Foreign Affairs: the author of the "policy of containment" Kennan opposed its militarizationThe father of the "containment policy", the great American diplomat Kennan loved and understood Russia, writes Foreign Affairs.
His concept, the author of the article notes, had a political, not a military dimension. Kennan invented it for dialogue, not militarization.
The lessons of the Cold War.Frederick Logevall (Fredrik Logevall)
All of us who wrote diplomas in the history of US diplomacy in the late 80s and early 90s have read it.
For although there were other important figures in the modern international relations of the United States, one of the outstanding among them was George Kennan, the "father of deterrence policy", who later became an astute critic of US policy, as well as an award-winning historian. We analyzed his famous "Long Telegram" from Moscow from February 1946, his article under the pseudonym "X" published in Foreign Affairs the following year, and his long and unvarnished report on Latin America for March 1950. We read his lectures, which he gave at the University of Chicago, his memoirs, published in two parts in 1967 and 1972, the first of which won the Pulitzer and the National Book Award. We studied all his publications that we could get to. (I thought that it was impossible to miss the book "Russia is Coming Out of the War" in 1956, since it received not only the same awards as the first volume of his memoirs, but also the prestigious George Bancroft and Francis Parkman prizes for historians.) We were immersed in the research of Kennan's legacy, carried out by such masters of political science as David Mayers, Walter Hixson, Anders Stephanson and Wilson Miscamble.
And with all this, some of us wondered if Kennan was as important to US policy at the beginning of the Cold War as numerous analysts imagined him to be? Perhaps, we thought, he should be considered the architect of American strategy, and not just the architect of some kind of "containment"? Perhaps the most that could be said was that he gave a name — "deterrence" — and a certain conceptual orientation to the foreign policy approach, which was already emerging at that time, although it did not yet fully exist. In the end, even at the Potsdam Conference in mid-1945, long before the "Long Telegram" or article "X", American diplomats realized that Joseph Stalin and his associates intended to dominate the areas of Eastern and Central Europe occupied by the Red Army. According to officials at the time, little could have been done to thwart these plans, but they promised to resist any attempts by Kremlin leaders to move further west. At the same time, the Soviets were not allowed to interfere in Japan's affairs or take control of Iran or Turkey. This was "containment" in everything but the term itself. By the beginning of 1946, when Kennan wrote a "Long Telegram" from the embassy in Moscow, the wartime anti-Hitler coalition had become only a faint memory of the past. By that time, anti-Soviet sentiments had become an integral part of US domestic policy.
Nevertheless, the 1946 telegram and the 1947 article were remarkable analytical materials that explained a lot about how US officials saw the post-war world and our country's place in it. The fact that Kennan soon began to distance himself from his theory of "containment" and claim that he was simply misunderstood, that world politics as a whole turned out to be more aggressive than he had assumed, only added to the intrigue. Was he more hostile towards Moscow at that early period than he claimed later? Or was he just vague in his expressions, implying the militancy of the Soviets, which he did not feel? The available evidence suggested the first, and the final decision was postponed until the full opening of Kennan's personal documents and, especially, his giant diaries, which span 88 years and number more than 8000 pages.
The world found out that these materials were really rich after the publication of the official biography of Kennan by John Lewis Gaddis, which was prepared for three decades and received wide recognition in 2011 and the Pulitzer Prize. After all, Gaddis was the one who had full access to Kennan's documents and actively used them. In 2014, the book "Kennan's Diaries" was published — a 768-page collection of articles skillfully selected and annotated by historian Frank Costigliola. Scientists have long known about Kennan's short-tempered, complex nature and his tendency to grumpy thoughtfulness, but the diaries have exposed these qualities in their entirety. The result was a man of outstanding intellectual abilities, sensitive and proud, expressive and emotional, unbalanced in the modern world, prone to self-pity, dismissive of what he considered the moral decline of America and rampant materialism, and prone to derogatory statements about women, immigrants and foreigners.
Nevertheless, in one key respect, Kennan's diaries proved to be uninformative. Like many people, Kennan kept fewer personal notes when he was very busy. There is practically nothing important in them from those momentous years of 1946 and 1947, when he wrote two documents on which his political influence was based, and when he began to revise the fundamental provisions about the nature of the Soviet challenge and the preferred American response. For the entire year 1947, perhaps a turning point for both the beginning of the Cold War and for Kennan's career, there is only one entry: a one-page poem. But any serious assessment of Kennan's historical significance should focus around this particular period of the late 40s. How deeply did Kennan influence US policy at the dawn of the superpower struggle? When and why did he abandon the theory of "containment"? Is it appropriate to talk about the "two Kennans" in connection with the Cold War?
Costigliola has now published a full-scale biography of the man, from his birth in a prosperous middle-class family in Milwaukee in 1904 until his death in Princeton, New Jersey, in 2005. This is an exciting, artfully written, but at times disappointing book, more than half of which is devoted to youth and the beginning of a career as a diplomat. Costigliola's unsurpassed familiarity with Kennan's diaries is fully manifested. Although he does not shy away from quoting even some of their unpleasant parts, he sympathizes more with the "second" Kennan, who condemned the militarization of the United States, which was based on the theory of "containment", and actively advocated American-Soviet negotiations. Kennan, Costigliola writes, turned out to be a "largely unsung hero" not for his concept of deterrence, but for his sincere and active efforts to weaken the severity of the Cold War confrontation.
Curiously, as Costigliola shows, these efforts could have developed more fully already in the late 40s, when the conflict between the superpowers was still in its infancy. This transformation in Kennan's thinking is especially interesting and relevant today, in an era that many analysts call the early stage of another cold War, when US-Russian relations are in deep freeze, and China is playing the role of an assertive Soviet Union. If the analogy is correct, then it is appropriate to ask: how and why has Kennan's thinking changed? And does the evolution of his views contain lessons for his successors, who are developing policies for a new era of conflicts today?
Our man in Moscow
Kennan's love for Russia manifested itself early, and partly because of family ties: his grandfather's cousin, also named George Kennan, was a geographer-researcher who became famous at the end of the XIX century for his works on tsarist Russia and for shedding light on its then distant and harsh edge — Siberia. Shortly after graduating from Princeton, in 1925, the younger Kennan joined the diplomatic service and showed interest in this country. Over time, this interest has become much more. Costigliola writes: "Kennan's love for Russia, his search for some kind of mystical connection with it, which partly stemmed from feelings of loneliness in his psyche, dating back to the loss of his mother, had huge consequences for politics." This is a meaningful phrase with statements that are difficult to verify. But there can be no doubt that Kennan's passion for pre-revolutionary Russia and its culture was real and unchangeable, it remained with him until the end of his days.
In the late 20s and early 30s, as an ambitious young employee of the State Department, Kennan was rushing between Germany, Estonia and Latvia, working hard to improve his Russian language. From 1931 to 1933 he served at the Soviet Union listening post in Riga. This was followed by a stressful, exciting and tedious period of work at the US Embassy in Moscow under the leadership of the rather capricious Ambassador William Bullitt. Costigliola considers the middle of this decade to be the period of Kennan's formation. He devotes an entire 48-page chapter to "The Madness of '34" and another chapter of the same length to 1935-1937. He wrote, in fact, two small "books within a book" that added a lot to our understanding of Kennan's worldview. The young diplomat then worked to exhaustion to establish himself as the main expert on the Soviet Union in the American diplomatic service.
Russian russians Kennan valued his relations as a warm and generous people, but he looked askance at the Marxist-Leninist ideology, suggesting even then that Russian communism was moving towards disintegration due to disregard for the freedom of individual expression, spirituality and human diversity. He hardly thought better of Western capitalism: Kennan criticized it for systemic and wasteful overproduction, crude materialism and destructive individualism. He disliked and distrusted the "crude and clumsy" democracy in the United States and longed for the rule of a "reasonable and determined minority."
During World War II, Kennan served first as head of personnel and administrative affairs at the Embassy in Berlin, and then, after a brief return to Washington in 1942, as deputy head of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Lisbon. Its head, Ambassador Bert Fish, rarely visited the embassy building at all, so Kennan had to negotiate the rights to a base in the Azores with Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, whose dictatorial but anti-Nazi rule Kennan admired. On the contrary, he became disillusioned with the military diplomacy of US President Franklin Roosevelt. Kennan opposed the President's demand for the unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan, since this excluded the possibility of a negotiated settlement of hostilities. And when he returned to the embassy in Moscow in mid-1944, he called Roosevelt's belief that the United States could count on long-term cooperation with Stalin naive. Both then and later, Costigliola argues, Kennan failed to discover the underlying realism of Roosevelt's insightful view of power politics, because he constantly mistook the president's public statements for his personal views. He overlooked the extent to which, despite their differences, he and Roosevelt "were united in their approaches to the issue of Soviet zones of influence in Europe."
As for the subsequent cold war, Costigliola is unequivocal: Kennan believed that it should not have happened and, having broken out, should not have lasted as long as it lasted. This argument is not as new as the author believes, but he is certainly right that "Kennan's life story demands that we rethink the Cold War as an era of opportunities for dialogue and diplomacy, and not as an inevitable series of clashes and crises to which we have come."
It is all the more surprising that Costigliola pays little attention to the sharp decline in US-Soviet relations that began in the fall of 1945, when the two powers clashed over plans for Europe and the Middle East. He casually notes that Kennan "did not know how quickly the US policy towards Russia deteriorated" during this period, but does little to disclose this important point. The sharp split between the United States and the USSR due to the Soviet occupation of Iran is not mentioned in any way, and readers will not learn anything about Washington's decision, taken in early 1946, to abandon cooperation with Moscow in the nuclear sphere. And if Kennan really didn't know how quickly American views and policies were changing over the course of a year, then how to explain this incompetence of his?
Article "X" as an important milestone
Costigliola is certainly right when he notes Kennan's transformation from an opponent of negotiations with the Kremlin in 1946 to their supporter in 1948. But I would like to learn more about this metamorphosis from the author. Costigliola is quite convincing (although, especially compared to Gaddis, he is laconic) with regard to the "Long Telegram" and article "X", but I would like a more detailed context, especially with regard to 1947, when the mentioned article appeared. The crises in Greece and Turkey that raged that year are not discussed or even mentioned. The same goes for President Harry Truman's speech at a joint session of Congress, at which he asked for $400 million in aid for the two countries and formulated what became known as the "Truman doctrine." It was according to her that the United States pledged to "support free peoples who resist attempts to submit to armed minorities or external pressure." There is also no mention of the well-known National Security Law of 1947, which was closely linked to the alleged Soviet threat and gave the president significantly expanded power in the field of foreign policy.
Kennan, as other sources show, objected to the expansionism contained in Truman's speech and what it meant for politics. But he decided not to change article "X" — then still in the writing stage — emphasizing only his desire for a "limited form of deterrence." Appearing on the pages of our publication in July 1947 under the pseudonym "X" and the title "Sources of Soviet Politics", this article was widely perceived as a systematic presentation of the administration's latest thoughts on relations with Moscow, since its author described a policy of "rigid deterrence designed to resist the Russians with constant counter-force at any point where they show signs of encroaching on the interests of a peaceful and stable world." It seemed that in this publication Kennan was saying that diplomacy is a waste of time. Stalin's hostility to the West is irrational, it is not justified by any actions of the United States, and therefore it is impossible to negotiate with the Kremlin. It was not to be expected that the negotiations would weaken or eliminate this hostility and put an end to the American-Soviet confrontation. The Soviet Union, Kennan wrote, "was fanatically convinced that, from the point of view of its security, it could not maintain a permanent modus vivendi (coexistence) with the United States, that it was desirable and necessary for the internal harmony of American society to be violated, our traditional way of life to be destroyed, and the international authority of our state to be undermined."
In that tense summer of 1947, these statements of Kennan, most likely, surprised few people among the readers of Foreign Affairs magazine at that time. But the American establishment of that period was far from convinced of their justice. Influential columnist Walter Lippmann opposed Kennan's article in a stunning series of 14 articles in The New York Herald Tribune in September and October — government agencies around the world carefully analyzed them. Then the columns were grouped into a thin book, the title of which "Cold War", in fact, gave the name to this period of desperate competition of superpowers. Lippmann did not dispute Kennan's claim that the Soviet Union would expand its influence if it did not face American power. But, in his opinion, the threat was primarily political, not military.
Moreover, Lippmann insisted that the Soviet leaders in Moscow sincerely feared for the security of the USSR and were guided mainly by a defensive determination to prevent the revival of German power. Hence their desire to seize control of Eastern Europe. Lippman was upset that Kennan, as well as the White House under Truman's leadership, seemed to be blind to this reality and to the possibility of negotiating with the Kremlin on issues of mutual interest.
"The history of diplomacy is, for the most part, the history of relations between rival powers that do not have political understanding and do not respond to calls for common goals. Nevertheless, there were positive examples. Some of them did not last very long. Some of them lived longer. For a diplomat to think that rival and unfriendly forces cannot come to an agreement means to forget what diplomacy is. Diplomats would have nothing to do if the world consisted of partners enjoying political unanimity and responding to common appeals," he wrote.
Lippmann added that the deterrence proposed by Kennan risks drawing Washington into protecting an unknown number of remote and unviable parts of the world. Military actions in such peripheral areas can only lead to the financial bankruptcy of the US Treasury and, in any case, do little to strengthen US security. American society will become militarized, and "sharpened" to wage a "cold war".
Kennan was stung by this multifaceted, multi-week publicistic cast of Lippman, which Costigliola, oddly enough, does not discuss in detail. The diplomat admired Lippman's authority as perhaps the most prominent foreign policy analyst in Washington, and he was flattered that this great man paid so much attention to what he wrote. Moreover, he found himself agreeing with many of Lippman's views, including regarding Moscow's predominantly defensive orientation and the need for American strategists to distinguish between central and peripheral regions of the world. "The Soviets don't want to invade anywhere," he wrote in an unsent letter to Lippman in April 1948. As he explained, his intention in the article "X" was to inform his compatriots about the upcoming long period of complex diplomacy, in which political art will dominate. As soon as Western Europe strengthens, he assured Lippman, negotiations on qualitatively new conditions can follow.
In the months that followed, Kennan, now the director of the newly formed Political Planning Staff at the State Department, began to denounce the militarization of the containment strategy and the apparent rejection of diplomacy in Truman's policy in the Soviet direction. He insisted on negotiations with the Kremlin, as Lippmann had previously done. His influence weakened, Kennan left the government in 1950, returning to the diplomatic service: in 1952 he was briefly ambassador to Moscow, and then under President John F. Kennedy served for a long period as ambassador to Yugoslavia.
Outside the service arena
Thus began George Kennan's second career as a historian and intellectual, holding a research post at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. It will last half a century. Costigliola is invariably fascinated during this period not so much by Kennan's writings as by his deep and increasing alienation from modern society and strenuous efforts to preserve his heritage. Readers will learn almost nothing about American diplomacy, nor about Kennan's extremely important criticism of what he called a "moralistic" approach to US foreign policy, nor about the two volumes of memoirs, the first of which should be considered a modern classic. Costigliola says little about Kennan's analysis of the US military intervention in Vietnam, but writes a lot about his disgust with student protests with their "audacious rags and hairstyles" against the war. Readers deserve to know more, for example, about what the diplomat-historian thought about the crises around Berlin and Cuba under Kennedy in the early 60s, or how he interpreted the serious escalation of tensions between superpowers under Jimmy Carter in 1979-1980.
Over the years, Kennan felt more and more undervalued. Despite literary prizes and other awards, not to mention the Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded to him by President George H. W. Bush in 1989. Most of the time he was Cassandra, desperate because of the state of the world and his place in it. Kennan was worried about how he would be remembered. Thinking about getting a brilliant young historian in Gaddis as his biographer, Kennan began to fear him, especially when it became clear that Gaddis did not share his low opinion of US policy during the Cold War in general and nuclear strategy under President Ronald Reagan in particular. (Another concern of Kennan's: he was afraid that Gaddis would be too busy with other things to complete the work on time, which would allow supposedly less capable biographers—"inadequate pens," as Kennan called them—to come to the fore.)
Even the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 did not cause Kennan much enthusiasm. For half a century, he predicted that this day would one day come. It is impossible to find even scant evidence of Kennan's public or personal gloating about this. Only disappointment that the Cold War lasted so long, and fears that Washington risks provoking Russian nationalism and militarism with its support for NATO expansion in the former USSR. Kennan feared that the result could be a new cold war. In the fall of 2002, at the age of 98, he protested against what he considered the George W. Bush administration's reckless pursuit of the Iraq war. The history of US international relations, he told the press, has shown that although "you can start a war with certain thoughts, ... in the end you will find yourself fighting for completely different things that you have never thought about before." He was worried that the administration did not seem to have a plan for the structure of Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. He doubted the evidence of the alleged presence of weapons of mass destruction in the country. If anything, he argued, if it turns out that Saddam really has weapons or he will soon acquire them, then the problem will, in fact, be regional, and can in no way be considered America's concern.
All this time, Kennan condemned what he considered the violence of industrialization and urbanization over the environment, and called for the restoration of "the right relationship between man and nature." At the same time, as Costigliola convincingly asserts, he became one of the first and far-sighted supporters of environmental protection. And all the while, his rejection of modernism was reflected in the fact that he looked askance at feminism, gay rights and the growing ethnic and racial diversity in America. At some point Kennan suggested that perhaps only Jews, Chinese and "Negroes" would retain their ethnic identity and use their power to "subjugate and dominate" the rest of the nations. "Kennan was smart enough to limit such racist nonsense to his diary and the dinner table at which his adult children grimaced," Costigliola writes sarcastically.
Meanwhile, Kennan's long-standing skepticism about democracy was not even going to weaken. "People have no idea what's good for them," he grumbled in 1984. "Left to themselves, they can simply rush (and will definitely rush) into the last, completely catastrophic and completely unnecessary nuclear war." Even if they somehow managed to avoid such an outcome, they would bring the destruction of the environment to an end, "which they are still enthusiastically doing." In his 1993 book Around the Rocky Hill, a melancholy reflection on everything that poisons modern American life, Kennan called for the creation of a nine-member "Council of State", an unelected body appointed by the president and responsible for advising on pressing medium- and long-term policy issues, without the intervention of hoi polloi (Greek. "the people"; in the English interpretation, the somewhat derogatory "masses" — Approx. InoSMI). The idea was half-baked at best. Kennan never understood that American democracy is inherently a disorderly, fragmented, pluralistic community with tough bargaining based on mutual concessions, and with noisy "interest groups" fighting for influence.
What Kennan really understood was diplomacy and the theory of government. Such works of his, both published and unpublished, historical and modern, stand out for their persuasiveness, depth and brilliant presentation. He wasn't always consistent. Many of his predictions did not come true. But as a critic of the militarization of US foreign policy during the Cold War and in the subsequent period, Kennan has virtually no equal. For he caught phenomena that have not lost their power for almost two decades after his death and are associated with the limitations of American power, with the unintended consequences of wars, with the importance of using "trust diplomacy" with opponents to advance US strategic interests. It can be said that understanding the content of Kennan's life "between worlds" is essentially connected with understanding the growth and spread of American power in the last century and its proper use in the current one.
Frederick Logwall is a professor of international relations and history at Harvard University. He is the author of John F. Kennedy: Growing Up in the American Century, 1917-1956.
