The X File: A. Stephanson on George Kennan

"The X-File"

By Anders Stephanson, The Nation (2005)

"Born in 1904 during Teddy Roosevelt's first Administration, and dead on March 24, 2005, under a very different kind of Republican rule, George Kennan took his last stance as a public intellectual when he was about to turn 100. The issue was the impending invasion of Iraq. Kennan considered it ill advised. The official justifications for war struck him as flimsy, the servile reaction by the leadership of the Democratic Party "shabby and shameful." When Colin Powell traveled up to Princeton later to pay homage on Kennan's hundredth birthday, the Secretary, though doubtless aware of these views, nevertheless saw fit to liken the Iraqi operation to containment.

...

he decisive aspect of these two texts (whose internal contradictions and errors I leave aside) was precisely Kennan's prescriptive refusal to deploy the traditional means of diplomacy in relations with Moscow, his insistence that nothing serious could be achieved by way of negotiation on fundamental issues of mutual concern until the entire nature of the regime had changed. I take this to be the decisive aspect of the cold war as well, the aspect of warlike hostility under formal conditions of peace that made the conflict a cold war as opposed to a nasty but essentially traditional conflict of international relations. In my view, this posture fundamentally shaped US foreign policy until the early 1960s, when the Cuban missile crisis, the Sino-Soviet split and other factors rendered it largely obsolete. Kennan's responsibility for the cold war, it would seem, was thus far from negligible. Perhaps Powell had a point?

...

That Kennan did not invoke the appeasement analogy perhaps owed something to the fact that he had had strong affinities for appeasement in the late 1930s. The chief reason, however, was that, as a conservative of the communitarian and sometimes authoritarian kind, he was suspicious of generalities, particularly historical analogies featuring "abstractions." He preferred particularities, or what he called "realities." Stalin was real. The apparatus he controlled at home and abroad was real. Communism, by contrast, was something else. Kennan was thus never a conventional anticommunist. He was against communism and fought communists, sometimes with means he would later regret. He certainly thought, at least for a while, that the Stalinist dictatorship should be fought fiercely in every conceivable way but open war. But he had no sympathy for the idea that the United States was engaged in a universal struggle against a singular, monolithic enemy called communism.

...

As was stated implicitly in NSC 68--the powerful 1950 summa of cold war thinking in the Truman Administration--and explicitly by containment's Republican critics, this strategy seemed to mean an unacceptably long moment of waiting for Godot while letting the evil forces roam pretty much freely within their confines. Hence the clamor in the early 1950s for "rollback," a supposedly active policy of muscular confrontation. In practice, however, Republicans and Democrats alike followed Kennan's erstwhile precept. The fundamental reason was simple. Containment may have been based on faulty premises, but as it was appropriated into a universal division of good and evil, its "positive" side--the prophylactic building of a global, anticommunist system led by the United States in the name of "the free world"--turned out to be immeasurably more important than the "negative" need to destroy Moscow in the name of rollback.

The project of eradicating evil turned out to be more important than actually achieving it. Indeed, it was precisely because it was wrong that containment worked so beautifully as cold war policy, the essence of which was to render unshakable the US commitment to globalism. Containment, meanwhile, did not destroy the Soviet Union but rather maintained it. Kennan's actual policy of mutual withdrawal from central Europe (a notion initially borrowed from Walter Lippmann) would have changed the Soviet Union long before that change came to pass.

Throughout the 1950s, Kennan derided the "triumphant and excited and self- righteous anti-communism" and the "image of the totally inhuman and totally malevolent adversary." By the end of the decade, his concrete policy positions (on Germany, nuclear weapons, recognition of interests) seemed closer to Moscow's than to those of his own government. Ultimately, despite an emphatic sense of citizenship, his allegiances were civilizational rather than national, to "the West" rather than to the United States. And by this time he had begun to see the Soviet Union as part of the "conservative-authoritarian" tradition he thought had been "the norm" in the West during the Christian era, not at any rate a state "hideous in the sight of God." Nationalism was by contrast one of his civilizational targets. He despised Wilsonian notions of self-determination along with the related principle of national sovereignty. "Could anything be more absurd," he asked, "than a world divided into several dozens of large secular societies, each devoted to the cultivation of the myth of its own unlimited independence?" The "world," at any rate, was not the site of an all-encompassing struggle between the free world and communism. It was precisely such mistaken cold war notions, Kennan thought, that were turning the world into a potential burial ground"