Training for Statesmanship

by GEORGE F. KENNAN

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ONE can hardly complain today about the time and effort devoted in American colleges and universities to instruction in foreign affairs. I doubt whether there is a liberal arts curriculum in the country which does not offer courses or activities in this field, and many of the technical institutions also are beginning to include such courses.

There are people, I am sure, who would feel that the high volume of instruction in this field is in itself the guarantee of a fairly respectable measure of achievement. These people would argue that some instruction in international affairs is obviously better than none at all, and that therefore this impressive volume of activity must produce useful results, regardless of the content of the courses.

About this I have my doubts. I am not certain that there is any virtue in teaching people about international affairs — aside from such virtue as may reside in the tenor of the teaching itself. Since the amount of relevant factual material is infinite, embracing in the last analysis practically everything there is to know about the human family, international affairs is a field in which the pursuit of knowledge without understanding is peculiarly pointless and useless. This being the case, mere volume of instruction does not guarantee anything at all in the way of desirable results. In fact, if instruction does not proceed from a realistic understanding of the subject, it can be worse than useless. I think anyone who has lectured extensively about foreign affairs will have had the same experience I have had—of noting that the questions asked by simple and relatively uneducated people are often more sensible and penetrating than those asked by people who have had a good deal of teaching on these subjects but have been taught the wrong way.

Instruction in international affairs can be given for two different purposes. The first is to instill into the student the type of understanding of the subject needed by the man who is not going to make participation in international affairs his business in life but who wants to acquit himself creditably of his duties of citizenship. A man who wants to be a good citizen needs to be able to judge men and issues in national life. But there are few important issues of national policy that can be understood today except in relation to our international position. And even the quality of the statesmanship of our national leaders often becomes manifest primarily in their reactions to problems that are at least partly problems of international life. The conscientious citizen therefore obviously requires as broad and enlightened an understanding of this subject as he can get.

The second purpose which instruction in international affairs can serve is to prepare men for service in the foreign field, either in governmental or in other positions.

It is a mistake, to think of international affairs as anything outside the regular context of life — as anything which a man could hope to understand without having to understand things much more basic. There is no such thing as foreign affairs in the abstract. The relations between nations are part of the whole great problem of politics — of the behavior of man as a political animal. They are inseparably connected with the fundamental human problem of power that lies at the heart of all politics: the problem of how the freedom of choice of the individual, or of the organized society, is to be limited in order to repress chaos and ensure the good order necessary to the continuation of civilization.

We Americans have a strange — and to me disturbing — attitude toward the subject of power. We don’t like the word. We don’t like the concept. We are suspicious of people who talk about it. We like to feel that the adjustment of conflicting interests is something that can be taken care of by juridical norms and institutional devices, voluntarily accepted and not involving violence to the feelings or interests of anyone. We like to feel that this is the way our own life is arranged. We like to feel that if this principle were to be understood and observed by others as it is by us, it would put an end to many of the misunderstandings and conflicts that have marked our time.

But we ignore the fact that power underlies our own society as it underlies every other order of human affairs distinguishable from chaos. Order and civilization are not self-engendering. They do not flow from themselves or even from any universal and enlightened understanding of political institutions in the abstract.

In our country, the element of power is peculiarly diffused. It is not concentrated, as it is in other countries, in what we might call the “pure form” of a national uniformed police establishment functioning as the vehicle of a central political will. Power with us does exist to some extent in courts of law and in police establishments, but it also exists in many other American institutions. It exists in our economic system, though not nearly to the degree the Marxists claim. Sometimes, unfortunately, it exists in irregular forces — in underworld groups, criminal gangs, or informal associations of a vigilante nature — capable of terrorizing their fellow citizens in one degree or another. Above all, it exists in the delicate compulsions of our social life, the force of community opinion within our country — in the respect we have for the good opinion of our neighbors. For reasons highly complex, we Americans place upon ourselves quite extraordinary obligations of conformity to the group in utterance and behavior, and this feature of our national life seems to be growing rather than declining. All these things can bring us to put restraints upon ourselves which in other parts of the world would be imposed upon people only by the straightforward exercise of the central police authority.

Now I am not taking exception to this curious diffusion, within American life, of the power to make men conform to given patterns of behavior. It has both advantages and dangers. It represents unquestionably a manner of protecting the interests of the individual against the more dangerous and humiliating forms of tyranny and oppression in normal times. But we must not permit this advantage to blind us to the fact that such a thing as power does exist and is, indeed, a necessity of civilization, flowing from certain facts about human nature — certain imperfections if you will — that are basic and that are not going to be corrected by any man-made device, whether institutional or educational. These basic facts provide one of the main keys to the understanding of history. They lie at the heart of our problem of living together as human beings within the borders of this land. And they also lie at the heart of our problem of living side by side with other human societies within the broader framework of this planet.

Whoever would understand foreign affairs, therefore, cannot and will not do it solely by understanding the intricacies of tariffs or the various classifications of treaties or the ways in which the United Nations Charter differs from the Covenant of the League of Nations or the techniques of sampling mass opinion. International affairs are primarily a matter of the behavior of governments. But the behavior of governments is in turn a matter of the behavior of individual man in the political context, and of the workings of all those basic impulses — national feeling, charity, ambition, fear, jealousy, egotism, and group attachment—which are the stuff of his behavior in the community of other men.

Whoever does not understand these things will never understand what is taking place in the interrelationships of nations. And he will not learn them from courses that purport to deal with international affairs alone. He will learn them, rather, from those things which have been recognized for thousands of’ years as the essentials of humanistic study: from history and from the more subtle and revealing expressions of man’s nature that go by the names of art and literature.

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I WOULD say, therefore: Let the international affairs course stand as an addendum to basic instruction in the humanities. Let it stand as an exercise in which the student is told to take what he has already learned about the characteristics of the human animal and to note in what curious and marvelous ways they find their ultimate expression in the behavior of governments. Let foreign relations be viewed as one area — an extremely important one — in which these laws of nature work themselves out. But let the teaching of the subject not be permitted to obscure its basic components. Let no one be permitted to think that he is learned in something called a “science” of international relations unless he is learned in the essentials of the political process from the grass roots up and has been taught to look soberly and unsparingly, but also with charity and sympathy, at his fellow human beings. International affairs is not a science. And there is no understanding of international affairs that does not embrace understanding of the human individual.

Only if these principles are observed will we be able to free ourselves from the strain of utopianism that has been present in the teaching of international affairs in our country in recent decades. By this I mean teaching that portrays incorrectly the nature of our world environment and our relation to it and encourages students to disregard the urgent real requirements of international life in favor of the cultivation of artificial and impractical visions of world betterment. This argument about the philosophy of our approach to our problems of foreign relations is one that has been agitating our academic communities intensely in recent months. I am myself a partisan in the dispute. I shall only say here that further exposure to the bitter realities of the practice of international relations, in a place where these realities are about as bitter as they can conceivably be, has strengthened my conviction that the shortcomings in the teaching of international affairs, and primarily the leanings toward shallow and utopian interpretations, represent, in their ultimate effect, an important limitation of our ability to handle ourselves effectively in world affairs. Admittedly this is largely a question of general educational level, and not just of the philosophical tenor of courses on foreign affairs; but that is precisely my point. Until we can achieve a deeper and more realistic understanding generally, among the influential strata of this country, as to what is really involved in the process of international relations, I tear we shall not succeed in reducing appreciably the number of bewildering and painful surprises our people derive from the unfolding of international events.

If the young men of this day are to be trained to look clearly and intelligently on America’s foreign relations, the teaching to which they are subjected must be stern and uncompromising. It must be founded in humility and renunciation of easy effects. It must exclude all that is Pollyannaisli and superficial. It must reject utopianism and every form of idealism not rooted in an honest and unsparing recognition of the nature of man. It must free itself from the tyranny of slogans, fashionable words, and semantic taboos. It must proceed from a recognition that the understanding of this subject can never be more simply acquired than the understanding of its basic component, which is man himself.

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SO MUCH for the teaching of the understanding of international affairs. Now a word about the teaching of the practice of it. There are a number of institutions in the country engaged, either entirely or partly, in this sort of teaching. I think they have done fine work. I think that they deserve every support. What I say is not in criticism of them but rather by way of defense of them against the pressures to which I know they must from time to time be subjected.

The participation of individual Americans in international activity takes a variety of forms, even within the framework of government work alone. The variety is so great that no institution could hope to give complete vocational training, in the strict sense of the word, for work in the international field. A man who enters the Foreign Service of the United States or who goes abroad in the employ of any great American concern, commercial or philanthropic, is apt to find himself dealing with the most amazing diversity of problems. This lies in the nature of international life and in the necessity—whatever the man’s function—of reconciling conflicting national outlooks and customs.

As far as I can see, the qualities that enable people to measure up to these various functions are the general qualities of understanding, adaptability, tact, and common sense. Certainly that is true of the Foreign Service of the United States. To be useful in the tasks of service in the international field, a man requires dignity both of the intellect and of character. The two are linked in curious ways, but character, in my opinion, is unquestionably the more important.

As one who has been in charge of Foreign Service establishments at one time or another, I can say without hesitation that I would wish my subordinates to be well-disciplined both in mind and in character; but if I had to choose, I would take any day the man on whose character I could depend, even though I had to nurse him along in his thinking, rather than the man whose mind might have been trained but whose character was unformed or undependable.

The qualities of honor, loyalty, generosity, consideration for others, and sense of obligation to others have been the guts of usefulness and effectiveness in the Foreign Service as I have known it. This was true even in the more distant days when it was easier to be a part of government, when the relationship of the individual officer to his superiors rested on rather old-fashioned assumptions that made things simple and uncomplicated for both parties and permitted the officer to concentrate his attention almost entirely on the external aspects of his work. How much truer it is today, when so much more is asked of the individual and so little help is given him. In our present controversial age, when the growing awareness of the responsibilities of citizenship and the sudden impact of the hideous problem of human disloyalty are whipping our established institutions about like trees in a storm, the position of the professional civil servant can become the center of some of the most severe strains and tensions our society knows. In this day of bigness and impersonality, of security clearances and loyalty investigations, of swollen staffs and managerial specialists—in this day, in short, of the fading vitality of the individual relationship in government — it requires a special manliness and fortitude for the civil servant to stride confidently along the path of his duties, to retain his serenity of mind and confidence in the future, to find the deeper roots of understanding of his own country and the deeper sources of faith in the utility of what he is doing.

As I said in my talk before the Pennsylvania State Bar Association, there has been much discussion about Communist penetration into our government. But people seldom attempt to appraise the actual damage done thereby to our public policy. I have been fairly close to the policy-making processes in Washington for the past six years. With many of the decisions I have been personally in accord; with others, not. But I cannot recall a single major decision of foreign policy during that period which Communist influence could have had any appreciable part in determining. If, therefore, I were to be asked what part Communist penetration had played in creating our difficulties and perplexities of today in the field of foreign affairs, I would have to say that — as far as these past years are concerned — that part has been negligible, and I am sure it is negligible today.

On the other hand, I have seen serious damage done in these recent years to public confidence and to governmental morale by the mishandling of our own measures to counter precisely this problem of Communist penetration. Such damage has been done by the public discussion of things that should have been handled quietly and privately. It has been done by the inability of many people to distinguish between questions of loyalty and questions of opinion. It has been done by the workings of hastily devised and not fully appropriate procedures for testing and establishing the reliability of public servants. Finally, such damage has been done by the failure of many people to realize that what is important from the standpoint of personal loyalty is not the dusty record of actions committed ten to twenty years ago and now proven by hindsight to have been errors, but the picture of the living human being as he stands before us today, and the extent to which he now possesses wisdom and maturity and stability and all those other positive qualities which too often are acquired only through the process of painful error.

The result to date of all these deficiencies in the treatment of the subject of civic loyalty has been the creation of a situation which worries me precisely because it seems to me to play very dangerously into the hands of those men who have constituted themselves our adversaries in the international sphere. I can see no reason why malicious people should have any particular difficulty in rendering unavailable for service to this country almost any person whom they might select for this treatment. All that is necessary is to release a spate of rumors and gossip and demands for investigation. There are always tongues willing and eager to take up this cry and carry it further; something of it is bound to stick in the public mind; and in the end, if the public servant in question is not discouraged and demoralized, a portion of the public will at any rate have lost confidence in him, and his usefulness to the country will have been thereby reduced. Mind you, I am thinking here not only of the man’s loss, which may be grievous. I am thinking of the country’s loss, which is more grievous still. Are we so rich in talented public servants that we can afford to leave the ones we have vulnerable to this sort of danger?

In coping with the strains and trials that such conditions involve, the official will not be much helped by memorized facts or by acquired techniques. He will not be much helped by erudition, as distinct from understanding. He will be helped primarily by those qualities of courage and resolution that make it possible for men to have independence of character, to face the loneliness and opprobrium this sometimes involves, and to stand up for their friends and their beliefs and their sense of duty to the national tradition.

It is my impression, from the recollection of my days as an undergraduate, that understanding based on a firm grasp of the humanities, and character based on an uncompromising integrity in all personal associations, are the very essence of a liberal education and represent goals to which our colleges have clung in the face of very considerable pressures. This is my plea: Let those students who want to prepare themselves for work in the international field read their Bible and their Shakespeare, their Plutarch and their Gibbon, perhaps even their Latin and their Greek, and let them guard as the most precious of their possessions that concept of personal conduct which has grown up around the honor system, but of which the honor system is only a part and a symbol. Let them guard that code of behavior which means that men learn to act toward each other with honor and truthfulness and loyalty, to bestow confidence where confidence is asked, and to build within themselves those qualities of self-discipline and selfrestraint on which the integrity of a public service must be founded.

If these things are clung to and cultivated, then our colleges will be doing what is most important to prepare their sons to confront the problems of international life, whether as citizens or as public servants. Whatever else can be taught them about the contemporary facts of international life will be a useful superstructure— but only that.