufficient reassurance against the establishment of regimes in Eastern Europe hostile to the Soviet Union, tempering the degree of control over that area that the Soviet leaders felt it necessary to exercise.” [18]
Kennan further argued that the United States would have to undertake this containment alone but if it could do so without undermining its own economic health and political stability, the Soviet party structure would undergo a period of immense strain eventually resulting in “either the break-up or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power”.[22]
The publication of the “X” article soon triggered one of the more intense debates of the Cold War. Walter Lippmann, a leading U.S. journalist and commentator on international affairs, strongly criticized the “X” article.[23] Lippmann argued that Kennan’s strategy of containment was “a strategic monstrosity” that could “be implemented only by recruiting, subsidizing and supporting a heterogeneous array of satellites, clients, dependents and puppets”.[24] Lippmann argued that diplomacy was the key towards improving relations with the Soviets; he suggested that the US withdraw its forces from Europe and reunify and demilitarize Germany.[25] Meanwhile, word soon leaked out that “X” was indeed Kennan. This information gave the “X” article the status of an official document expressing the Truman administration’s new policy toward Moscow.[26]
Kennan had not intended the “X” article as a prescription for policy.[27] For the rest of his life, Kennan continued to reiterate that the article did not imply an automatic commitment to resist Soviet ‘expansionism’ wherever it occurred, with little distinction of primary and secondary interests. The article did not make it clear that Kennan favored employing political and economic rather than military methods as the chief agent of containment.[28] “My thoughts about containment” said Kennan in a 1996 interview to CNN, “were of course distorted by the people who understood it and pursued it exclusively as a military concept; and I think that that, as much as any other cause, led to [the] 40 years of unnecessary, fearfully expensive and disoriented process of the Cold War.”[29]
In addition, the administration made few attempts to explain the distinction between Soviet influence and the international Communist movement to the U.S. public. “In part, this failure reflected the belief of many in Washington”, writes historian John Lewis Gaddis, “that only the prospect of an undifferentiated global threat could shake Americans out of their isolationist tendencies that remained latent among them”.[30]
In a PBS television interview with David Gergen in 1996, Kennan again reiterated that he did not regard the Soviets as primarily a military threat. “They were not like Hitler“, noted Kennan. In Kennan’s view, this misunderstanding:
“…all came down to one sentence in the “X” Article where I said that wherever these people, meaning the Soviet leadership, confronted us with dangerous hostility anywhere in the world, we should do everything possible to contain it and not let them expand any further. I should have explained that I didn’t suspect them of any desire to launch an attack on us. This was right after the war, and it was absurd to suppose that they were going to turn around and attack the United States. I didn’t think I needed to explain that, but I obviously should have done it.”[31]The “X” article meant sudden fame for Kennan, who became the father of the government’s containment doctrine overnight, leading him to write in his memoirs, “My official loneliness came in fact to an end … My reputation was made. My voice now carried.”[32]
[edit] Influence under Marshall
Between April 1947 and December 1948, when George C. Marshall was Secretary of State, Kennan was more influential than he was at any other period in his career. Marshall valued his strategic vision and had him create and head what is now called the Policy Planning Staff, the United States Department of State‘s internal think tank.[33] Kennan became the first Director of Policy Planning.[34][35] Marshall relied heavily on him to prepare policy recommendations.[36]As an intellectual architect of the Marshall Plan, Kennan helped launch the pillar of economic and political containment of the Soviet Union. Although Kennan regarded the Soviet Union as too weak to risk war, he nonetheless considered it an enemy capable of expanding into Western Europe through subversion, given the popular support for Moscow-controlled Communist parties in Western Europe, which remained demoralized by the devastation of the Second World War. To counter this potential source of Soviet influence, Kennan’s solution was to direct economic aid and covert political help to Japan and Western Europe to revive Western governments and prop up international capitalism; by doing so the U.S. would help to rebuild the balance of power. In June 1948, Kennan proposed covert support of left-wing parties not oriented toward Moscow and to labor unions in Western Europe in order to engineer a rift between Moscow and working class movements in Western Europe.[37]
As the U.S. was launching the Marshall Plan, Kennan and the Truman administration hoped that the Soviet Union’s rejection of Marshall aid would place strains on its relations with its Communist allies in Eastern Europe.[37] Kennan was proposing a series of efforts to exploit the schism between Moscow and Josip Broz Tito‘s Yugoslavia. Kennan proposed conducting covert action in the Balkans aimed at further eroding Moscow’s influence.[38]
The administration’s new vigorously anti-Soviet policy also became evident when, at Kennan’s suggestion, the U.S. changed its long-standing hostility to Francisco Franco‘s fascist regime in Spain in order to secure U.S. influence in the Mediterranean. Kennan had observed in 1947 that the Truman Doctrine implied a new view of Franco. His suggestion heralded the turn in U.S.-Spanish relations, which ended in close military cooperation after 1950.[39]
[edit] Differences with Acheson
Kennan’s influence rapidly declined under Secretary of State Dean Acheson, the successor of the ailing George Marshall in 1949 and 1950.[40][41] Acheson did not regard the Soviet ‘threat’ as chiefly political, and he saw the Berlin blockade starting in June 1948, the first Soviet test of a nuclear weapon in August 1949, the Communist revolution in China a month later and the beginning of the Korean War in June 1950 as evidence of his view. Truman and Acheson decided to delineate the Western sphere of influence and to create a system of alliances backed by conventional and nuclear weapons.This policy was written as NSC-68, a classified report issued by the United States National Security Council in April 1950 and written by Paul Nitze, Kennan’s successor as Director of Policy Planning.[42] Kennan and Charles Bohlen another State Department expert on Russia, fought over the wording of NSC-68, which emerged as the blueprint for waging the Cold War.[43] Kennan rejected the idea that Stalin had a grand design for world conquest implicit in Nitze’s report and argued that he actually feared overextending Russian power. Kennan even argued that NSC-68 should not have been drafted at all, as it would make U.S. policies too rigid, simplistic and militaristic. Acheson overruled Kennan and Bohlen, backing up the view of the Soviet menace in NSC-68.[44]
Kennan opposed the building of the hydrogen bomb and the rearmament of Germany, which were policies backed up by the assumptions of NSC-68.[45][46] During the Korean War (which began when North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950), when rumors started circulating in the State Department that plans were being made to advance beyond the 38th parallel into North Korea, a move that Kennan considered highly dangerous, he engaged in intense arguments with Assistant Secretary of State for the Far East Dean Rusk, who apparently supported Acheson’s goal to forcibly unite the Koreas.[47]
Kennan lost influence with Acheson, who in any case relied much less on his staff than Marshall had. Kennan resigned as director of policy planning in December 1949 but stayed in the department as counselor until June 1950.[48] Acheson replaced Kennan with Nitze in January 1950, who was far more comfortable with the calculus of military power. Afterwards, Kennan accepted an appointment as Visitor to the Institute for Advanced Study from fellow moderate Robert Oppenheimer, Director of the Institute.[49]
Despite his influence, Kennan was never really comfortable in government. He always regarded himself as an outsider and had little patience with critics. W. Averell Harriman, the U.S. ambassador in Moscow when Kennan was deputy between 1944 and 1946, remarked that Kennan was “a man who understood Russia but not the United States”.[50]
[edit] Ambassador to the Soviet Union
In December 1951, President Truman nominated Kennan to be the next United States ambassador to the Soviet Union. His appointment was strongly supported in the Senate.[51]At the time U.S.-Soviet tensions had moved beyond the point at which diplomacy could play a significant role. In many measures (to Kennan’s consternation) the priorities of the administration focused more on solidifying alignments against the Soviets than negotiating differences with them.[51] In his memoirs, Kennan recalled, “So far as I could see, we were expecting to be able to gain our objectives… without making any concessions though, only ‘if we were really all-powerful, and could hope to get away with it’. I very much doubted that this was the case.”[52]
At Moscow, Kennan found the atmosphere even more regimented than on his previous trips, with police guards following him everywhere, discouraging contact with Soviet citizens.[53] At the time, Soviet propaganda charged the U.S. with preparing for war, which Kennan did not wholly dismiss. “I began to ask myself whether… we had not contributed… by the overmilitarization of our policies and statements… to a belief in Moscow that it was war we were after, that we had settled for its inevitability, that it was only a matter of time before we would unleash it.”[54]
In September 1952, Kennan made a misstatement that cost him his ambassadorship. In an answer to a question at a press conference, Kennan compared his conditions at the ambassador’s residence in Moscow to those he had encountered while interned in Berlin during the first few months of the Second World War. While his statement was not unfounded, the Soviets took it as an implied analogy with Nazi Germany. The Soviets then declared Kennan persona non grata and refused to allow him to re-enter the Soviet Union. Kennan acknowledged in retrospect that it was a “foolish thing for me to have said.”[55]
[edit] Kennan and the Eisenhower administration
Kennan returned to Washington where he became embroiled in disagreements with Dwight D. Eisenhower‘s hawkish secretary of State, John Foster Dulles.[56] Even so he was able to work constructively with the new administration. In the summer of 1953 President Eisenhower asked Kennan to chair the first of a series of top-secret teams, dubbed Operation Solarium, examining the advantages and disadvantages of continuing the Truman administration’s approach of containment and of seeking to “roll back” existing areas of Soviet influence. Upon completion of the project, the president appeared to endorse the group’s recommendations.[57][58]By lending his prestige to Kennan’s position, the president tacitly signaled his intention to formulate the strategy of his administration within the framework of its predecessor’s, despite the misgivings of some within the Republican Party.[59] The critical difference between the Truman and Eisenhower approaches to containment had to do with Eisenhower’s concerns that the U.S. could not indefinitely afford high military spending.[60] The new president thus sought to minimize costs not by acting whenever and wherever the Soviets acted (a strategy designed to avoid risk) but rather whenever and wherever the U.S. could afford to act.
[edit] Ambassador to Yugoslavia
During John F. Kennedy‘s 1960 presidential election campaign Kennan wrote to the future president to offer some suggestions on how his administration should improve the country’s standing in the world, in light of Soviet and Chinese efforts to break down the Americans and their western alliances. Kennan wrote, “What is needed is a succession of… calculated steps, timed in such a way as not only to throw the adversary off balance but to keep him off it, and prepared with sufficient privacy so that the advantage of surprise can be retained.”[61] He also urged the administration to “assure a divergence of outlook and policy between the Russians and Chinese,” which could be accomplished by improving relations with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev who had wanted to distance himself from the communist Chinese.[62] He wrote, “We should… without deceiving ourselves about Khrushchev’s political personality and without nurturing any unreal hopes, be concerned to keep him politically in the running and to encourage the survival in Moscow of the tendencies he personifies.” In addition, he recommended that the U.S. work towards creating divisions within the Soviet bloc by undermining its power in Eastern Europe and supporting the independent propensities of satellite governments.[62] Although Kennan had not been considered for a position by Kennedy’s inner circle of advisers, the president himself offered Kennan the choice of ambassadorship in either Poland or Yugoslavia. Kennan was more interested in Belgrade, so he accepted Kennedy’s offer and took his post in Yugoslavia in May 1961.[62]Kennan was tasked with trying to strengthen Yugoslavia’s stance against the Soviets and to encourage other states in the Eastern Bloc to pursue autonomy from the Soviets. Kennan found his ambassadorship in Belgrade to be much improved from his experiences in Moscow a decade earlier. He commented, “I was favored in being surrounded with a group of exceptionally able and loyal assistants, whose abilities I myself admired, whose judgment I valued, and whose attitude toward myself was at all times … enthusiastically cooperative. … Who was I to complain?”[62] Kennan found the Yugoslav government treated the American diplomats politely and warmly, a sharp contrast from the way in which he was treated in Moscow. He wrote that the Yugoslavs “considered me, rightly or wrongly, a distinguished person in the US, and they were pleased that someone whose name they had heard before was being sent to Belgrade.”[63]
Kennan found it difficult to conduct his job in Belgrade. President Josip Broz Tito and his foreign minister Koča Popović began to suspect that Kennedy would embrace an anti-Yugoslav policy during his term. Tito and Popović saw Kennedy’s decision to observe Captive Nations Week as an indication that the U.S. would support anti-communist liberation efforts in Yugoslavia. Tito also believed that the CIA and the Pentagon were the true directors of American foreign policy. Kennan attempted to restore Tito’s confidence in the American foreign policy establishment but his efforts were compromised by a series of diplomatic blunders and crimes, the Bay of Pigs Invasion and the U-2 spy incident.[63]
Relations between Yugoslavia and the United States quickly began to break down. In September 1961, Tito held a conference of nonaligned nations, where he delivered speeches that the U.S. government interpreted as being pro-Soviet. According to historian David Mayers, Kennan argued that Tito’s perceived pro-Soviet position was in fact a ploy to “buttress Khrushchev’s position within the Politburo against hardliners opposed to improving relations with the West and against China, which was pushing for a major Soviet-US showdown.” This position also earned Tito “credit in the Kremlin to be drawn upon against future Chinese attacks on his communist credentials.”[64] While politicians and government officials expressed growing concern over Yugoslavia’s relationship with the Soviet Union, Kennan believed that the country had an “anomalous position in the Cold War that objectively suited US purposes”.[65] Kennan also believed that within a few years, Yugoslavia’s example would lead states in the Eastern bloc to demand more social and economic autonomy from the Soviets.[65]
By 1962, Congress had passed legislation to deny financial aid grants to Yugoslavia, to withdraw the sale of spare parts for Yugoslav warplanes and to revoke the country’s most favored nation status. Kennan strongly protested the legislation, arguing that it would only result in a straining of relations between Yugoslavia and the U.S.[66] Kennan came to Washington in the summer of 1962 to lobby against the legislation but was unable to elicit a change from Congress. President Kennedy supported Kennan in private but remained noncommittal in public, as he did not want to jeopardize his slim majority support in Congress on a potentially contentious issue.[66] With the outlook of U.S.–Yugoslav relations getting progressively worse, Kennan tendered his resignation as ambassador in late July 1963.[67]
[edit] Academic career and later life
In 1957, Kennan was invited by the BBC to give the annual Reith Lectures – a series of six radio lectures, which were titled Russia, the Atom and the West. For these, Kennan explored the history, impact and possible consequences of relations between Russia and the West.After the end of his brief ambassadorial post in Yugoslavia in 1963, Kennan spent the rest of his life in academe, becoming a leading realist critic of U.S. foreign policy.[48] Having spent 18 months as a scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study between 1950 and 1952, Kennan permanently joined the faculty of the Institute’s School of Historical Studies in 1956.[68] During his career there, Kennan wrote seventeen books and scores of articles on international relations. He won the Pulitzer Prize for history, the National Book Award, the Bancroft Prize and the Francis Parkman Prize for Russia Leaves the War, published in 1956.[50] He again won a Pulitzer and a National Book Award in 1968 for Memoirs, 1925–1950.[69] A second volume, taking his reminiscences up to 1963 was published in 1972. Among his other works were American Diplomacy 1900–1950, Sketches from a Life, published in 1989 and Around the Cragged Hill in 1993.[70]
His properly historical works amount to a six-volume account of the relations between Russia and the West from 1875 to his own time; the period from 1894 to 1914 was planned but not completed. He was chiefly concerned with:
- the folly of the First World War as a choice of policy; he argues that the costs of modern war, direct and indirect, predictably exceeded the benefits of removing the Hohenzollerns.
- the ineffectiveness of summit diplomacy, with the Conference of Versailles as a type-case. National leaders have too much to do to give any single matter the constant and flexible attention which diplomatic problems require.
- The Allied intervention in Russia of 1918–19. He was indignant with Soviet accounts of a vast capitalist conspiracy against the world’s first worker’s state, some of which do not even mention the World War; he was equally indignant with the decision to intervene as costly and harmful. He argues that the interventions may by arousing Russian nationalism, have ensured the survival of the Bolshevik state.
[edit] Realism
Political realism formed the basis of Kennan’s work as a diplomat and diplomatic historian and remains relevant to the debate over American foreign policy, which since the 19th century has been characterized by a shift from the Founding Fathers’ realist school to the idealistic or Wilsonian school of international relations. In the realist tradition, security is based on the principle of a balance of power, whereas the Wilsonian view (considered impractical by realists) relies on morality as the sole determining factor in statecraft. According to the Wilsonian approach the spread of democracy abroad as a foreign policy is key and morals are universally valid. During the Presidency of Bill Clinton, American diplomacy reflected the Wilsonian school to such a degree that those in favor of the realist approach likened President Clinton’s policies to social work. According to Kennan, whose concept of American diplomacy was based on the realist approach, such moralism without regard to the realities of power and the national interest is self-defeating and will lead to the erosion of American power.[71]In his historical writings and memoirs, Kennan laments in great detail the failings of democratic foreign policymakers and those of the United States in particular. According to Kennan, when American policymakers suddenly confronted the Cold War, they had inherited little more than rationale and rhetoric “utopian in expectations, legalistic in concept, moralistic in [the] demand it seemed to place on others, and self-righteous in the degree of high-mindedness and rectitude… to ourselves”.[72] The source of the problem is the force of public opinion, a force that is inevitably unstable, unserious, subjective, emotional, and simplistic. Kennan has insisted that the U.S. public can only be united behind a foreign policy goal on the “primitive level of slogans and jingoistic ideological inspiration”.[73]
Containment in 1967, when he published the first volume of his memoirs, involved something other than the use of military “counterforce”. He was never pleased that the policy he influenced was associated with the arms build-up of the Cold War. In his memoirs, Kennan argued that containment did not demand a militarized U.S. foreign policy. “Counterforce” implied the political and economic defense of Western Europe against the disruptive effect of the war on European society.[74] Exhausted by war, the Soviet Union posed no serious military threat to the United States or its allies at the beginning of the Cold War but rather an ideological and political rival.[75]
In the 1960s, Kennan criticized U.S. involvement in Vietnam, arguing that the United States had little vital interest in the region.[76] In Kennan’s view, the Soviet Union, Britain, Germany, Japan and North America remained the arenas of vital U.S. interests. In the 1970s and 1980s, he emerged as a leading critic of the renewed arms race as détente was scrapped.[77]
In 1989 President George H. W. Bush awarded Kennan the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. Yet, he remained a realist critic of recent U.S. presidents, urging the U.S. government to “withdraw from its public advocacy of democracy and human rights”. “This whole tendency to see ourselves as the center of political enlightenment and as teachers to a great part of the rest of the world strikes me as unthought-through, vainglorious and undesirable”, he said in an interview with the New York Review of Books in 1999. “I would like to see our government gradually withdraw from its public advocacy of democracy and human rights. I submit that governments should deal with other governments as such, and should avoid unnecessary involvement, particularly personal involvement, with their leaders.”[50] These ideas were particularly applicable to U.S. relations with China and Russia. Kennan opposed the Clinton administration’s war in Kosovo and its expansion of NATO (the establishment of which he had also opposed half a century earlier), expressing fears that both policies would worsen relations with Russia.[78] He described NATO enlargement as a “strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions”.[79]
Kennan remained vigorous and alert in the last years of his life, although arthritis had him using a wheelchair. In his later years, Kennan concluded that “the general effect of Cold War extremism was to delay rather than hasten the great change that overtook the Soviet Union”.[80] At 98 he warned of the unforeseen consequences of waging war against Iraq. He warned that launching an attack on Iraq would amount to waging a second war that “bears no relation to the first war against terrorism” and declared efforts by the Bush administration to link al Qaeda with Saddam Hussein “pathetically unsupportive and unreliable”. Kennan went on to warn:
Anyone who has ever studied the history of American diplomacy, especially military diplomacy, knows that you might start in a war with certain things on your mind as a purpose of what you are doing, but in the end, you found yourself fighting for entirely different things that you had never thought of before… In other words, war has a momentum of its own and it carries you away from all thoughtful intentions when you get into it. Today, if we went into Iraq, like the president would like us to do, you know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end.[81]In February 2004 scholars, diplomats and Princeton alumni gathered at the university’s campus to celebrate Kennan’s 100th birthday. Among those in attendance were Secretary of State Colin Powell, international relations theorist John Mearsheimer, journalist Chris Hedges, former ambassador and career Foreign Service Officer Jack F. Matlock, Jr. and Kennan’s biographer, John Lewis Gaddis.[82]
[edit] Use of Institutions
Kennan was critical of America’s attempt to extend its influence abroad through the use of institutions. From his perspective, attempting to extrapolate our domestic politics to other nations through international regimes was a dangerous proposition. Kennan states, “In the first place, the idea of the subordination of a large number of states to an international juridicial regime, limiting their possibilities for aggression and injury to other states, implies that these are all states like our own, reasonably content with their international borders and status, at least to the extent that they would be willing to refrain from pressing for change without international agreement.”[83] Rather than tying our hands to other states by investing our power in institutions, he advocated keeping power on the state level and focusing on maintaining the balance of power abroad to protects America’s domestic security interests.[edit] Death and legacy
Kennan died on March 17, 2005 at age 101 at home in Princeton. He was survived by his wife Annelise, whom he married in 1931, and his four children, eight grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.[5] Annelise died in 2008 at the age of 98.[84]In an obituary in The New York Times, Kennan was described as “the American diplomat who did more than any other envoy of his generation to shape United States policy during the cold war” to whom “the White House and the Pentagon turned when they sought to understand the Soviet Union after World War II”.[5] Of Kennan, historian Wilson D. Miscamble remarked that “[o]ne can only hope that present and future makers of foreign policy might share something of his integrity and intelligence”.[78] Foreign Policy described Kennan as “the most influential diplomat of the 20th century”. Henry Kissinger said that Kennan “came as close to authoring the diplomatic doctrine of his era as any diplomat in our history”, while Colin Powell called Kennan “our best tutor” in dealing with the foreign policy issues of the 21st century.[85]
During his career, Kennan received a number of awards and honors. As a scholar and writer, Kennan was a two-time recipient of both the Pulitzer Prizes and the National Book Award, and had also received the Francis Parkman Prize, the Ambassador Book Award and the Bancroft Prize. Among Kennan’s numerous other awards and distinctions were the Testimonial of Loyal and Meritorious Service from the Department of State (1953), Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Nation’s Service (1976), the Order of the Pour le Mérite (1976), the Albert Einstein Peace Prize (1981), the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (1982), the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal (1984), the Franklin D. Roosevelt Foundation Freedom from Fear Medal (1987), the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1989), the Distinguished Service Award from the Department of State (1994), and the Library of Congress Living Legend (2000). Kennan had also received 29 honorary degrees and was honored in his name with the George F. Kennan Chair in National Security Strategy at the National War College and the George F. Kennan Professorship at the Institute for Advanced Study.[86][87][88]
Historian Wilson D. Miscamble argues that Kennan played a critical role in shaping the foreign policies of the Truman administration. He also states that Kennan did not hold a vision for either global or strongpoint containment; he simply wanted to restore the balance of power between the United States and the Soviet Union.[89] Like historian John Lewis Gaddis, Miscamble concedes that although Kennan personally preferred political containment, his recommendations ultimately resulted in a policy directed more towards strongpoint than to global containment.[90]
[edit] Hispanics
Kennan deplored the Hispanicization of the United States. Noting the large-scale Mexican immigration in the Southwest, Kennan in 2002 saw “unmistakable evidences of a growing differentiation between the cultures, respectively, of large southern and southwestern regions of this country, on the one hand,” and those of “some northern regions.” In the former, “the very culture of the bulk of the population of these regions will tend to be primarily Latin-American in nature rather than what is inherited from earlier American traditions….Could it really be that there was so little of merit [in America] that it deserves to be recklessly trashed in favor of a polyglot mix-mash?”[91][edit] Publications
- “X” (July 1947), “The Sources of Soviet Conduct“, Foreign Affairs 25 (4): 566–582, doi:10.2307/20030065, ISSN 0015-7120, JSTOR 20030065
- Kennan, George F. (1951), American Diplomacy, 1900–1950, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, OCLC 466719
- Kennan, George F. (1954), Realities of American Foreign Policy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, OCLC 475829
- Kennan, George F. (1956), Russia Leaves the War, Princeton: Princeton University Press, OCLC 1106320
- Kennan, George F. (1956), “The Sisson Documents,” Journal of Modern History v. 28 (June, 1956), 130-54
- Kennan, George F. (1958), The Decision to Intervene, Princeton: Princeton University Press, OCLC 1106303
- Kennan, George F. (1958), Russia, the Atom, and the West, New York: Harper, OCLC 394718
- Kennan, George F. (1961), Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, OCLC 253164
- Kennan, George F. (1967), Memoirs: 1925–1950, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, OCLC 484922.
- Kennan, George F. (1968), From Prague after Munich: Diplomatic Papers, 1938–1940, Princeton: Princeton University Press, ISBN 0-691-05620-X
- Kennan, George F. (1971), The Marquis de Custine and his “Russia in 1839″, Princeton: Princeton University Press, ISBN 0-691-05187-9
- Kennan, George F. (1972), Memoirs: 1950–1963, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, OCLC 4047526.
- Kennan, George F. (1978), The Cloud of Danger: Current Realities of American Foreign Policy, London: Hutchinson, ISBN 0-09-132140-9
- Kennan, George F. (1979), The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order: Franco-Russian Relations, 1875–1890, Princeton: Princeton University Press, ISBN 0-691-05282-4
- Kennan, George F. (1982), The Nuclear Delusion: Soviet-American Relations in the Atomic Age, New York: Pantheon Books, ISBN 0-394-52946-4
- Kennan, George F. (1984), The Fateful Alliance: France, Russia, and the Coming of the First World War, New York: Pantheon Books, ISBN 0-394-53494-8
- Kennan, George F. (1989), Sketches from a Life, New York: Pantheon Books, ISBN 0-394-57504-0
- Kennan, George F. (1993), Around the Cragged Hill: A Personal and Political Philosophy, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, ISBN 0-393-31145-7
- Kennan, George F. (1996), At a Century’s Ending: Reflections 1982–1995, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, ISBN 0-393-31609-2
- Kennan, George F. (2000), An American Family: The Kennans, the First Three Generations, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, ISBN 0-393-05034-3
[edit] See also
- Origins of the Cold War
- Cold War (1947–1953)
- Cold warrior
- Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies
[edit] Notes
- ^ a b Keene, George. “Photocopy of Long Telegram — Truman Library”. Telegram, George Kennan to George Marshall February 22, 1946. Harry S. Truman Administration File, Elsey Papers. Retrieved 27 June 2011.
- ^ Isaacson & Thomas 1986, p. 73.
- ^ Lukacs 2007, p. 17.
- ^ a b Miscamble 2004, p. 22.
- ^ a b c d e f Weiner & Crossette 2005.
- ^ Miscamble 2004, pp. 22–23.
- ^ a b c Miscamble 2004, p. 23.
- ^ Bennett, Edward Moore (1985), Franklin D. Roosevelt and the. Search for Security: American-Soviet Relations, 1933–1939, Wilmington, Delaware: Scholarly Resources, p. 24, ISBN 0-8420-2247-3
- ^ Gaddis 1990, pp. 117–143.
- ^ Paterson 1988, p. 122.
- ^ Paterson 1988, p. 123.
- ^ Paterson 1988, pp. 123–124.
- ^ Miscamble 2004, p. 24.
- ^ a b c Kennan, George F. (February 22, 1946), The Long Telegram, retrieved July 30, 2009
- ^ Kennan 1967, pp. 292–295.
- ^ a b Nash, Gary B. “Containment Defined.” The American People. Creating a Nation and a Society. 6th ed. New York: Pearson Education, 2008. 825.
- ^ LaFeber 2002, p. 69.
- ^ a b Grodzins, Morton, and Eugene Rabinowitch. The Atomic Age; Scientists in National and World Affairs. Articles from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 1945-1962. Vol. 43. New York: Basic, 1963.Ser. 9. 17-18.
- ^ President Harry Truman’s Address Before a Joint Session of Congress, March 12, 1947, retrieved July 29, 2009
- ^ “X” 1947, pp. 566–582.
- ^ “X” 1947, pp. 575–576.
- ^ “X” 1947, p. 582.
- ^ LaFeber 2002, pp. 70–71.
- ^ Lippmann, Walter (1947), The Cold War: A Study in U.S. Foreign Policy, New York: Harper, pp. 18, 21, OCLC 457028
- ^ Miscamble 1992, p. 66.
- ^ Paterson 1988, p. 131.
- ^ Mayers 1990, p. 112.
- ^ For Kennan’s critique of the “X” article and an account of the circumstances surrounding its publication, see Memoirs: 1925-1950, pp. 354-367.
- ^ An interview with George Kennan: Kennan on the Cold War, April 1, 2009, retrieved July 30, 2009
- ^ Gaddis 1990, p. 200.
- ^ Online NewsHour: George Kennan, PBS, retrieved July 30, 2009
- ^ Kennan 1967, p. 295.
- ^ Miscamble 2004, p. 26.
- ^ Hixson 1989, p. 51.
- ^ Miscamble 1992, p. 39.
- ^ Miscamble 1992, pp. 43–74.
- ^ a b Gaddis 1990, p. 199.
- ^ Hixson 1989, p. 85.
- ^ Forrestal 1951, p. 328.
- ^ Brinkley, Douglas (1994), Dean Acheson: The Cold War Years, 1953–71, New Haven: Yale University Press, p. 76, ISBN 0-300-06075-0
- ^ Miscamble 2004, pp. 30–31.
- ^ Miscamble 1992, p. 309.
- ^ McCoy, Donald R. (1984), The Presidency of Harry S. Truman, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, p. 214, ISBN 0-7006-0252-6
- ^ LaFeber 1997, p. 96.
- ^ Wells, Samuel F., Jr. (1979), “Sounding the Tocsin: NSC 68 and the Soviet Threat”, International Security 4 (2): 116–158, doi:10.2307/2626746, ISSN 0162-2889, JSTOR 2626746
- ^ Mayers 1990, p. 147.
- ^ LaFeber 2002, p. 113.
- ^ a b Miscamble 2004, p. 31.
- ^ Hixson 1989, p. 117.
- ^ a b c Smith 2005.
- ^ a b Gaddis 1990, p. 211.
- ^ Kennan 1967, pp. 107–110.
- ^ Kennan 1967, pp. 112–134.
- ^ Kennan 1967, p. 134.
- ^ Kennan 1967, p. 159.
- ^ Mayers 1990, p. 205.
- ^ Gaddis 1990, p. 218.
- ^ Mayers 1990, pp. 223–224.
- ^ Gaddis 1990, pp. 218–219.
- ^ Gaddis 1990, p. 219.
- ^ Mayers 1990, p. 207.
- ^ a b c d Mayers 1990, p. 208.
- ^ a b Mayers 1990, p. 209.
- ^ Mayers 1990, p. 210.
- ^ a b Mayers 1990, p. 212.
- ^ a b Mayers 1990, p. 213.
- ^ Mayers 1990, pp. 214, 216.
- ^ Mayers 1990, p. xiv.
- ^ Hixson 1989, p. 221.
- ^ Mayers 1990, p. 376.
- ^ Richard Russell, “American Diplomatic Realism: A Tradition Practised and Preached by George F. Kennan”, Diplomacy and Statecraft, Nov 2000, Vol. 11 Issue 3, pp 159-83
- ^ Kennan 1972, pp. 70–71.
- ^ Urban 1976, p. 17.
- ^ Kennan 1967, p. 358.
- ^ “George Kennan, architect of the Cold War, dies at 101″, Associated Press, March 18, 2005, retrieved August 5, 2009
- ^ Anderson, David L. (1991), Trapped by Success, New York: Columbia University Press, p. xi, ISBN 0-231-07374-7
- ^ Miscamble 2004, p. 33.
- ^ a b Miscamble 2004, p. 34.
- ^ Talbott 2002, p. 220.
- ^ Zinn, Howard (2003), A People’s History of the United States, New York: HarperCollins, p. 592, ISBN 0-06-052842-7
- ^ Eisele, Albert (September 26, 2002), George Kennan Speaks Out About Iraq, History News Network, retrieved August 5, 2009
- ^ Engerman, David C. (February 29, 2004), “The Kennan century: Debating the lessons of America’s greatest living diplomat”, The Boston Globe
- ^ George Kennan (1951). American Diplomacy. pp.97
- ^ http://www.towntopics.com/aug1308/obits.php
- ^ O’Hara, Carolyn (March 2005), “Cold Warrior”, Foreign Policy, retrieved August 16, 2009
- ^ Kennan’s Legacy, Institute for Advanced Study, June 11, 2007, archived from the original on April 23, 2008, retrieved August 16, 2009
- ^ American Academy of Arts and Letters – Award Winners: Gold Medal, American Academy of Arts and Letters, retrieved August 16, 2009
- ^ Library of Congress to Honor “Living Legends”, Library of Congress, April 14, 2000, retrieved August 16, 2009
- ^ Miscamble 1992, pp. 118, 353.
- ^ Pelz, Stephen (December 1994), “The Sorrows of George F. Kennan”, Reviews in American History 22 (4): 712, ISSN 0048-7511
- ^ Bill Kauffman, Free Vermont, The American Conservative Dec 19,2005
[edit] References
- Gaddis, John Lewis (2011), George F. Kennan: An American Life, Penguin Press, ISBN 1-594-20312-1.
- Gaddis, John Lewis (1982), Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy, New York: Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-503097-4.
- Gaddis, John Lewis (1990), Russia, the Soviet Union, and the United States: An Interpretive History (2nd ed.), New York: McGraw Hill, ISBN 0-07-557258-3.
- Etzold, Thomas H.; Gaddis, John Lewis (1978), “NSC 10/2, “National Security Council Directive on Office of Special Projects,” June 18, 1948″, Containment: Documents on American Policy and Strategy, 1945-1950, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 125–128, ISBN 0-231-04399-6.
- Forrestal, James (1951), Millis, Walter; Duffield, E. S., eds., The Forrestal Diaries, New York: Viking Press, OCLC 908389.
- Hixson, Walter L. (1989), George F. Kennan: Cold War Iconoclast, New York: Columbia University Press, ISBN 0-231-06894-8.
- Isaacson, Walter; Thomas, Evan (1986), The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made: Acheson, Bohlen, Harriman, Kennan, Lovett, and McCloy, New York: Simon & Schuster, ISBN 0-684-83771-4.
- LaFeber, Walter (1997), America, Russia, and the Cold War: 1945–1996, Boston: McGraw-Hill, ISBN 0-07-036064-2.
- LaFeber, Walter (2002), America, Russia, and the Cold War: 1945–2002, Boston: McGraw-Hill, ISBN 0-07-284903-7.
- Lukacs, John (2007), George Kennan: A Study of Character, New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, ISBN 0-300-12221-7.
- Mayers, David (1990), George Kennan and the Dilemmas of US Foreign Policy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-505139-4.
- Miscamble, Wilson D. (1992), George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 1947–1950, Princeton: Princeton University Press, ISBN 0-691-02483-9.
- Miscamble, Wilson D. (May 2004), “George Kennan: A Life in the Foreign service”, Foreign Service Journal 81 (2): 22–34, ISSN 1094-8120. (alternative link).
- Paterson, Thomas G. (1988), Meeting the Communist Threat: Truman to Reagan, New York: Oxford University Press, p. 122, ISBN 0-19-504532-7.
- Smith, J. Y. (March 18, 2005), “Outsider Forged Cold War Strategy”, The Washington Post, retrieved July 14, 2009.
- Stephanson, Anders (1989), Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-50265-5.
- Talbott, Strobe (2002), The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy, New York: Random House, ISBN 0-8129-6846-8.
- Urban, George (September 1976), “From Containment to Self-Containment: A conversation with George Kennan”, Encounter.
- Weiner, Tim; Crossette, Barbara (March 18, 2005), “George F. Kennan Dies at 101; Leading Strategist of Cold War”, The New York Times, retrieved July 14, 2009.
[edit] Further reading
- John Lukacs (editor with the introduction), George F. Kennan and the Origins of Containment, 1944–1946 : the Kennan-Lukacs Correspondence (Columbia, Mo. : University of Missouri Press, 1997).
[edit] External links
 | Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: George F. Kennan |
 | Wikisource has original works written by or about: George F. Kennan |
- George F. Kennan Papers at the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University
- Obituary from the New York Times
- Obituary from the Washington Post
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Showing 1 comments
maintain “the image of the Leader as ‘guide’, rather than
executive”, Khamenei stays aloof from day-to-day politics. He gives no
press conferences or interviews, and, as noted in Hooman Majd’s book:He speaks only at special gatherings, such as an occasional Friday prayer
or commemoration ceremonies of one sort or another. The Leader meets
with foreign dignitaries (almost exclusively Muslim) but limits any
televised and public words to generalities, such as Iran’s support for
the country (or entity like Hamas or Hezbollah)
whose emissary he is meeting, Iran’s peaceful and Islamic nature, and
Iran’s eagerness to expand trade and contacts with the friendly country
in question. He pointedly does not meet with representatives of Western powers. The Leader does not travel overseas; if anyone wishes to see him, that person must travel to Iran.
Khamenei did travel outside Iran before he became Leader.[citation needed]
Despite this policy, as leader, Khamenei reserves the right to
“inject himself into the process and ‘correct’ a flawed policy or
decision.”
One more thing. Why so much (historic) interpretation? Iran is not Persia of the past and thye hardly ever mention their origins to ancient Aryan tribal migration from Russian steppes. Indians do that.
…and I am Sid Harth@arabuhuru.com
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