The New York Times Review of Books, November 10, 2011
The Age of Kennan
By HENRY A. KISSINGER
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.
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.
Henry A. Kissinger’s latest book, “On China,” was published in May.
