I’d like to react a little to Bob Jervis’s contribution to the H-Diplo
roundtable that just came out on John Gaddis’s biography of George Kennan
(http://www.h-net.org/~diplo/roundtables/PDF/Roundtable-XIII-24.pdf ). In
particular, I’d like to deal with the question of whether Kennan was
really important enough to deserve all the attention that has been
showered on him over the years.

Kennan’s contribution, Jervis writes (summarizing one of the points Gaddis
makes when dealing with this issue) “was not to alert Washington to the
danger of Soviet expansionism. This was already clear to many in
Washington and would soon enough have been apparent thanks to Stalin’s
behavior. Rather, the contribution was in showing that there was a way
out, a path between appeasement and inevitable war.”

My own view is a little different.  I don’t think Kennan should be given
particular credit for showing that there was “a path between appeasement
and inevitable war.”  The reason is that I don’t think people like
Secretary of State James Byrnes, the real maker of American policy in the
immediate post-World War II period, ever believed that those were the only
two possibilities.  He and other key U.S. policy makers had little trouble
grasping the point from the very start (and especially at Potsdam) that a
division of Europe in general, and of Germany in particular, was a
perfectly viable solution to the problem of how the two sides could
coexist without a war.

Was it the case, however, that only Kennan  (in the X-article) could give
a convincing rationale for the containment policy?  The X-article, to my
mind, was scarcely convincing on its own terms.  It put forth an
internalist interpretation of Soviet foreign policy, which was very odd
for someone like Kennan whose whole approach to foreign policy was
supposed to be grounded in realist principles.  I’m still struck when I
reread that piece by the cavalier way in which Kennan dismissed the
importance of real foreign threats in the making of Soviet policy--by his
claim that the emphasis the Soviets placed on a "basic antagonism between
the capitalist and Socialist worlds" was "not founded in reality."  "The
real facts concerning it," he went on, "have been confused by the
existence abroad of genuine resentment provoked by Soviet philosophy and
tactics and occasionally by the existence of great centers of military
power, notably the Nazi regime in Germany and the Japanese government of
the late 1930s, which did indeed have aggressive designs on the Soviet
Union."  But there was "ample evidence," he thought, that that sort of
thing did not count for much, and that the foreign threat was artificially
trumped up for domestic political purposes.  I remember my jaw dropping
when I read this.  "Occasionally"?  These were rare occurrences, of no
great political importance?  Given what the Soviets had just suffered,
this was an extraordinary line to take in 1947, politically blind and
morally insensitive, and I wonder how many serious people were really
persuaded by this line of argument.

But maybe we pay too much attention to the X-article and containment when
we think about Kennan.  Looking at his career as a whole, there’s a lot
about him I find appealing.  I personally like Kennan’s 1950 book
_American Diplomacy_, especially the lecture about Wilson and World War I,
a lot more than Jervis does.  It certainly made an enormous impression on
me when I first read it, and played a key role in shaping my own approach
to foreign policy.  Jervis calls it “an inferior work of history,” but I
think it should not be viewed as a work of history at all, but rather as a
work that used history as a vehicle for presenting ideas about policy.  I
also like the fact that Kennan was inclined -- although perhaps a little
too inclined, as Jervis suggests - -to lean against the prevailing wisdom.
 I think Jervis was right to note that much the same could be said of
Bernard Brodie.  But to my mind Brodie was more honest, or perhaps just
more penetrating, than Kennan.  I never knew Brodie personally, but I have
warm feelings when I think about him, whereas Kennan as a person leaves me
cold.

Let me give an example of where Kennan fell short, when measured against
the Brodie standard.  As Jervis points out, Kennan felt that Europe could
not be kept in a “subordinate position forever”--that it was “unthinkable
that its destiny could be guided by outsiders” like America and Russia.
But I don’t think Kennan ever understood that Eisenhower’s goal was to
provide for a Europe that could stand on its own, or that the experience
of the 1950s showed that that kind of approach was simply not viable--that
there was no purely European solution to the European security problem.
There had to be a counterweight to Soviet power in Europe;  if America was
not to provide it, then you would need a strong Europe, and a strong
Europe implied a strong, i.e., nuclearized, Germany.  But that would in
turn create problems of its own, problems probably greater than those
associated with the divided Europe of the Cold War period, and practically
no one outside of Germany wanted it--not the Russians, not Germany’s West
European neighbors, not even the Americans by and large.  The Eisenhower
policy had led straight to the Berlin crisis, and the Kennedy people, whom
Kennan admired, recognized that a free-standing Europe was not in the
cards, and built a new, and ultimately viable, policy on the basis of that
assumption.  (These matters are very fresh in my mind, since I dealt with
them in a piece on de Gaulle that just came out in the _Journal of Cold
War History_.)  And yet Kennan simply did not see what was going on around
him.  He did not even understand what Byrnes was doing in late 1945, even
though he was in the Moscow embassy at the time and Harriman, the
ambassador there, was deeply involved in the implementation of the Byrnes
policy.

Incidentally, it is surprising, given how much was on the public record at
the time, that people--not even people in the Kennedy
administration--simply did not understand the Eisenhower policy.  I
remember pointing this out once in a conference in 1992 on the Skybolt
affair, and McGeorge Bundy, who was there, kind of smiled and said,
tongue-in-cheek, that there was a certain tendency in the Kennedy period
“to think that history began in January 1961.”

In any event, I think Kennan was very different from Brodie.  Brodie’s
inconsistencies, such as they were, were rooted in his ability to see both
sides of an issue, and his dislike of dogmatism.  Kennan's tone is quite
different, at times verging on whining.

One last point about Kennan, and that has to do with why the Kennan
myth-­how he was the architect of containment and so on--is so persistent.
 I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that when an interpretation
of the recent past first takes shape, people seize on what’s most visible.
 The X-article got a lot of attention at the time; it was thus natural to
take it, along with other prominent events like the Truman Doctrine
speech, as one of the building blocks of a consensus interpretation when
people first felt the need for something of that sort.  And once that
interpretation takes shape, it is often--far too frequently in my
view--more or less impervious to the arguments historians make based on
new evidence.


Marc Trachtenberg
Political Science Department
University of California at Los Angeles

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