Voice in the wilderness

Belgrade, Yugoslavia. My fellow students and I -- undergraduates, naïve and excited -- were herded into a somber meeting room at the American Embassy. The Ambassador, a pleasant, middle aged gentleman, welcomed us to Yugoslavia and suggested things we might want to see and think about while visiting that Communist -- yet officially neutral -- nation.

Despite having read George F. Kennan's book, American Diplomacy, just a year earlier for a class in political science, I don't recall having been impressed by the fact that its author was now standing just a few feet in front of me, extending his welcome. Nor do I now recall anything specific that he told us.

What I didn't know about Mr. Kennan at the time would have filled a book. Several books, in fact. Over the years, I've come to realize that Kennan's importance in the shaping of post-war American foreign policy far exceeded that of his diplomatic mission to a country in the Balkans. A number of years ago, I read his two volumes of memoirs, and began to realize not only the importance of his thoughts and insights into foreign policy, but the complexity and subtlety of his withdrawn and reflective personality.

Then, yesterday, I read a feature-length review in the New Yorker of John Lewis Gaddis's new biography.¹ I had barely absorbed the New Yorker's analysis of Kennan's life, when this morning's New York Times book review section featured a similarly lengthy review of the Gaddis biography -- a review written by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Clearly the time has arrived for a new appraisal of this unusual diplomat, thinker, foreign policy analyst, and writer of careful and sensitive prose. Kennan's life and thought confronted difficult issues in American politics and diplomacy, issues that we have never resolved successfully, and probably never will.

How does a relatively transparent democracy with all its ambient noise and competing political demands -- i.e., a nation like the United States -- conduct a skillful, nuanced foreign policy that seeks to secure goals critical to its own interests -- not just goals that focus ahead a day or two, or until the next election, but ones that contemplate our relationship with the world 25 or 50 years in the future?

Kennan's fame today is as the author of the policy of "containment," a concept he first expressed in 1946 while he was posted to the American Embassy in Moscow. He explained his thoughts in a lengthy telegram to the State Department -- the legendary "Long Telegram," reputed to be the longest telegram ever received by State. He expanded his ideas a year later in an article published in Foreign Affairs under the pseudonym "X."

Kennan had never believed during World War II that the Soviets saw the Western allies as anything but allies of convenience, to be discarded as soon as the war ended. He was less concerned about the Soviet Union's being Communist than with its being Russian. Kennan was fluent in the Russian language. Although he loved Russian civilization and the Russian people, he had no illusions about the endemic paranoia of the Russian people, their longing for despotic leaders, and their historic urge toward territorial expansion -- national traits that shaped the character of both Tsarist Russia and the Communist Soviet Union. The Soviets should be "contained" whenever their urge towards expansion conflicted with American interests or world peace, Kennan urged. There was no need, however, to be proactive in the sense of attacking Russia -- no "pre-emptive strikes," as our present jargon would put it.

If successfully contained, Kennan argued, the Soviet Union would ultimately implode because -- ironically -- of its own internal contradictions. And so it did, nearly a half century later.

Kennan's long term analysis created a sensation both within and without the State Department, filling a vacuum in post-war foreign policy analysis in government circles. "Containment" became a catch phrase, shaping policies under the Truman, Eisenhower, and subsequent administrations. It became a justification for the war in Vietnam, a war that Kennan deplored.

Kennan soon felt that his theory of "containment" had been hijacked by militarists who used the concept to support the build-up of massive American military forces, resulting in the arms race of the Cold War. Although he believed that military force occasionally would be necessary in limited situations with limited objectives, Kennan conceived "containment" primarily in economic and diplomatic terms. Kissinger -- our quintessential "realist" in foreign policy -- seems to ignore or belittle this distinction in his review. He is attracted to the obvious realism in Kennan's own thought, but believes that Kennan "wimped out" when it came to putting it into practice.

Kennan's life and thought are fascinating as history. But more important are the questions his life and thought raise about our ability to shape and implement foreign policy objectives that are rational and directed to both the short term and the long term. Kennan strongly believed -- as does Kissinger, as indicated in his book Diplomacy -- that foreign policy is too important to be left to amateur politicians. To some degree, at least, it must be developed by experts who have devoted their professional lives to its study and practice. How to balance this need for expertise and dispassion with the demands of a democratic form of government is a question that awaits resolution.

This week's Republican debates regarding foreign policy do not offer much assurance that we have attained the proper balance.

In conclusion, Kennan's life and thought are worth study. The new Gaddis biography sounds like an excellent overview of the subject, one that I look forward to reading. I hope the publicity generated by this weekend's two excellent reviews of the biography encourages anyone interested in diplomacy and foreign policy to give it a read.
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¹ John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan, An American Life (Penguin Press 2011).

NOTE (11-14-11): The Economist's own review of Prof. Gaddis's biography, in this week's issue, points out that Gaddis has on past occasion expressed his admiration for the foreign policies of Presidents Reagan and George W. Bush. Gaddis clearly disagrees with Kennan's assessment of Reagan's foreign policy, which Kennan found to be "simply childish, inexcusably childish, unworthy of people charged with the responsibility of conducting the affairs of a great nation in an endangered world." Instead, Gaddis believes that Reagan actually brought Kennan's strategy to a successful conclusion. The Economist sides with Kennan, observing that

If Kennan's] concern for the costs of bellicose foreign policy, rather than [Reagan's] enthusiasm for imperial exercise of American power, had dominated the last decade, it would have made for a sounder grand strategy.

Amen.