Contemplating Kennan.

• Author: Heilbrunn, Jacob
• Position: The Realist

In 1994, George F. Kennan spoke at the Council on Foreign Relations on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday. His remarks, which were excerpted in the New York Times, continue to make for fascinating reading. They focused on the abiding preoccupation of his career--American relations with Russia. He recalled that he had originally argued for a containment policy of the Soviet Union after World War II, which the Truman administration largely implemented. But Kennan also observed that after the West had made it clear that it would not permit Stalin to make any further inroads into Europe, he was disappointed to discover that neither Washington nor the Western allies had any real interest in entering into discussions with Moscow. "What they and the others wanted," Kennan said, "from Moscow, with respect to the future of Europe, was essentially 'unconditional surrender.' They were prepared to wait for it. And this was the beginning of the forty years of cold war."

Kennan's lifelong apprehensions about what he liked to call America's legalistic-moralistic approach to foreign affairs centered around the notion of unconditional surrender. In his book American Diplomacy 1900-1950, for instance, Kennan criticized American diplomats at the turn of the twentieth century for what he saw as their proclivity for elevating morality above political realism about current events. Kennan was also dubious about Woodrow Wilson and his intervention in the Russian Civil War--for over eighteen months, starting in August 1918, more than 7,000 American doughboys were dispatched to Siberia. Kennan's reservations, however, about Franklin D. Roosevelt's endorsement of a policy of unconditional surrender at the 1943 Casablanca Conference toward the Axis powers proved unwarranted.

Kennan perceived American foreign policy, more often than not, as an exercise in idealism run amok. Always somewhat skeptical of democratic regimes, which were susceptible to the impulsive passions of crowds, Kennan lived, or sought to live, in the lofty world of statesmen such as Castlereagh, Metternich, and Bismarck. The preeminent catastrophe for Kennan was World War I. One of his last books was called The Decline of Bismarck's European Order. In it, Kennan explained, "I came to see World War I ... as the great event which ... lay at the heart of the failure and decline of this Western civilization." What he called the "delirious euphoria" of the crowds in Germany and France and Great...