Ideas, even more than armies, move the world. George Kennan, an American diplomat, wrote two articles in 1946 and 1947 that guided American policy through the Cold War, to the West’s victory in 1991. Then, a year after the Soviet collapse, Paul Wolfowitz, an undersecretary in the first Bush administration, wrote an analysis of the post-Cold War world that, a decade later, is guiding the second Bush administration through the age of terror.
Kennan died this month at 101. One day earlier, Wolfowitz was nominated by President Bush to be president of the World Bank.
The two men share more than a week’s headlines. Their work reveals not only the power of ideas but the way these ideas become policy, and how this policy is made. It demonstrates how philosophies and fashions change, in foreign policy as in all else. It shows how the world works much as it did in 1946–and how much has changed.
Kennan, in 1946 a diplomat in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, had been feeling ignored until a cable arrived from Washington asking for an explanation of Soviet behavior.
“Suddenly, my opinion was being asked,” he wrote in his memoirs. Suffering miserably from sinus problems, toothache and official indifference to his ideas, Kennan sat down and wrote the diplomatic message that changed his life–and the world.
“It was one of those moments when official Washington . . . was ready to receive a given message . . . ” Kennan wrote of the electric reaction to his cable. “My reputation was made. My voice now carried.”
The Long Telegram
Kennan had written what became known as the Long Telegram, an analysis of Soviet behavior under Josef Stalin. A year later, he published another article, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” in the magazine Foreign Affairs, under the thin pseudonym “X,” urging the West to meet Soviet expansionism with “a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment.”
The two articles–the Long Telegram and the “X” article–laid the groundwork for the doctrine of “containment” that guided U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union for the next 40-plus years. Kennan himself later complained that his ideas have been distorted and militarized by those who carried them out. But containment worked. However implemented, it won the Cold War.
When the Cold War ended, every ambitious American foreign policy thinker spit on his hands and tried to write the next “X” article. Each wanted to be the next George Kennan.
And each labored unaware that the next “X” article already existed and was percolating through the think tanks, ready to dominate American policy in the world after Sept. 11.
In the waning days of the first Bush administration, a team gathered by then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney conceived a paper called “Defense Planning Guidance.” Wolfowitz, then an undersecretary of defense, did most of the writing.
The Cheney-Wolfowitz document made it clear that a new era was at hand.
“We have moved from containment to the new regional defense strategy,” it said. The U.S. would seek unchallenged dominance in nearly every region of the world. America would maintain military superiority sufficient to “prevent the re-emergence of a new rival.” Permanent alliances were out. “Ad hoc assemblies,” mostly temporary, were in.
Especially, it said, unilateralism would be necessary, “should international support prove sluggish or inadequate . . . the United States should be postured to act independently.”
The Clinton administration came to power and, for eight years, ignored the Defense Planning Guidance paper. But its authors, in opposition now, spread their ideas through universities, think tanks and right-wing publications. In 2001, they returned to power with George W. Bush. One year after Sept. 11, their ideas had been enshrined as official U.S. policy in Bush’s “National Security Strategy” document.
The Kennan and Wolfowitz documents differ starkly in tone, one counseling patient pressure by like-minded allies to wait out Russian hostility, the other explicitly rejecting deterrence and containment in favor of military dominance.
But they also have fascinating similarities.
Some similarities
One is timing.
Kennan said that while “none of my previous literary efforts had seemed to evoke even the faintest tinkle from the bell at which they were aimed, this one, to my astonishment, struck it squarely and set it vibrating.” What this proves, he said, is that the truth may be less important than “the subjective state of readiness on the part of Washington officialdom to recognize this or that feature of it.”
Kennan’s articles appeared just when Washington was waking up to the Soviet threat and wondering what lay behind it. The Wolfowitz policy, honed behind the scenes through the ’90s, was all set to go when Sept. 11 hit and Washington was ready to strike back.
Another is the elite nature of creating foreign policy. The “Wise Men” (Kennan among them) who made policy for the Truman administration could fit comfortably around a dining table. So could Cheney, Wolfowitz and his team.
Kennan and the other “Wise Men” were a self-conscious elite, graduates of the best Eastern schools, grandees who felt not only the obligation but the right to rule.
Similarly, the Cheney-Wolfowitz team was a tight mix of New York neoconservatives, highly intellectual and disputatious, and hawkish Washington insiders.
The “Wise Men” sold their policy to a Congress and nation shocked by the Soviet conquest of Eastern Europe. Cheney and Wolfowitz sold theirs to a president who, although born to East Coast privilege, had adapted the outlook of the frontier: a nationalism based on militarism and fundamental religiosity, plus a suspicion of government, of foreigners and of international institutions.
In short, both had a message that their audience was ready to hear. In policy, as in comedy, timing is everything.
Which is not to say that Kennan and Wolfowitz would have agreed on much else.
As a professional diplomat, Kennan was suspicious of messianic leaders, absolute dogma, the demonization of enemies. He considered Stalin and his men “sinister, cruel, devious, cynically contemptuous of us,” but rational and not beyond reach. This, he said, “is not the best of all conceivable worlds, but it is a tolerable one, and it is worth living in.”
From this flowed pronouncements that are out of fashion in today’s Washington.
“There is . . . nothing in nature,” he said, “more egocentrical than the embattled democracy.” A democracy in the heat of war subordinates everything else to that battle and “soon becomes the victim of its own war propaganda.”
And again: “It is useful and necessary, in a complex world, to have dealings with enemies as well as with friends,” something that the Bush administration ignores in its policy toward, say, Iran.
American leaders never understood communist revolution in Russia or China, he said, “because they were drawing their information exclusively from the side which they wanted to see win,” a sin that deformed the U.S. decision to attack Iraq.
Kennan understood the road to the atrocities at Abu Ghraib prison.
“It is characteristic of those who think of themselves as nice people . . . that they are slow to react to provocation but once they feel their interests or their security to be seriously jeopardized, they respond with a peculiar violence and vindictiveness.”
No evil in foreign affairs
Kennan rejected the idea of evil in foreign affairs. Instead, he said, we live “in a world of relative and unstable values. We must, as the Biblical phrase goes, put away childish things; and among these childish things, the first to go . . . should be self-idealization and the search for absolutes in world affairs: for absolute security, absolute amity, absolute harmony.”
“Let us not repeat the mistake of believing that either good or evil is total. Let us beware, in future, of wholly condemning an entire people. . . . No other people, as a whole, is entirely our enemy. No people at all–not even ourselves–is entirely our friend.”
Kennan saw terrorism coming but would have disapproved of how we’re handling it.
Writing in 1987, he warned of the “rise in several parts of the world of a fanatical and wildly destructive religious fundamentalism, and . . . the terrorism to which that sort of fundamentalism so often resorts.”
But he also decried, in 1985, an American policy of high military spending and huge budgetary deficits, leaving a country “not in a position to make the most effective use of its own resources on the international scene, because they are so largely out of its control.”
In an interview in 2002, Kennan opposed the U.S. occupation of Iraq. But much earlier, he had recorded his skepticism about the use of force, especially in a place like Iraq.
Kennan went there once, in 1944, hated the place and, in a diary item penned in Baghdad, mused on whether we should have anything to do with it.
“Are we willing to bear this responsibility?” he asked. ” . . . We are not. Our government is technically incapable of conceiving and promulgating a long-term consistent policy toward areas remote from its own territory. Our actions in the field of foreign affairs are the convulsive reactions of politicians to an internal political life dominated by vocal minorities.”
Could he have had George Bush in mind? Only those Americans “who remember something of the pioneer life of their own country” and who may be “seeking an escape from reality” will take the “long and stony road” to Baghdad.
Better, he said, to remember all the unfulfilled chores at home.
Better to “restrain their excitement at the silent, expectant possibilities in the Middle Eastern deserts and . . . return, like disappointed but dutiful children, to the sad deficiencies and problems of their native land.”
