RIP, George Kennan

IN THE NEWS
While the major news outlets have been focused on Pope John Paul II's final days, an important figure of the last century also passed away, but with far less fanfare. George F. Kennan died two weeks ago with only a smattering of and tributes.

However, Kennan may be far more historically significant than John Paul II, both for what he did and what he represented. Both men made their contributions to ending the Cold War, but for Kennan, of course, it was his full-time job in the Foreign Service. The election of the new pope may be intensifying the clashes among different strains of Catholicism, but Kennan's death definitively marks the end of an era, the last days of doctrine in US foreign policy.

George Kennan is most famous for his "long telegram" from the Moscow Embassy in 1947. He later re-wrote the basic argument as a Foreign Affairs article, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," published under the pseudonym X. The point of disguising his identity, of course, was to both shield a career bureaucrat from any possible political reprisals, but more importantly, to give the impression that the anonymous author was speaking for the Truman Administration.

Kennan, a Russian specialist, saw the looming Soviet threat through Russian eyes. The Soviets put an internationalist, socialist face on the basic national interests of the Russian empire, but their interest in their own security was the starting point for predicting Soviet behavior. The horrendous cost in both lives and capital that the Great Patriotic War inflicted on the Soviets heightened the inherent distrust of the West that the Politburo inherited from the Romanovs. Vowing never to let another Hitler reach their doorstep again, the Soviets made Eastern Europe their tightly-controlled buffer against hostile Western powers. Despite the great economic strain it inflicted on a war-weary country, Kennan argued, it was inevitable that the Soviets would maintain their large standing army as both shield and sword against the West.

At the same time that the Russian bear kept its teeth and claws sharp, it was also slowly dying. Soviet totalitarianism had already, by the end of WWII, clearly failed, according to Kennan. That was a startling statement about a once-ally who had defeated the Nazis, and a new enemy that seemed poised to topple the regimes of Western Europe in a wave of Communist riots, strikes, and putsches. Kennan, however, had the experience and acumen to see how the Soviet economy was deteriorating. The fissures between Russians and non-Russians in the USSR were already clear, including the terror famines largely directed against the Ukrainians, the welcome Ukrainians and non-Russians gave the invading Wehrmacht forces, and the immediate crackdown against nationalist dissidents immediately after the war.

Ultimately, Kennan believed, the center would not hold. US foreign policy, therefore, needed to be patient enough to wait for the Soviet collapse. Before that happened, the United States needed to contain Soviet power, driven by Russian paranoia and Communist ideology to be expansionist. And thus, the decades-long policy of containment was born.

Containment underwent many changes from its inception, through different Administrations and different landmarks of the Cold War. Over time, its military component outgrew what Kennan believed its proper role to be. Events like the Korean War made it seem that the Soviet threat, faced directly in Europe or through its proxies in Asia, needed to be blocked with equal or greater military force. To Kennan, that was a losing game, playing the game of superpower conflict on the Soviets' terms. An asymmetric strategy, depending more on American economic, political, and diplomatic strengths, was Kennan's preferred approach. Whether or not he was right on this point, I leave it to the reader to decide.

Although I count Kennan among the people I admire, I certainly don't agree with everything he said. For example, in an article he wrote during the 1980s, "Containment: 40 Years Later," he argued that a rapprochement with Khrushchev was briefly possible, but the personal embarrassment he suffered during the U-2 incident made it impossible to make peace overtures to the West. If the political situation inside the Soviet leadership was that delicate, how likely was it for Khrushchev to have delivered on his part of any Cold War-ending diplomacy?

Before you chuckle at Kennan's naivete on this point, it's worth remembering what many of the "hard-liners" believed during the Cold War. Up until the end of the Soviet empire, many of them, from academics like Richard Pipes and Condoleeza Rice to policy experts like Richard Perle and Frank Gaffney, believed that the Soviet military was more powerful than it was, and the Soviet system itself was holding up pretty well. In fact, during an academic fad in the 1970s and 1980s concerning the crisis of Western capitalism and democracy, some of the people within this ideological camp said that the Soviets had a better chance of surviving than we did. It's also worth reading Kennan's rebuttal to the claim that the GOP won the Cold War, a cold tonic splashed in the red face of "Whoo-hoo, we won the Cold War!" triumphalism.

Kennan was, however, more right than wrong, a track record that's only possible with a combination of expertise and detachment. Kennan wrote his proposed containment doctrine before politics crashed into the making of foreign policy, starting cataclysmically with McCarthyism. He was, therefore, able to view the Soviets with the same scientific objectivity that a naturalist enjoys when studying tigers. He recognized the natural origins of their predatory behavior, as well as the limits of the threat they represented. He was not at all deluded by the danger they represented, just confident that they were fighting a losing race against their own self-destruction.

During the early days of the Cold War, Kennan's long telegram was not the only "must read" analysis of the Soviet threat. Many authors approached the Soviets from a variety of angles: Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon; Milovan Djilas' The New Class, an insider's indictment of Communist corruption in both his native Yugoslavia and the larger Eastern Bloc; and, of course, the new generation of military strategists, such as Schelling and Brodie, who depicted how the cold logic of nuclear brinksmanship shaped Soviet conduct. In other words, Kennan may have been the Moses of the Cold War, but he was not the only prophet. Within the US government, the official version of containment continued to evolve, as crystallized in official doctrines such as Truman's NSC-68 directive, Eisenhower's New Look, the Kennedy/Johnson flexible response approach, and the Nixon/Kissinger injection of Realpolitik-flavored diplomacy into containment.

Today, we live in what might be called a "post-doctrine" era. Our new global conflict does not have a framing document like the X article, a direct response to fears about Soviet aggression that arose during the 9/11 of the Cold War, the Greek and Turkish crises of 1947. If there are important analyses of anti-American Islamism, terrorist methods, and the long-term strategy for defeating Al Qaeda and its allies, they are far less discernible in the haze of daily news than the works of Kennan, Koestler, Schelling, Brodie, and others were.

Most startlingly, there is nothing like the comfort between the White House and the national security intelligentsia that once existed. Where Truman let Kennan speak for his administration, or Eisenhower let Brodie and Schelling guide decisions about nuclear strategy, Bush lashes out at any modern-day Kennans within Defense Department, State Department, CIA, and other permanent members of the national security bureaucracy. His in-house sources of doctrine behave like careerists, not strategists. It's hard to imagine Kennan behaving like Bush's advisers, who so loyal to Bush that they are willing to turn on a dime to disavow their earlier opinions. Where JCS Chairman Colin Powell once helped frame the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine, Secretary of State Powell helps dismantle it to make the Iraq invasion possible. And the list goes on. State sponsors of terrorists are the real center of gravity? Wrong. The real threat is WMDs in Iraq that might be given to terrorists? Wrong. The Iraq invasion will pay for itself? Wrong. Being the world's only superpower means that you'll drag your allies along, like it or not? Wrong. Legal changes like the PATRIOT Act, and bureaucratic reforms like the creation of the Homeland Security Department, are going to bag a lot of terrorist who would otherwise have inflicted more 9/11-like horrors? Wrong. George Kennan could be wrong, but he was more right than wrong. Paul Wolfowitz can be right, but he certainly has been more wrong than right.

The contemporary equivalents of George Kennan the man, and containment as a doctrine, do exist. They're just not given the attention that they're due—certainly not if 9/11 was the day that changed everything, the way Americans were shocked by the Greek-Turkish Crisis and the Berlin blockade into understanding they were in the midst of a new global conflict. Certainly there is no definitive public statement of counterterrorism strategy on par with the X article and the long telegram.  Where we once had an evolving doctrine for containment, we have the absence of any doctrine whatsoever, except for a few platitudes ("the terrorists hate freedom") and, perhaps, a few well-concealed position papers that hint at what the ultimate strategy really is.

Without a doctrine, you cannot provide clear guidance to your subordinates within the national security community. Without a doctrine, you cannot gain substantial support within your own populace and among your allies. Without a doctrine, you cannot help your fellow citizens identify what should be feared, and what is not worth worrying about. Without a doctrine, you cannot identify whom you are fighting, and measure your successes and failures against this enemy. Without a doctrine, you lurch in the direction of one hazily-defined idea, watch it fail, and then grab at the next notion. Without a doctrine, you declare a war, and then invent several new versions after the fact of the cassus belli. Without a doctrine, your enormous power may crush your enemies, including once-feared antagonists like the Ba'athist regime of Iraq. (Which, obviously, threatened the US on neither the WMD nor the terrorist line of attack in the way they were once depicted.) Without a doctrine, therefore, you flail.

It's worth taking a moment to mourn both the passing of George Kennan and the age of foreign policy doctrine. If we're lucky, we may see someone like him again, and we can pray that we'll see a return of disciplined thinking about national security as well.

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