Positive Quiddity: George Kennan

George Frost Kennan (February 16, 1904 – March 17, 2005) was an American adviser, diplomat, political scientist, and historian, best known as "the father of containment" and as a key figure in the emergence of the Cold War. He later wrote standard histories of the relations between Russia and the Western powers.

In the late 1940s, his writings inspired the Truman Doctrine and the U.S. foreign policy of "containing" the Soviet Union, thrusting him into a lifelong role as a leading authority on the Cold War. His "Long Telegram" from Moscow in 1946, and the subsequent 1947 article "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" argued that the Soviet regime was inherently expansionist and that its influence had to be "contained" in areas of vital strategic importance to the United States. These texts quickly emerged as foundational texts of the Cold War, expressing the Truman administration's new anti-Soviet Union policy. Kennan also played a leading role in the development of definitive Cold War programs and institutions, most notably the Marshall Plan.
Shortly after his ideas had been enshrined as official US policy, Kennan began to criticize the policies that he had seemingly helped launch. By mid-1948, he was convinced that the situation in Western Europe had improved to the point where negotiations could be initiated with Moscow. The suggestion did not resonate within the Truman administration, and Kennan's influence was increasingly marginalized—particularly after Dean Acheson was appointed Secretary of State in 1949. As U.S. Cold War strategy assumed a more aggressive and militaristic tone, Kennan bemoaned what he called a misinterpretation of his thinking.
In 1950, Kennan left the Department of State, except for two brief ambassadorial stints in Moscow and Yugoslavia, and became a leading realist critic of U.S. foreign policy. He continued to be a leading thinker in international affairs as a faculty member of the Institute for Advanced Study from 1956 until his death at age 101 in March 2005.

Early life and career

Kennan was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to Kossuth Kent Kennan, a lawyer specializing in tax law, and Florence James Kennan. Mrs. Kennan died two months after giving birth to Kennan. After his father remarried, Kennan briefly lived with his stepmother in Cassel, Germany. He attended St. John's Military Academy in Delafield, Wisconsin and arrived at Princeton University in the second half of 1921. Unaccustomed to the "elite" East Coast atmosphere of the school, the shy and introverted Kennan found his undergraduate years difficult and lonely. After receiving his bachelor's degree in 1925, Kennan considered applying to law school, but decided it was too expensive and instead opted to apply to the newly formed Foreign Service. He passed the qualifying examination, and after seven months of studying at the Foreign Service School in Washington, D.C., he took on his first post, as a vice consul in Geneva, Switzerland. Within a year, he was transferred to a post in Hamburg, Germany. In 1928, Kennan considered leaving the Foreign Service to go back to school when he was selected for a linguist training program that would give him three years of graduate level study without having to leave the service.

In 1929, Kennan began his program on history, politics, culture and the Russian language at the University of Berlin's Oriental Institute. In doing so, he would follow in the footsteps of his grandfather's younger cousin, George Kennan (explorer), for whom he was named, and who was a leading 19th-century expert on Imperial Russia and author of Siberia and the Exile System, a well-received 1891 account of the Czarist prison system. During the course of his diplomatic career, Kennan would master a number of other languages, including German, French, Polish, Czech, Portuguese, and Norwegian.

In 1931, Kennan was stationed at the legation in Riga, Latvia, where, as Third Secretary, he worked on Soviet economic affairs. From his post, Kennan "grew to mature interest in Russian affairs" . When the U.S. opened diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union in 1933 following the election of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Kennan accompanied U.S. ambassador William C. Bullitt to Moscow. By the mid-1930s, Kennan was among the core of professionally-trained Russian experts on the staff of the U.S. embassy in Moscow, along with Charles E. Bohlen, and Loy W. Henderson. These officials had been influenced by the long-time head of the State Department's division of East European Affairs, Robert F. Kelley. They believed that there was little basis for cooperation with the Soviet Union, even against potential adversaries. Meanwhile, Kennan closely followed Stalin's Great Purge, which would profoundly affect his outlook on the internal dynamics of the Soviet regime for the rest of his life.

Kennan found himself in strong disagreement with Joseph E. Davies, Bullitt's successor as Ambassador to the Soviet Union, who was indifferent to the Great Purge and other aspects of Stalin's rule. Kennan carried no sway over Davies' decisions, and the ambassador even suggested that Kennan be transferred out of Moscow for "his health". Kennan again contemplated resigning from the service, but instead decided to accept the Russian desk at State Department in Washington. By September 1938, Kennan had been reassigned to a post at the legation in Prague. Following the fall of the Czechoslovak Republic to Nazi Germany at the outbreak of World War II, Kennan was assigned to Berlin. There, he supported the U.S.'s Lend-Lease policy, but warned against displaying any notion of American support for the Soviet Union, which he considered to be an unfit ally. He was interned in Germany for six months after the United States had entered the war in December 1941.

In September 1942, Kennan was assigned as a counselor in Lisbon, where he begrudgingly took on an administrative role handling intelligence and base operations. In January 1944, he was sent to London, where he served as counselor of the U.S. delegation to the European Advisory Commission, which worked to prepare Allied policy in Europe. There, Kennan even grew more disenchanted with the State Department, which he believed was ignoring his qualifications as a trained specialist. However, within months of entering the post, he was appointed deputy chief of the U.S. mission in Moscow, upon request by W. Averell Harriman, the Ambassador to the Soviet Union.

Cold War

“The "long telegram"

In Moscow, Kennan again felt that his opinions were being ignored by Harry S. Truman and policymakers in Washington. Kennan tried repeatedly to persuade policymakers to abandon plans for cooperation with the Soviet Union in favor of a sphere of influence approach in Europe to reduce the Soviets' power there. Kennan believed that a federation needed to be established in western Europe to counter Soviet influence and power in the region, and to compete against the Soviet stronghold in eastern Europe.

Kennan served as deputy head of the U.S. mission in Moscow until April 1946. Near the end of that term, the Treasury Department requested the State Department to explain recent Soviet behavior, such as its disinclination to support the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Kennan responded on February 22, 1946 by sending a lengthy 5,500-word telegram (sometimes cited as being over 8,000 words) from Moscow to Secretary of State James Byrnes outlining a new strategy on how to handle diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. At the "bottom of the Kremlin's neurotic view of world affairs", Kennan argued, "is the traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity". Following the Russian Revolution, this sense of insecurity became mixed with communist ideology and "Oriental secretiveness and conspiracy".

Soviet behavior on the international stage, argued Kennan, depended chiefly on the internal necessities of Joseph Stalin's regime; according to Kennan, Stalin needed a hostile world in order to legitimize his own autocratic rule. Stalin thus used Marxism-Leninism as a "justification for [the Soviet Union's] 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... Today they cannot dispense with it. It is the fig leaf of their moral and intellectual respectability."

The solution, Kennan suggested, was to strengthen Western institutions in order to render them invulnerable to the Soviet challenge while awaiting the eventual mellowing of the Soviet regime.

His new policy of containment was that Soviet pressure had to “be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points.”

his dispatch brought Kennan to the attention of Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, a leading advocate among Truman's inner circle of a hard-line approach to relations with the Soviets, the United States' former wartime ally. Forrestal helped bring him back to Washington, where Kennan served as the first deputy for foreign affairs at the National War College, and then strongly influenced his decision to publish the "X" article.


The goal of his policy was to withdraw all the European force from US. “The settlement reached would give the Kremlin sufficient reassurance against the establishment of regimes in Eastern Europe hostile to the Soviet Union, tempering the degree of control over that area that the Soviet leaders felt it necessary to exercise.


Meanwhile, in March 1947, Truman appeared before Congress and used Kennan's warnings in the "long telegram" as the basis of what became known as the Truman Doctrine. "I believe", he argued "that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures".


“X”


Unlike the "long telegram", Kennan's well-timed article appearing in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs under the pseudonym "X", entitled "The Sources of Soviet Conduct", did not begin by emphasizing "traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity". Instead, it asserted that Stalin's policy was shaped by a combination of Marxist-Leninist ideology, which advocated revolution to defeat the capitalist forces in the outside world, and Stalin's determination to use the notion of "capitalist encirclement" as a fig leaf legitimizing his regimentation of Soviet society so that he could consolidate his own political power. Kennan argued that Stalin would not (and moreover could not) moderate the supposed Soviet determination to overthrow Western governments. Thus,


“the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies... Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the Western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and manoeuvers of Soviet policy, but which cannot be charmed or talked out of existence.”


His new policy of new containment declared that Soviet pressure had to “be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points.” The goal of his policy was to withdraw all the European force from US. “The settlement reached would give the Kremlin sufficient reassurance against the establishment of regimes in Eastern Europe hostile to the Soviet Union, tempering the degree of control over that area that the Soviet leaders felt it necessary to exercise.”
Kennan further argued that the United States would have to undertake this containment alone and unilaterally, but if it could do so without undermining its own economic health and political stability, the Soviet party structure would undergo a period of immense strain eventually resulting in "either the break-up or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power".
The publication of the "X" article soon triggered one of the more intense debates of the Cold War. Walter Lippmann, a leading U.S. journalist and commentator on international affairs, strongly criticized the "X" article. Lippmann argued that Kennan's strategy of containment was "a strategic monstrosity" that could "be implemented only by recruiting, subsidizing and supporting a heterogeneous array of satellites, clients, dependents and puppets". Lippmann argued that diplomacy was the key towards improving relations with the Soviets; he suggested that the US withdraw its forces from Europe and reunify and demilitarize Germany. Meanwhile, word soon leaked out that "X" was indeed Kennan. This information effectively gave the "X" article the status of an official document expressing the Truman administration's new policy toward Moscow.


However, Kennan had not intended the "X" article as a comprehensive prescription for future policy. For the rest of his life, Kennan continued to reiterate that the article did not imply an automatic commitment to resist Soviet 'expansionism' wherever it occurred, with little distinction of primary and secondary interests. In addition, the article did not make it clear that Kennan favored employing political and economic rather than military methods as the chief agent of containment. "My thoughts about containment" said Kennan in a 1996 interview to CNN, "were of course distorted by the people who understood it and pursued it exclusively as a military concept; and I think that that, as much as any other cause, led to [the] 40 years of unnecessary, fearfully expensive and disoriented process of the Cold War."


In addition, the administration made few attempts to explain the distinction between Soviet influence and the international Communist movement to the U.S. public. "In part, this failure reflected the belief of many in Washington", writes historian John Lewis Gaddis, "that only the prospect of an undifferentiated global threat could shake Americans out of their isolationist tendencies that remained latent among them".


In a PBS television interview with David Gergen in 1996, Kennan again reiterated that he did not regard the Soviets as primarily a military threat. "They were not like Hitler", noted Kennan. In Kennan's view, this misunderstanding:

“...all came down to one sentence in the "X" Article where I said that wherever these people, meaning the Soviet leadership, confronted us with dangerous hostility anywhere in the world, we should do everything possible to contain it and not let them expand any further. I should have explained that I didn't suspect them of any desire to launch an attack on us. This was right after the war, and it was absurd to suppose that they were going to turn around and attack the United States. I didn't think I needed to explain that, but I obviously should have done it."

The "X" article meant sudden fame for Kennan, who became the father of the government's containment doctrine overnight, leading him to write in his memoirs, "My official loneliness came in fact to an end ... My reputation was made. My voice now carried."

Influence under Marshall

Between April 1947 and December 1948, when George C. Marshall was Secretary of State, Kennan was more influential than he was at any other period in his career. Marshall valued his strategic vision, and had him create and head what is now called the Policy Planning Staff, the United States Department of State's internal think tank. Kennan became the first Director of Policy Planning. Marshall relied heavily on him, along with other members of his staff, to prepare policy recommendations.

As an intellectual architect of the Marshall Plan, Kennan helped launch the pillar of economic and political containment of the Soviet Union. Although Kennan regarded the Soviet Union as too weak to risk war, he nevertheless considered it an enemy capable of expanding into Western Europe through subversion, given the popular support for Moscow-controlled Communist parties in Western Europe, which remained demoralized by the devastation of the Second World War. To counter this potential source of Soviet influence, Kennan's solution was to direct economic aid and covert political help to Japan and Western Europe in order to revive Western governments and prop up international capitalism. By doing so, the U.S. would help to rebuild the balance of power. In addition, in June 1948, Kennan proposed covert support of left-wing parties not oriented toward Moscow and to labor unions in Western Europe in order to engineer a rift between Moscow and working class movements in Western Europe.

As the U.S. was launching the Marshall Plan, Kennan and the Truman administration hoped that the Soviet Union's rejection of the Marshall aid would place strains on its relations with its Communist allies in Eastern Europe.[36] Meanwhile, Kennan was proposing a series of efforts to exploit the schism between Moscow and Josip Broz Tito's Yugoslavia. Kennan proposed conducting covert action in the Balkans aimed at further eroding Moscow's influence.

The administration's new vigorously anti-Soviet policy also became evident when, at Kennan's suggestion, the U.S. changed its long-standing hostility to Francisco Franco's fascist regime in Spain in order to secure U.S. influence in the Mediterranean. Kennan had observed in 1947 that the Truman Doctrine implied a new view of Franco. His suggestion heralded the turn in U.S.-Spanish relations, which ended in close military cooperation after 1950.

Academic career and later life

After the end of his brief ambassadorial post in Yugoslavia in 1963, Kennan spent the rest of his life in academia, becoming a leading realist critic of U.S. foreign policy.[47] Having spent 18 months as a scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study between 1950 and 1952, Kennan permanently joined the faculty of the Institute's School of Historical Studies in 1956.[67] During his career there, Kennan wrote seventeen books and scores of articles on international relations. He won the Pulitzer Prize for history, the National Book Award, the Bancroft Prize and the Francis Parkman Prize for Russia Leaves the War, published in 1956.[49] He again won a Pulitzer and a National Book Award in 1968 for Memoirs, 1925–1950.[68] A second volume, taking his reminiscences up to 1963, was published in 1972. Among his other works were American Diplomacy 1900–1950, Sketches from a Life, published in 1989, and Around the Cragged Hill in 1993.

His properly historical works amount to a six-volume account of the relations between Russia (whether the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union) and the West from 1875 to his own time; the period from 1894 to 1914 was planned, but never completed. He was chiefly concerned with:

• the folly of the First World War as a choice of policy; he argues that the costs of modern war, direct and indirect, predictably exceeded the benefits of removing the Hohenzollerns.
• the ineffectiveness of summit diplomacy, with the Conference of Versailles as a type-case. National leaders have, and had, too much to do to give any single matter the constant and flexible attention which diplomatic problems require.
• the Allied intervention in Russia of 1918–19. He was indignant with Soviet accounts of a vast capitalist conspiracy against the world's first worker's state, some of which do not even mention the World War; he was equally indignant with the decision to intervene, as costly, harmful, and counterproductive. He argues that the interventions may in fact, by arousing Russian nationalism, have ensured the survival of the Bolshevik state.

Realism

Political realism formed the basis of Kennan's work as a diplomat and diplomatic historian and remains relevant to the debate over American foreign policy, which since the 19th century has been characterized by a shift from the Founding Fathers' realist school to the idealistic or Wilsonian school of international relations. In the realist tradition, security is based on the principle of a balance of power and the reliance on morality as the sole determining factor in statecraft is considered impractical. According to the Wilsonian approach, on the other hand, the spread of democracy abroad as a foreign policy is key and morals are universally valid. During the Presidency of Bill Clinton, American diplomacy reflected the Wilsonian school to such a degree that those in favor of the realist approach likened President Clinton's policies to social work. According to Kennan, whose concept of American diplomacy was based on the realist approach, such moralism without regard to the realities of power and the national interest is self-defeating and will lead to the erosion of power, to America's detriment.

In his historical writings, and his memoirs, Kennan laments in great detail the failings of democratic foreign policymakers and those of the United States in particular. According to Kennan, when American policymakers suddenly confronted the Cold War, they had inherited little more than rationale and rhetoric "utopian in expectations, legalistic in concept, moralistic in [the] demand it seemed to place on others, and self-righteous in the degree of high-mindedness and rectitude... to ourselves". The source of the problem, according to Kennan, is the force of public opinion, a force that is inevitably unstable, unserious, subjective, emotional, and simplistic. As a result, Kennan has insisted that the U.S. public can only be united behind a foreign policy goal on the "primitive level of slogans and jingoistic ideological inspiration".

Containment in 1967, when he published the first volume of his memoirs, involved something other than the use of military "counterforce". He was never pleased that the policy he influenced was associated with the arms build-up of the Cold War. In his memoirs, Kennan argued that containment did not demand a militarized U.S. foreign policy. Instead, "counterforce" implied the political and economic defense of Western Europe against the disruptive effect of the war on European society. Exhausted by war, the Soviet Union posed no serious military threat to the United States or its allies at the beginning of the Cold War, Kennan argued, but rather a strong ideological and political rival.

In the 1960s, Kennan criticized U.S. involvement in Vietnam, arguing that the United States had little vital interest in the region. In Kennan's view, the Soviet Union, Britain, Germany, Japan, and North America remained the arenas of vital U.S. interests. In the 1970s and 1980s, he emerged as a leading critic of the renewed arms race as détente was breaking down.

In 1989, President George H. W. Bush awarded Kennan the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. Yet, he remained a realist critic of recent U.S. presidents, urging, in particular, the U.S. government to "withdraw from its public advocacy of democracy and human rights". "This whole tendency to see ourselves as the center of political enlightenment and as teachers to a great part of the rest of the world strikes me as unthought-through, vainglorious and undesirable", he said in an interview with the New York Review of Books in 1999. "I would like to see our government gradually withdraw from its public advocacy of democracy and human rights. I submit that governments should deal with other governments as such, and should avoid unnecessary involvement, particularly personal involvement, with their leaders." These ideas were particularly applicable, he said, to U.S. relations with China and Russia. Kennan opposed the Clinton administration's war in Kosovo and its expansion of NATO (the establishment of which he had also opposed half a century earlier), expressing fears that both policies would worsen relations with Russia. He described NATO enlargement as a "strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions".

Kennan remained vigorous and alert in the last years of his life, although arthritis had him confined to a wheelchair. In his later years, Kennan concluded that "the general effect of Cold War extremism was to delay rather than hasten the great change that overtook the Soviet Union". At age 98, he warned of the unforeseen consequences of waging war against Iraq. He warned that launching an attack on Iraq would amount to waging a second war that "bears no relation to the first war against terrorism" and declared efforts by the Bush administration to link al Qaeda with Saddam Hussein "pathetically unsupportive and unreliable". Kennan went on to warn:

Anyone who has ever studied the history of American diplomacy, especially military diplomacy, knows that you might start in a war with certain things on your mind as a purpose of what you are doing, but in the end, you found yourself fighting for entirely different things that you had never thought of before... In other words, war has a momentum of its own and it carries you away from all thoughtful intentions when you get into it. Today, if we went into Iraq, like the president would like us to do, you know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end.[80]

In February 2004, scholars, diplomats, and Princeton alumni gathered at the university's campus to celebrate Kennan's 100th birthday. Among those in attendance were then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, international relations theorist John Mearsheimer, journalist Chris Hedges, former ambassador and career Foreign Service Officer Jack F. Matlock, Jr., and Kennan's official biographer, John Lewis Gaddis.

Death and legacy

Kennan died on March 17, 2005 at age 101 at his home in Princeton. He was survived by his wife, Annelise, whom he married in 1931, and his four children, eight grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

In an obituary in The New York Times, Kennan was described as "the American diplomat who did more than any other envoy of his generation to shape United States policy during the cold war," to whom "the White House and the Pentagon turned when they sought to understand the Soviet Union after World War II". Of Kennan, historian Wilson D. Miscamble remarked that "[o]ne can only hope that present and future makers of foreign policy might share something of his integrity and intelligence".[77] Foreign Policy described Kennan as "the most influential diplomat of the 20th century". Henry Kissinger said that Kennan "came as close to authoring the diplomatic doctrine of his era as any diplomat in our history", while Colin Powell called Kennan "our best tutor" in dealing with the foreign policy issues of the 21st century.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_F._Kennan