FYI. Recent review on Kennan's latest book.
-- Charlie Reid
cjreid@netcom.com
"Salus populi suprema est lex" (Cicero)
The welfare of the people is the highest law.
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Wisdom, Youth, and One Blind Eye:
George Kennan's Look at This Century's End
By Charles J. Reid
(George F. Kennan. At a Century's Ending: Reflections 1982-1995.
New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996. 351 pp., Ind., $27.50 cloth.)
SANTA CRUZ, Calif -- One sign of culpability is the rush to
explain. Psychologists and interrogators recognize it immediately: the
attempt to avoid or shift blame by pleading one's words have been grossly
misinterpreted or distorted. If this is true, George Kennan, in "At a
Century's Ending," has been caught in a historical trap of his own making.
Every student of 20th Century U.S. foreign policy knows that George
Kennan was a key architect of American Cold-War foreign policy. He was the
author of a 1946 embassy report which singlehandedly reshaped
Washington's view of the world. Writing from Moscow, Kennan argued that
Soviet intransigence immediately following World War II was an attribute
of the Soviet system itself. Communist ideology and Russian insecurity
explained the Soviet system and the Soviet threat. This made the goals
and purposes of the United States and the Soviet Union utterly incompatible.
Back in Washington a State Department official drafted a memo
attempting to turn Kennan's abstract observations into an operational
foreign policy formulation. Recall that the Soviet Union moved to
consolidate its position in Eastern Europe and failed to demobilize at
war's end as the Western Allies did. Kennan's colleague argued the U.S.
should act "in the first instance by diplomatic means and in the last
analysis by military means if necessary" to stop the threat of Soviet
expansion, which seems real at the time.
A few months later, in 1947, Kennan wrote an even more famous
article, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" under the pseudonym "X." It is a
remarkable foreign policy document. In it, Kennan predicts the fall of
the Soviet Union and explains why. He writes how the U.S. can defeat the
Soviet Union with a "policy of firm containment, designed to confront the
Russians with unalterable counter-force at every point where they show
signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world."
Looking back over past 50 years, it is clear that the policy of
containment Kennan recommended had its successes and failures. The
failures were almost exclusively limited to the military and human rights
arenas: Korea, Vietnam, Latin America.
One of the objectives of the documents Kennan includes in "At a
Century's Ending" is to clarify wha he "meant" by the term
"containment." In "Containment: Then and Now" he writes, "When I used
the word 'containment' with respect to that country in 1946, what I had
in mind was not at all the averting of the sort of military threat people
are talking about today."
Today, he says, he was speaking then of a "political-ideological
threat." The implication is that American hard-liners, especially those
who came to power after 1952, distorted his recommendations, and ended up
dragging out the Cold War a lot longer than necessary.
If this is true, then Kennan seems to be looking back with one blind
eye, somehow not seeing where his responsibility lies for some of the
more painful American experiences. In the broad scheme of things, this
may be understandable, if one is concerned with one's place in history.
Yet we have to remember that the 1948 Truman Doctrine was a corollary of
containment, and Korea was an application. Vietnam, Afghanistan, and
Gorbachev still lay ahead.
"At a Century's Ending" includes some 40 essays and talks from
1982 to 1995 covering a gamut of subjects. The book is truly a pleasure
to read, though it is sometimes difficult to determine whether Kennan
interprets historical events as a subjective witness through the personal
prism of his own historical experience or as an objective historian.
Certainly, Kennan's wisdom stretches out over time through his
reflections on the Cold War, his analysis of the Balkan Crisis, his
prediction of the coup against Gorbachev, his prognosis for Russian
Democracy, or his magnificent discussion of morality and foreign policy
and his distaste for covert action.
One myth has dogged Kennan through the years, namely his ability to
"divine Russia." Unfortunately, there is little evidence of this in the
book. In "The Gorbachev Prospect," he describes the Russian people as "a
population that, to use Chekhov's phrase, wakes up from the bad dream of
daily life only behind a vodka glass in the pub on Saturday nights." This
would appear to be an unflattering stretch.
He shows little appreciation for the festive Russian spirit embodied in
music and art, the emotional romanticism, the quest for personal loyalty,
and the instinct for survival Russians needed to make it through the
years of Soviet rule, not the least through the very psychopathology of
Stalin that Kennan describes in "Letter to Robert Tucker."
Kennan, a graduate of St. John's Military Academy and Princeton,
is certainly inclined to sit in Presbyterian judgment when evaluating his
Russian colleagues. He harshly judges Andrei Gromyko in "The Buried Past,"
a review of the former Soviet Foreign Minister's memoirs. Noting the long
list of Stalinist-era crimes, Kennan suggests that Gromyko "saw no evil,
heard no evil," and barely criticized Stalin in his autobiography. Yet
Kennan suggests we might forgive Gromyko: "The Russian Revolution involved
many mass bewilderments." Somehow "Russian" and "Soviet" invariably get
used interchangeably.
There may be an explanation for Kennan's aloofness from the
Russian Culture. After being accepted by the U.S. Foreign Service, Kennan
actually pursued Russian Studies that the University of Berlin during the
waning days of the Weimar Republic. German universities were in ferment.
They were hotbeds of German idealism and romanticism where the works of
Hegel, Husserl, and Heiddiger held sway. The Nazi Party, with it's
Uebermensch, anti-Slav philosophy, lurked in the corridors. And shortly
after Hitler assumed power in 1933, students from the University of
Berlin amassed in a great demonstration to inaugurate the first book
burning of the Nazi Reich. By then Kennan was in Moscow, but it is hard
not to conclude that he must have been influenced by his years at a
German university in the early 1930s.
Kennan's greatest strength lies not in his ability to divine the
motives and behavior of people, but in his genius for determining how
institutions worked in systems, and how systems relate to each other. He
is an analytical historian with wisdom forged by steady witness and
reflection, not human interaction. His record of successful prediction
proves this. Being able to observe and evaluate events with detachment,
he seems to have the uncanny ability to determine what direction the
course of events will take.
Probably his finest writing appears in "Witness," a review of "The
Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of Central Europe," by Timothy
Garton Ash. Kennan's writing is crisp, fresh, and precise. You could
easily conclude the writer is a young news magazine staff writer fresh out
of college, proof that somewhere in the tempered, aged soul there always
glows the creative energy of youth.
It is hard to believe that Kennan is 92 years old. His concern for
America at the turn of this Millennium is obviously sincere and in tune
with the times. This is clear in the essays "Morality and Foreign Policy"
and "Security and the Moscow Embassy." While Kennan is obviously
nostalgic for the "good old days" when covert agents didn't control the
embassies, he has a clear sense of the modern challenges facing diplomats
today.
He's full of energy when he discusses nuclear weapons control,
deficit spending, environmental protection, and managing population
growth. These concerns, which will face the world through the next
century, pop up unexpectedly throughout the book.
We can only hope the current generation of foreign policy
practitioners read this book, and heed his perspicacious yet always
diplomatic advice.
-30-
(Charles J. Reid is a Bay area freelancer.)
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