Kennan On Russia and Negotiations
by George Liebmann
Issue 116 - September 24, 2008

Robert Kagan’s "Power Play" (Wall Street Journal, August 31,2005) will not convince those who prefer attention to historical particulars to neo-conservative grand theorizing.

Kagan caricatures today’s realists by deriding them as believers in "the United Nations. . . and vast new international conferences, a la Woodrow Wilson." He invokes instead the shade of George Kennan and Dean Acheson, particularly Acheson, who he says "had nothing but disdain. . . for most international efforts to solve world problems" , who "aimed to build a ‘preponderance of power’. . . around the world" pending which "negotiations and international conferences with adversaries such as the Soviet Union were worthless. He opposed talks with Moscow throughout his entire time in office." (Churchill, the customary neo-conservative hero, is unavailable for this purpose, having devoted his entire final term in office (1951-55) to vain efforts to get the U.S. to talk to the Russians - on the sound premise that they were finding their Eastern European empire burdensome and indigestible.)

But Acheson and Kennan did not disdain negotiations, only summit conferences. Kennan’s authorized meetings with Jacob Malik at the U.N. gave rise to the negotiations that ended the Korean War. The Western Alliance was forged in meetings with foreign ministers, most notably Bevin, Schuman, and Sforza. Acheson never indulged the illusion that temporarily prostrate European powers would forever remain so; like the first George Bush, he sought to immerse them in international institutions and by recognizing that alliances required deference to the desires of allies, hence his reluctant support of the last efforts at colonialism. Acheson was a critic of our abandonment of the British and French at Suez; one cannot picture him embarking on a Middle East war against the wishes of the Russians, Chinese, French and Germans. He also believed that America’s strength was to be focused on vital interests, chiefly the defense of the great industrial powers: Western Europe and Japan. Hence the withdrawal from China in 1948, the China White Paper, for which he was vituperatively attacked, and the recall of General Mac Arthur.

We need not speculate on what the postwar realists would have said about our current problems in Iraq and with Russia, for Kennan lived to tell us what he believed.

As to Russia, he lauded the Genscher-Shevardnadze agreement allowing the unification of Germany and excluding American missiles from East Germany, the product of enlightened diplomacy in which the first Bush administration played a critical part. He deplored the eastward expansion of NATO, predicting in 1997 that it would "influence the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion [and] have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy." (Richard Holbrooke wrote in 2002 "Events, of course, proved Bill Clinton right and Kennan. . . wrong." This does not read too well now.)

As to Iraq and Afghanistan, Kennan declared in 2002 before the start of the Iraq war "Are you talking about one war or two wars? And if it’s two wars, have we really faced up to the competing demands of the two. . . I have seen no evidence that we have any realistic plans for dealing with the great state of confusion in Iraqi affairs which would presumably follow even after the successful elimination of the dictator. . . any attempt to confront that situation by military means alone could easily serve to aggrevate it rather than alleviate it. . . war has a momentum of its own and it carries you away from all thoughtful intentions when you get into it. You know where you begin--you never know where you’re going to end."

Kagan regards as a "terrible blind spot" the realists’ view that democracies are not necessarily pacific and dictatorships not necessarily aggressive. Kennan found much evidence for this: in the run-ups to the Wars of 1812, Mexican War, Spanish-American War and indeed Civil War; and in the revanchism in France prior to the 1914 war, about which he wrote one of his lesser-known books (Fateful Alliance, 1984). The rationality of the Versailles Treaty did not benefit from the ‘Khaki election’ in Britain and the Palmer raids and Mc Carthyism were not American democracy’s prouder moments. By contrast, Ataturk’s Turkey, despite its bloody origins, pursued a non-expansionist foreign policy; the Lausanne treaty, which endures, was a monument to the benefits of rational and prolonged negotiation between foreign ministers and ambassadors: Ismet Inonu, Lord Curzon, and Sir Horace Rumbold. The Congress of Vienna, as Henry Kissinger reminded us, was a successful agreement with and among autocracies. Does Mr. Kagan really mean to deplore the Austrian State Treaty, Ostpolitik, the Berlin agreement, the nuclear test ban treaty, and the settlement of the Cuban missile crisis by Robert Kennedy’s agreement with Ambassador Dobryinin that removal of American missiles from Turkey would follow Soviet withdrawal of missiles in Cuba? (P. Nash, The Other Missiles of October, 1997).

Nearly a century ago, Germany’s Johann von Bernstorff reflected "Even England’s experience in ruling subject nations will not enable it to found and maintain a world empire and a world civilization, like that of Rome. The material interests and the national character of the peoples of the earth are too discordant for this." The American diplomat Lewis Einstein, writing before World War I, noted that modern credit mechanisms rendered mobilizations more complete and wars more protracted and destructive. Cautioning against American acceptance of an Armenian mandate, ultimately rejected by the Senate, he observed that we would be required "to devise religious policies. . . alien to our experience [which] must surely lead to the development of a military imperialism. . . diverting American national enterprise into the bypaths of distant adventure. . . The essence of the democratic spirit is little favorable to the assertion of one man over another necessary to make the successful administrator of an alien race. We have no wide colonial experience. We fortunately possess no particular traditions of class domination."

The hard-boiled Turkish President and former foreign minister Ismet Inonu observed in 1960: "considering how impulsive were the actions which led to both world wars, it is hard to count on man’s ability permanently to avoid fatal mistakes. . . mankind should be taught ceaselessly, in every possible way, that at the present stage of civilization nations are under a compulsion to, and should be able to, co-exist peacefully. If nations keep up contacts, keep discussing, then time will finally erode their hesitation and resistance. Impatience, especially as regards important problems between large groups of powers, is unnecessary and harmful. If the last fifteen years’ experience has saved us now from the deadlock created by the idea that face-to-face discussions are futile, than all these years have not passed in vain."

The German militarists’ downfall, General de Gaulle wrote after the first World War, came about because of "the characteristic taste for immoderate undertakings, the passion to expand their personal power at any cost, the contempt for the limits marked out by human experience, common sense, and the law." The terrible maledictions passed by George Kennan in 1952 on the warmongers of his time ought to be taken to heart by Mr. Kagan and his friends: "The counsels of impatience and hatred can always be supported by the crudest and cheapest symbols; for the counsels of moderation, the reasons are often intricate, rather than emotional, and difficult to explain. And so the chauvinists of all times and places go their appointed way: plucking the easy fruits, reaping the little triumphs of the day at the expense of someone else’s tomorrow, deluging in noise and filth anyone who gets in their way, dancing their reckless dance on the prospects for human progress, drawing the shadow of a great doubt over the validity of democratic institutions. And until peoples learn to spot the fanning of mass emotions and the sowing of bitterness, suspicion and intolerance as crimes in themselves–as perhaps the greatest disservice that can be done to the cause of popular government–this sort of thing will continue to occur."

GEORGE W. LIEBMANN, recently a Visiting Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge, is the author of Diplomacy Between the Wars: Five Diplomats and the Shaping of the Modern World (I.B. Tauris and Palgrave Macmillan, September 2008, a study of Bernstorff, Einstein, Rumbold, Sforza, and Inonu,)