Kennan's Passionate Realism
BY STANLEY HOFFMANN
THE NUCLEAR DELUSION:
Soviet-American Relations in the Atomic Age by . Pantheon, $1-1.95.
FOR LOVERS OF PARADOX, the life and works of George Kennan offer innumerable rewards. Undoubtedly, of all the American professional diplomats of the post-World War II era, he is the most distinguished intellectually; but his direct influence on the shaping of American foreign policy was limited to a very small number of years—essentially, 1946 to 1949. He is the father of the policy of containment, which has been the core of American foreign policy and the main part of Washington’s policy toward Moscow since 1947; but he quickly became one of the main critics of the way in which this policy has been carried out, and he has protested steadfastly against what he considers to be official misinterpretations of his two fundamental statements on the subject—the “long telegram” he addressed to the State Department from Moscow in February, 1946, and the famous article signed X in Foreign Affairs in 1947. He has a very dim view of American politics, of the way in which demagoguery often prevails over common sense, and of the destructive effects pressure groups, parties, and the whims of members of Congress have on the foreign-policy process. And he is anything but a populist, having observed the frequent mindlessness, brutality, chauvinism, or aggressiveness of crowds; and yet, he has sympathized with some American radical groups or “surge movements,” when their concerns were the defense of the environment and the threat of nuclear destruction. He is considered, rightly, as one of the leaders of the “realist” school of foreign-policy analysis, critical of Wilsonian idealism, contemptuous of attempts to resolve international conflicts by legalistic or moralistic formulas, concerned about replacing such illusions with a firm understanding of power and a proper regard for the national interest. And yet there is a fierce Christian moralism in George Kennan—it comes out forcefully whenever he deals with either the evils of Stalinism (one candid remark about it, when he was ambassador in Moscow, comparing the treatment of foreign diplomats in Moscow with the treatment he received as an internee in Nazi Germany, made him persona non grata there) or the horrors of nuclear war.
Another paradox can be found in the contrast between his grim view of Soviet power and ideology in 1946-1947 and his apparently much more benign judgment of the late 1970s and early 1980s: now he sees the Soviet Union as a country led by “a group of troubled men—elderly men, for the most part—whose choices and possibilities are severely constrained,” “prisoners of many circumstances”; and he protests against “this systematic dehumanization of the leadership of another great country,” which he feels prevails in America today. And yet, he is not inconsistent. He remains what he has always been: a pessimistic, compassionate humanist, worried about mankind’s inclination to foul and even to destroy its own nest, devoid of illusions but not of modest hopes, convinced that moderation offers the best, perhaps the only, way of waging the inevitable contest of nations, and that the biggest threats America faces come from within: from “the problems of crime, drugs, deteriorating educational standards, urban decay, pornography, and decadence of one sort or another,” and also from those military planners and “nonmilitary people who . . . lose themselves in the fantastic reaches of. . . military mathematics.” The Kennan of 1946-1947 wanted to wake up an American establishment and public that had been lulled, by wartime propaganda and by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “manipulation of opinion,” into expecting harmony in Soviet-American relations after the war (in Kennan’s dislike of Roosevelt’s government by charisma, the disdain of the professional diplomat for the political antics and amateurishness of the presidential system comes to the fore). The Kennan of today wants to move the American establishment and public away from what he considers an equally mistaken view of the Soviet Union—as a monster “not greatly different from the image of the Nazi regime as it existed shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War.” The images of the Soviet Union have turned from rosy to black; what has not changed—and what Kennan both deplores and fights— is the “congenital subjectivity of the American perception of the outside world.” Throughout his career, as a diplomat and later as a professional historian and respected public figure, Kennan has been challenging passing orthodoxies: first, the Rooseveltian orthodoxy of easy collaboration (on American terms), then the Cold War orthodoxy based on the militarization of the policy Kennan himself had recommended, now the new orthodoxy of the Committee on the Present Danger and the Reagan administration, geared to confrontation, committed to a nuclear buildup, and eager to change the Soviet system by a combination of ideological, military, and economic pressures.
THE NUCLEAR DELUSION is a collection of pieces—articles, interviews, speeches—almost all of which were written in the past six or seven years (the outstanding exception is a 1950 memo to Secretary of State Dean Acheson about the atomic bomb). A long, introspective, and retrospective introduction ties these pieces together and reviews the author’s intellectual evolution. Like all collections of essays written for different audiences, this one gets a bit repetitious at times. But it provides the reader with what might be called the quintessential Kennan: everything he has thought and cared about in his long career is presented here in distilled and crystal-clear form. The two themes of the book are the Soviet-American relation and the nuclear problem—the links between the two being his conviction that nuclear calculations and the concern for the strategic balance of military power have needlessly complicated and poisoned the contest between Washington and Moscow and his belief that “there is no issue at stake in our political relations with the Soviet Union . . . which would conceivably be worth a nuclear war.”
In recent years, as—after the brief hopes of the détente era—the Soviet Union came again to be seen by much of the enlightened public as a dangerously expansionist and imperial power, many people thought of Kennan, if not as an apologist for Moscow, at least as a renegade who had come to view the Soviet Union as a conservative and harmless power. These essays show that such a view is quite false. I know of no better recapitulation of the Soviet-American relationship, from the Russian Revolution to the present, than the second chapter of this book. It lists lucidly all the contributions that the Soviet Union, and particularly Stalin, made to the Cold War: the passion for secrecy (an old Russian tradition), Soviet behavior in Eastern Europe, the lies and distortions of the propaganda machine.
Those who see Kennan as a kind of convert to Soviet-American collaboration will be in for a shock: he makes it clear that he believes détente to have been oversold and opportunities for collaboration to be limited, given the incompatibilities between the two regimes, between their external goals, and between the two national styles. What he argues against is the belief that the Soviet Union is above all a military threat, a country that would engage in world conquest were it not for nuclear deterrence. To him, the militarization of the Cold War was essentially America’s responsibility: the Soviet military probes—such as in Korea and in Afghanistan—have been limited, yet they have been misread in the West as preludes to general aggression. He does not deny “the traditional predilection for piecemeal border expansion through relatively small and low-risk steps,” but he finds that there are definite limits to it, imposed both by conditions within the Soviet Union and by external realities. To Kennan, in other words, the Soviet Union is neither the military monster nor the bankrupt and brittle regime that the Reaganites see: it is a resilient adversary with limited usable means and circumscribed objectives.
What emerges from these essays is the view of a competitive yet manageable relationship. Kennan is not worried by Soviet opportunities in the Third World; he is convinced that the quest for nuclear superiority on either side cannot yield political results; he is eager to see Washington replace at last its obsession with Soviet capabilities with a sober look at Soviet intentions. He condemns attempts at changing the Soviet system, not because it is an attractive one but because “we would not know what to put in [its] place.” He is critical of the JacksonVanik Amendment, tying trade and credits to Jewish emigration, and he cites an equally futile 1911 precedent. He doubts that the use of trade as a political instrument can succeed. He sees some long-term benefits in trade and in cultural and scientific exchanges. But he is, wisely, critical of agreements about principles of behavior, such as the famous one signed by Nixon and Brezhnev at the Moscow summit in 1972, which promised a renunciation of unilateral advantages, or the Helsinki agreements of 1975. With Moscow, specific agreements make sense; vague ones breed trouble. He is skeptical of the SALT process: “. . . the pace of technological innovation ... far outstripped the pace of the SALT-type negotiations, so that their results tended regularly to be outdated before they were even arrived at.”
AND YET, IT IS the nuclear arms race that worries him most. His 1950 memo argued against giving too prominent a place to nuclear weapons in America’s strategy and foreign policy. He would have liked them to be deemed “something superfluous to our basic military posture . . . something which we are compelled to hold against the possibility that they might be used by our opponents”—and therefore only as many bombs as were necessary to deter a nuclear attack on the U.S. and its allies should have been built. Even then, he argued against the notion of extended deterrence—against trying to protect the allies in Western Europe, who faced superior Soviet conventional forces, by threatening the Soviets with the first use of nuclear weapons in case of conventional aggression. As his recent contribution to a critique of the “first use” notion in Foreign Affairs has shown, he has remained faithful to his view that NATO should rely on conventional defense, not on nuclear deterrence. He believes that throughout the postwar arms race, “it has been we Americans who, at almost every step of the road, have taken the lead in the development” of nuclear weaponry. (This is questionable: in the case of the H bomb, the ICBM, and the ABM, the Soviets’ efforts came first.) He pleads for a denuclearization of Central and Northern Europe, for a complete ban on nuclear testing, and for an American initiative proposing to the Soviets an across-the-board reduction of the nuclear arsenals by 50 percent.
When he writes about nuclear weapons, Kennan’s tone is one of passion and indignation. He has always been haunted by the scandal of 1914—a catastrophic war that could have been avoided by wiser statesmen. Hence his warnings against the “intellectual primitivism and naivety” entailed by our “demonizing” Soviet leaders, against the “subconscious need . . . for an external enemy ... in whose allegedly inhuman wickedness one could see the reflection of one’s own exceptional virtue.” His anguish has been magnified by his fear of a nuclear
war, which, he believes, could not be controlled. He sees in the nuclear weapon “the most useless weapon ever invented. It can be employed to no rational purpose. ... It is only something with which, in a moment of petulance or panic, you commit such fearful acts of destruction as no sane person would ever wish to have upon his conscience.”
Kennan’s horror of the nuclear bomb comes not only from his Christian conscience (it is a bomb that destroys all the restraints mankind has laboriously tried to impose on the savagery of war) but also from his view that the bomb is both the culmination of and a diversion from the solution to the material and moral evils of industrial society—a society that Kennan, nostalgic for a more pastoral, frugal, and simple world, has always loathed, and whose problems, as he sees it, “confront the Russians and ourselves alike.” Modern society demoralized mankind; nuclear weaponry, a strategy based on it, and a policy geared to such a strategy immoralize mankind. Not only extended deterrence but all nuclear deterrence is evil, since it rests on the assumption that “the Russians are such monsters that unless they are deterred they would assuredly launch upon us a nuclear attack.” Indeed, “this entire preoccupation with nuclear war is a form of illness.” It is Kennan’s nostalgia for a rational and humane world view in which even force could serve national goals that makes him believe that the nuclear weapon is necessarily useless. Not everybody would agree: to a Western European, giving up the nuclear threat and increasing conventional forces might well make a war seem more likely. Mankind has been caught in a dilemma: nuclear war—the resort to nuclear weapons— would most certainly be an unprecedented disaster, and would most probably be uncontrollable. And the evolution of technology makes for the proliferation of war-fighting scenarios, and of nuclear weapons as well. However, the threat of nuclear war has apparently contributed to preventing any conventional conflict between the superpowers. Wouldn’t the abolition of nuclear weapons make the world safe for hideous conventional wars? In his introduction, Kennan comes to grips with this problem—and concludes that, indeed, “war itself, as a means of settling differences at least between the great industrial powers, will have to be in some way ruled out,” along with the “greater part of the vast military establishments.”
It is a startling conclusion for a champion of realism and of modesty in goals and expectations, for a critic of past “demands for the outlawing of war.” But it is one to which he is led quite logically by his very concern for a sane world. Even those who are not ready for so sweeping a challenge, or do not agree with every point he makes, will, I hope, be sensitive to the two greatest virtues of this admirable book: the elegant, graceful, supple, and eloquent style (reading Kennan gives the same pleasure as listening to Alfred Brendel playing Mozart), and the moving, intelligent, passionate, yet controlled and reasoned humanity of one of America’s greatest public servants. He is always courteous, even in his polemics; he is never shrill, even in his indignations. Let us hope that he will continue to speak out for many years. □