containment

Review: George F. Kennan

/ rtrube54 / 2 Comments

George F. Kennan: An American Life, John Lewis Gaddis. New York: Penguin Books, 2011.

Summary: The authorized biography of this diplomat and strategic thinker who articulated the Western strategy of “containment” that curbed and ultimately resulted in the end of the former Soviet Union.

He grew up in modest surroundings in a quiet Milwaukee neighborhood, bereft of his mother, who died in early childhood. After a college career at Princeton, he entered the foreign service and became one of the first Russian specialists when the Soviet Union was closed to the United States. He was one of the first Russia experts to go to Russia when the U.S. opened an embassy in 1933. As the Nazi threat rose, he took assignments in Prague, and then Berlin, leading to his internment during the first months of the war. Later, he returned to Moscow under Ambassador Harriman.

It was while Harriman was away that a request came in 1946 to Kennan as deputy to explain certain aspects of Soviet behavior. Kennan long had bemoaned the lack of “grand strategy” on the part of the U.S., particularly in the post-war situation where the once-ally was now an ideological adversary once more. He sent an 8,000 word telegram, known as the “Long Telegram” that articulated both Kennan’s assessment of the Soviet outlook, and what he thought the appropriate American response, one of containment, checking Soviet threats while projecting a peaceful intent and strengthening western Europe until the Soviets could no longer control their satellites. Kennan perceived the unsustainability of the Soviet state.

Later, this was expanded into a Foreign Affairs article by “X.” What he had done was nothing less than articulate the strategy the United States would follow, with variations, for the next forty-five years. He soon was called upon to help establish the War College, as deputy director, an advanced training school for rising officers in the services. He also was called on to form the Policy Planning Staff, which over the next years, during the Truman administration, published policy papers for nearly every part of th world, including one on Yugoslavia, recognizing that communism often was a nationalist movement not necessarily aligned with Moscow.

Over his life, Kennan went on to a post at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, where he wrote Russia Leaves the War, winning multiple awards including the Pulitzer Prize in History and a second Pulitzer years later for the first volume of his memoirs. He was an early opponent of the nuclear arms race, an early advocate for the environment, he proposed the reunification of Germany, he opposed the Vietnam war, testifying in 1966 to its folly before Congress.

Yet Kennan never held positions any higher than an ambassadorship in Moscow that last merely five months before undiplomatic remarks led to him being declared persona non grata. Under Kennedy, he served as ambassador in Yugoslavia for two years. A recurring complaint was that no one was listening, and in a profession where diplomacy was the name of the game, he could be quite undiplomatic. Acheson as Secretary of State was an admirer and friend but thought him utterly impractical.

He was a person of incredible rectitude, always elegantly dressed, articulate and well-spoken, and elegant in writing. He lived under the shadow of another George Kennan, also an ambassador to Russia, his grandfather’s cousin, with whom he shared a birthday. Recognition was important to this man who grew up without a mother and a distant father. When things became stressful, he suffered from a variety of illnesses including ulcers. He was married to Annelise until his death at 101, yet also had several affairs, and then suffered under a Calvinist-formed conscience.

In sum, he was a complicated individual–understanding the Soviet Union better than almost anyone, yet despairing for the character of his own country, particularly the “counter-culture” of which he spoke critically. He was prescient, and at times incisive, and at others, a bit of a wool-gatherer and one to whom others turned a deaf ear. John Lewis Gaddis, selected by Kennan to write his authorized biography, explores not only the extraordinary career of Kennan but the complexities of his character. This biography is a model of erudition, one that captures as fully as any biography I’ve read, the character as well as the accomplishments of its subject. Closing the circle, Gaddis followed his subject in winning the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the National Book Critics Circle award for this work. This is a profound work not only in understanding Kennan, but also American foreign policy since World War II.

Review: American Diplomacy

/ rtrube54 / 1 Comment

American Diplomacy, Expanded Edition, George Kennan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. (Link is to in-print 60th anniversary edition, 2012).

Summary: A compilation of Kennan’s six Charles R. Walgreen lectures, two articles on US-Soviet relations originally from Foreign Affairs, and two Grinnell lectures.

George F. Kennan (1904-2005) was one of the foremost thinkers, and at times, shapers of American foreign policy. He is perhaps most famous for the “long telegram” in 1946 from Moscow to the American Secretary of State, on how the U.S. should relate to post-war Stalinist Soviet Union. This telegram and two subsequent articles in Foreign Affairs which appear in this volume, served as the intellectual basis of the American policy of containment which prevailed until the end of the former Soviet Union in 1989.

This work actually consist of three parts. The first reviews American diplomacy from the Spanish-American War through World War 2 in six lectures sponsored by the Charles R. Walgreen Foundation. The second part reprints the two Foreign Affairs articles, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” and “America and the Russian Future.” The third part consists of two Grinnell lectures given in 1984, one a retrospective of the Walgreen lectures, and the other a review of American foreign policy in Korea and Vietnam and our present military-industrial complex.

One of the basic threads that runs through the Walgreen lectures is that our diplomacy flowed out of “legalistic-moralistic” foundations or situational, politically shaped responses that lacked “any accepted, enduring doctrine for relating military strength to political policy, and a persistent tendency to fashion our policy toward others with a view to feeding a pleasing image of ourselves rather than to achieving real, and desperately needed results in our relations with others. The lectures start with our war with Spain launched without any clear policy but shaped by popular mood. The second focuses on the “Open Door” policy with China where what appeared to be noble foreign policy poorly apprehended the material interests of the other powers involved. The third lecture looked at our pre-Maoist diplomacy with China and Japan, over-sentimentalizing China, over-vilifying Japan, and failing to work toward a balance of powers between Russia, China, and Japan that may have averted war, and possibly the rise of Communist China (I doubt this, given the corruption of the Chiang Kai-shek government).

In the fourth lecture, he observes the irony of our entering World War 1 because of the violation of our neutrality, and then rationalizing it as a great fight for the values of civilization when in fact we acceded to the gutting of Germany which led to the second war. With the second war, we allowed ourselves to begin at a place of weakness that created the necessity of dependency on Russia and then adopted an idealized vision of the post war future that failed to realistically face the price Russia would exact for its alliance. He concludes for a diplomacy of professionalism and realism rather than a moralistic-legalistic effort to project American ideals.

Part two reflects the working out of Kennan’s ideas in relation to the Soviet Union. He argues that it is vitally important to understand the ideology of the communist conflict with capitalism, the infallibility of the Kremlin and the concordant concentration of power in what amount to a dictatorship. It is here, that recognizing the difficulties of relating to Soviet power, that he contends for a policy of disciplined “containment.” He writes:

“In these circumstances it is clear that the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies. It is important to note, however, that such a policy has nothing to do with outward histrionics: with threats or blustering or superfluous gestures of outward ‘toughness’ ” (p. 119).

The second article he argues that America should not directly challenge the Soviet Union, but allow it to decay from within, a consequence we watched unfold in the 1980’s.

The first of the Grinnell lectures basically reprises the Walgreen lectures and then considers Korea and Vietnam. He contends that our assessment of Communist global expansionist ambitions to be flawed, especially in Vietnam where he assessed Ho to first of all be a nationalist. In Korea, we failed to reckon with how our military presence in Japan, shutting out the Soviet Union, would be perceived as a threat warranting “consolidation of its military-political position in Korea, with all our efforts costing 54,000 casualties to achieve merely the status quo ante. I find this a bit troubling as he seems to infer that it would be fine if all of the Korean peninsula were communist. I don’t suspect today’s South Koreans, as much as they would like to see the reunification of Korea, would prefer communist rule. But there is an interesting question of whether a different settlement was possible if we had settled things differently with Japan, a historic enemy of Russia.

The second lecture argues that the large scale militarization of the U.S. in the post war reflected mistaken notions of Soviet global conquest and the folly of the nuclear arms race. He argues that having made these dispositions we cannot walk back commitments either to Japan or to NATO. His call is simply for a greater humility in our diplomacy, and that example is more powerful than demand. He hoped a budget of over $250 billion for our military would not be necessary. (Now it is over $750 billion).

I am writing this on the eve of what may be a massive Russian invasion of Ukraine, once part of the former Soviet Union. I cannot help but think of Kennan’s observations about both the communist mindset in Russia, humiliated in 1989, but hardly extinguished, and our lack of steady, professional diplomacy in the years since while the Putin government has been an implacable constant. I’m troubled by the corrosion from within, not of Russia but our own country, and the danger that this could further undermine a steady realism in our foreign policy.

A larger issue that Kennan raises is whether it is possible to have a “moral” diplomacy. One the one hand we may often be deceived by our own claims to morality or blind to other factors in international situations. Yet humility is a moral virtue. The recognition of human dignity inherent in our commitments to democracy is moral. Perhaps this compact volume was not the place to unpack whether a moral, if not moralistic diplomacy is possible. Perhaps we need to turn to his spiritual mentor, Reinhold Niebuhr, to explore these arguments, elaborated in Moral Man and Immoral Society and other works. Whatever we might conclude, Kennan’s call for a professional, unpoliticized and unmilitarized diplomacy that takes develops a long term approach to American diplomacy is worth considering.