While
writing this essay, I asked several young men and women what George
F. Kennan meant to them. As it turned out, nearly all were
essentially oblivious of the man or his role in shaping American
foreign policy. Yet Kennan had fashioned the concept of containment
in the name of which the cold war was conducted and won and almost
concurrently had also expressed some of the most trenchant
criticism of the way his own theory was being implemented. To the
present generation, Kennan has receded into a vague past as has
their parents’ struggle to bring forth a new international order
amid the awesome, unprecedented power of nuclear weapons.
For
the surviving participants in the emotions of that period, this
state of affairs inspires melancholy reflections about the
relevance of history in the age of the Internet and the 24-hour
news cycle. Fortunately, John Lewis Gaddis, a distinguished
professor of history and strategy at Yale, has brought again to
life the dilemmas and aspirations of those pivotal decades of the
mid-20th century. His magisterial work, “George F. Kennan: An
American Life,” bids fair to be as close to the final word as
possible on one of the most important, complex, moving, challenging
and exasperating American public servants. The reader should know
that for the past decade, I have occasionally met with the students
of the Grand Strategy seminar John Gaddis conducts at Yale and that
we encounter each other on social occasions from time to time. But
Gaddis’s work is seminal and beyond personal relationships.
George
Kennan’s thought suffused American foreign policy on both sides
of the intellectual and ideological dividing lines for nearly half
a century. Yet the highest position he ever held was ambassador to
Moscow for five months in 1952 and to Yugoslavia for two years in
the early 1960s. In Washington, he never rose above director of
policy planning at the State Department, a position he occupied
from 1947 to 1950. Yet his precepts helped shape both the foreign
policy of the cold war as well as the arguments of its opponents
after he renounced — early on — the application of his maxims.
A
brilliant analyst of long-term trends and a singularly gifted prose
stylist, Kennan, as a relatively junior Foreign Service officer,
served in the entourages of Secretaries of State George C. Marshall
and Dean Acheson. His fluency in German and Russian, as well as his
knowledge of those countries’ histories and literary traditions,
combined with a commanding, if contradictory, personality. Kennan
was austere yet could also be convivial, playing his guitar at
embassy events; pious but given to love affairs (in the management
of which he later instructed his son in writing); endlessly
introspective and ultimately remote. He was, a critic once charged,
“an impressionist, a poet, not an earthling.”
For
all these qualities — and perhaps because of them — Kennan was
never vouchsafed the opportunity actually to execute his sensitive
and farsighted visions at the highest levels of government. And he
blighted his career in government by a tendency to recoil from the
implications of his own views. The debate in America between
idealism and realism, which continues to this day, played itself
out inside Kennan’s soul. Though he often expressed doubt about
the ability of his fellow Americans to grasp the complexity of his
perceptions, he also reflected in his own person a very American
ambivalence about the nature and purpose of foreign policy.
When
his analytical brilliance was rewarded with ambassadorial
appointments, to the Soviet Union and then to Yugoslavia, Kennan
self-destructed while disregarding his own precepts. The author of
trenchant analyses of Soviet morbid sensitivity to slights and of
the Kremlin’s penchant for parsing every word of American
diplomats, he torpedoed his Moscow mission after just a few months.
Offended by the constrictions of everyday living in Stalin’s
Moscow, Kennan compared his hosts to Nazi Germany in an offhand
comment to a journalist at Tempelhof airport in Berlin. As a
result, he was declared persona non grata — the only
American ambassador to Russia to suffer this fate. Similarly, in
Belgrade a decade later, Kennan reacted to Tito’s affirmation of
neutrality on the issue of the Soviet threat to Berlin as if it
were a personal slight. Yet Tito’s was precisely the kind of
neutralist balancing act Kennan had brilliantly analyzed when it
had been directed against the Soviet Union. Shortly afterward,
Kennan resigned.
Nonetheless,
no other Foreign Service officer ever shaped American foreign
policy so decisively or did so much to define the broader public
debate over America’s world role. This process began with two
documents remembered as the Long Telegram (in 1946) and the X
article (in 1947). At this stage, Kennan served a country that had
not yet learned the distinction between the conversion and the
evolution of an adversary — if indeed it ever will. Conversion
entails inducing an adversary to break with its past in one
comprehensive act or gesture. Evolution involves a gradual process,
a willingness to pursue one’s ultimate foreign policy goal in
imperfect stages.
America
had conducted its wartime diplomacy on the premise that Stalin had
abandoned Soviet history. The dominant view in policy-making
circles was that Moscow had embraced peaceful coexistence with the
United States and would adjust differences that might arise by
quasi-legal or diplomatic processes. At the apex of that
international order would be the newly formed United Nations. The
United States, the Soviet Union and Great Britain were to be the
joint guardians. (China and France were later additions.)
Kennan
had rejected the proposition of an inherent American-Soviet harmony
from the moment it was put forward and repeatedly criticized what
he considered Washington’s excessively accommodating stance on
Soviet territorial advances. In February 1946, the United States
Embassy in Moscow received a query from Washington as to whether a
doctrinaire speech by Stalin inaugurated a change in the Soviet
commitment to a harmonious international order. The ambassador was
away, and Kennan, at that time 42 and deputy chief of mission,
replied in a five-part telegram of 19 single-spaced pages. The
essence of the so-called Long Telegram was that Stalin, far from
changing policy, was in fact implementing a particularly robust
version of traditional Russian designs. These grew out of Russia’s
strategic culture and its centuries-old distrust of the outside
world, onto which the Bolsheviks had grafted an implacable
revolutionary doctrine of global sweep. Soviet leaders would not be
swayed by good-will gestures. They had devoted their lives (and
sacrificed millions of their compatriots) to an ideology positing a
fundamental conflict between the Communist and capitalist worlds.
Marxist dogma rendered even more truculent by the Leninist
interpretation was, Kennan wrote, “justification for their
instinctive fear of the outside world, for the dictatorship without
which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not
dare not to inflict, for sacrifice they felt bound to demand. In
the name of Marxism they sacrificed every single ethical value. . .
. Today they cannot dispense with it.”
The
United States, Kennan insisted (sometimes in telegramese), was
obliged to deal with this inherent hostility. With many of the
world’s traditional power centers devastated and the Soviet
leadership controlling vast natural resources and “the energies
of one of world’s greatest peoples,” a contest about the nature
of world order was inevitable. This would be “undoubtedly
greatest task our diplomacy has ever faced and probably greatest it
will ever have to face.”
In
1947, Kennan went public in a briefly anonymous article published
in Foreign Affairs, signed by “X.” Among the thousands of
articles produced on the subject, Kennan’s stands in a class by
itself. Lucidly written, passionately argued, it elevated the
debate to a philosophy of history.
The
X article condensed the Long Telegram and gave it an apocalyptic
vision. Soviet foreign policy represented “a cautious, persistent
pressure toward the disruption and weakening of all rival influence
and rival power.” The only way to deal with Moscow was by “a
policy of firm containment designed to confront the Russians with
unalterable counterforce at every point where they show signs of
encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world.”
So
far this was a doctrine of equilibrium much like what a British
foreign secretary in the 19th century might have counseled in
dealing with a rising power — though the British foreign
secretary would not have felt the need to define a final outcome.
What conferred a dramatic quality on the X article was the way
Kennan combined it with the historic American dream of the ultimate
conversion of the adversary. Victory would come not on the
battlefield nor even by diplomacy but by the implosion of the
Soviet system. It was “entirely possible for the United States to
influence by its actions” this eventuality. At some point in
Moscow’s futile confrontations with the outside world — so long
as the West took care they remained futile — some Soviet leader
would feel the need to achieve additional support by reaching down
to the immature and inexperienced masses. But if “the unity and
efficacy of the Party as a political instrument” was ever so
disrupted, “Soviet Russia might be changed over night from one of
the strongest to one of the weakest and most pitiable of national
societies.”
No
other document forecast so presciently what would in fact occur
under Mikhail Gorbachev. But that was four decades away. It left a
number of issues open: How was a situation of strength to be
defined? How was it to be built and then conveyed to the adversary?
And how would it be sustained in the face of Soviet challenges?
Kennan
never dealt with these issues. It took Dean Acheson to translate
Kennan’s concept into the design that saw America through the
cold war. As under secretary to George Marshall, Acheson worked on
the Marshall Plan and, as secretary of state, created NATO,
encouraged European unification and brought Germany into the
Atlantic structure. In the Eisenhower administration, Secretary of
State John Foster Dulles extended the alliance system through the
Baghdad Pact for the Middle East and SEATO for Southeast Asia. In
effect, containment came to be equated with constructing military
alliances around the entire Soviet periphery over two continents.
The
practical consequence was to shelve East-West diplomacy while the
positions of strength were being built. The diplomatic initiative
was left to the Soviet Union, which concentrated on Western weak
points, or where it calculated that it had an inherent advantage
(as in the exposed position of Berlin). Paradoxically containment,
while hardheaded in its absolute opposition to the further
expansion of the Soviet sphere, failed to reflect the real balance
of forces. For with the American atomic monopoly — and the huge
Soviet losses in the world war — that actual balance was never
more favorable for the West than at the beginning of the cold war.
A situation of strength did not need to be built; it already
existed.
The
most illustrious advocate of this point of view was Winston
Churchill. In a series of speeches between 1946 and 1952, he called
for diplomatic initiatives to produce a European settlement while
American strength was still preponderant. The American policy based
on the X article appealed for endurance so that history could
display its inevitable tendencies. Churchill warned of the
psychological strain of a seemingly endless strategic stalemate.
At
the same time that Churchill was urging an immediate diplomatic
confrontation, Kennan was growing impatient with Washington’s
tendency to equate containment with a largely military strategy. He
disavowed the global application of his principles. As he so often
did, he pushed them to their abstract extreme, arguing that there
were some regions “where you could perfectly well let people fall
prey to totalitarian domination without any tragic consequences for
world peace in general.” We could not bomb the Soviets into
submission, nor convince them to see things our way; we had, in
fact, no direct means to change the Soviet regime. We had instead
to wait out an unsettled situation and occasionally mitigate it
with diplomacy.
The
issue became an aspect of the perennial debate between a realism
stressing the importance of assessing power relationships and an
idealism conflating moral impulses with historical inevitability.
It was complicated by Kennan’s tendency to defend on occasion
each side of the issue — leading to incisive and quite
unsentimental essays and diary entries analyzing the global balance
of power, followed by comparable reflections questioning the
morality of practicing traditional power politics in the nuclear
age.
Stable
orders require elements of both power and morality. In a world
without equilibrium, the stronger will encounter no restraint, and
the weak will find no means of vindication. At the same time, if
there is no commitment to the essential justice of existing
arrangements, constant challenges or else a crusading attempt to
impose value systems are inevitable.
The
challenge of statesmanship is to define the components of both
power and morality and strike a balance between them. This is not a
one-time effort. It requires constant recalibration; it is as much
an artistic and philosophical as a political enterprise. It implies
a willingness to manage nuance and to live with ambiguity. The
practitioners of the art must learn to put the attainable in the
service of the ultimate and accept the element of compromise
inherent in the endeavor. Bismarck defined statesmanship as the art
of the possible. Kennan, as a public servant, was exalted above
most others for a penetrating analysis that treated each element of
international order separately, yet his career was stymied by his
periodic rebellion against the need for a reconciliation that could
incorporate each element only imperfectly.
At
the beginning of his career, Kennan’s view of the European order
was traditional. America should seek, he argued, an equilibrium
based on enlightened self-interest and sustained by the permanent
introduction of American power. “Heretofore, in our history, we
had to take the world pretty much as we found it,” he wrote
during the war. “From now on we will have to take it pretty much
as we leave it when the crisis is over.” And that required “the
firm, consistent and unceasing application of sheer power in
accordance with a long-term policy.”
In
pursuit of that European equilibrium, Kennan urged Washington and
its democratic allies to oblige the Soviet Union to accept borders
as far east as possible. In 1944, he proposed that Poland be placed
under international trusteeship to prevent its domination by the
Soviet Union. But when this was rejected by Roosevelt, who did not
want to risk alienating Moscow in the last phase of the war, Kennan
adjusted his view to the new realities as he saw them. If the
United States was unwilling to force the Soviet Union into
acceptable limits, “we should gather together at once into our
hands all the cards we hold and begin to play them for their full
value.” That meant dividing Europe into spheres of influence with
the line of division running through Germany. The Western half of
Germany should be integrated into a European federation. He called
this a “bitterly modest” program, but “beggars can’t be
choosers.”
Six
years later, Acheson was building an Atlantic partnership in
essentially the manner Kennan had proposed. But Kennan rejected it
for three reasons: his innate perfectionism, his growing concern
about the implications of nuclear war and his exclusion from a role
in government.
The
irony of Kennan’s thought was that his influence in government
arose from his advocacy of what today’s debate would define as
realism, while his admirers outside government were on the whole
motivated by what they took to be his idealistic objections to the
prevalent, essentially realistic policy. His vision of peace
involved a balance of power of a very special American type, an
equilibrium that was not to be measured by military force alone. It
arose as well from the culture and historical evolution of a
society whose ultimate power would be measured by its vigor and its
people’s commitment to a better world. In the X article, he
called on his countrymen to meet the “test of the overall worth
of the United States as a nation among nations.”
Kennan
saw clearly — more so than a vast majority of his contemporaries
— the ultimate outcome of the division of Europe, but less
clearly the road to get there. He was too intellectually rigorous
to countenance the partial steps needed to reach the vistas he
envisioned. Yet policy practice — as opposed to pure analysis —
almost inevitably involves both compromise and risk.
This
is why Kennan often shrank from the application of his own
theories. In 1948, with an allied government in China crumbling,
Kennan — at some risk to his career — advanced the minority
view that a Communist victory would not necessarily be
catastrophic. In a National War College lecture, he argued that
“our safety depends on our ability to establish a balance among
the hostile or undependable forces of the world.” A wise policy
would induce these forces to “spend in conflict with each other,
if they must spend it at all, the intolerance and violence and
fanaticism which might otherwise be directed against us,” so
“that they are thus compelled to cancel each other out and
exhaust themselves in internecine conflict in order that the
constructive forces, working for world stability, may continue to
have the possibility of life.” But when, in 1969, the Nixon
administration began to implement almost exactly that policy,
Kennan called on me at the White House, in the company of a
distinguished group of former ambassadors to the Soviet Union, to
warn against proceeding with overtures to China lest the Soviet
Union respond by war.
So
emphatically did Kennan sometimes reject the immediately feasible
that he destroyed his usefulness in the conduct of day-to-day
diplomacy. This turned his life into a special kind of tragedy.
Until his old age, he yearned for the role in public service to
which his brilliance and vision should have propelled him, but that
was always denied him by his refusal to modify his perfectionism.
A
major element in this refusal was Kennan’s growing repugnance at
the prospect of nuclear war. From the beginning of the nuclear age,
he emphasized that the new weapons progressively destroyed the
relationship between military and political objectives.
Historically,
wars had been fought because the prospect of accommodation seemed
more onerous than the consequences of defeat. But when nuclear war
implied tens of millions of casualties — and arguably the end of
civilization — that equation was turned on its head.
The
most haunting problem for modern policy makers became what they
would in fact do when the limit of diplomatic options had been
reached: Did any leader or group of leaders have the right to
assume the moral responsibility for taking risks capable of
destroying civilized order? But by the same calculus, could any
leader or group of leaders assume the responsibility for abandoning
nuclear deterrence and turn the world over to groups with possibly
genocidal tendencies? Acheson chose the risk of deterrence,
probably convinced that he would never have to implement it. Kennan
abandoned deterrence and the nuclear option, at one stage even
seeking to organize a no-first-use pledge from American policy
makers and musing publicly in an interview whether Soviet dominance
over Western Europe might not be preferable to nuclear war.
When
Kennan was operating in the realm of philosophy, he tended to push
matters to passionate and abstract conclusions. Yet under pressure
of concrete events, he would swing back to the role of a hard-nosed
advocate of specific operational policies. After the Chinese
offensive across the Yalu in 1950, he overcame his distaste for
Acheson’s more militant policy to urge him to refuse any attempt
at diplomacy with the Communist world and instead adopt a
Churchillian posture of defiance. Similarly, in 1968, his
decade-long advocacy of military disengagement in Europe did not
keep him from urging President Johnson to respond to the Soviet
invasion of Czechoslovakia by sending another 100,000 troops to
Europe.
It
was my good fortune to know both Acheson and Kennan at or near the
height of their intellectual powers. Acheson was the greatest
secretary of state of the postwar period. He designed the
application of the concepts for which Kennan was the earliest and
most eloquent spokesman. The growing estrangement between these two
giants of American foreign policy was as sad as it was inevitable.
Acheson was indispensable for the architecture of the immediate
postwar decade; Kennan’s view raised the issues of a more distant
future. Acheson considered Kennan more significant for literature
than for policy making and wholly impractical. Kennan’s reaction
was frustration at his growing irrelevance to policy making and his
inability to convey his long-term view.
On
the issues of the day, I sided with Acheson and have not changed my
views in retrospect. If Europe was to be secured, America did not
have the choice between postponing the drawing of dividing lines or
implementing a diplomatic process to determine whether dividing
lines needed to be drawn at all. The application of Kennan’s
evolving theories in the immediate postwar decades (particularly
his opposition to NATO, his critique of the Truman doctrine and his
call for a negotiated American disengagement from Europe) would
have proved as unsettling as Acheson predicted.
At
the same time, Kennan deserves recognition for raising the key
issues of the long-term future. He warned of a time in which
America might strain its domestic resilience by goals beyond the
physical and psychological capacity of even the most exceptional
society.
Kennan
was eloquent in emphasizing the transient nature of a division of
the world into military blocs and the ultimate need to transcend it
by diplomacy. He came up with remedies that were both too early in
the historical process and occasionally too abstract. He at times
neglected the importance of timing. Gaddis quotes him as pointing
out that he had problems with sequencing: “I have the habit of
seeing two opposing sides of a question, both of them wrong, and
then overstating myself, so that I appear to be inconsistent.”
In
a turbulent era, Kennan’s consistent themes were balance and
restraint. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he applied these
convictions to his side of the debate as well. He testified before
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee against the Vietnam War but
on the limited ground that there was no strategic need for it. He
emphasized that the threat posed by Hanoi was exaggerated and that
the alleged unity of the Communist world was a myth. But he also
warned elsewhere against “violent objection to what exists,
unaccompanied
by any constructive concept of what, ideally ought to exist in its
place.” He questioned the policy makers’ judgment but not their
intent; he understood their dilemmas even as he both criticized and
sought to join them.
Oscillating
between profound perceptions of both the world of ideas and the
world of power, Kennan often found himself caught between them. Out
of his inward turmoil emerged themes that, like the movements of a
great symphony, none of us who followed could ignore, even when
they were occasionally discordant.
s
time went on, Kennan retreated into writing history. He did so less
as a historian than as a teacher to policy makers, hoping to
instruct America in the importance of moderation in objectives and
restraint in the use of power. He took as an example the collapse
of the European order that led to the outbreak of World War I. He
produced two works of exemplary scholarship and elegant writing,
“Russia Leaves the War” and “The Decision to Intervene.” He
published a book of lectures and essays about the making of
American foreign policy in the first half of the 20th century,
“American Diplomacy: 1900-1950,” which remains the best short
summary of the subject.
Yet
Kennan did not derive genuine satisfaction from the accolades that
so fulsomely came his way from the nonpolicy world. His partly
self-created exile from policy making was accompanied by permanent
nostalgia for his calling. In his diary he meticulously recorded
the tribute that was paid to him by the American chargé d’affaires
at an embassy dinner in Moscow in 1981, noting that no secretary of
state had ever paid him comparable attention.
Policy
makers, even when respectful, shied away from employing him because
the sweep of his vision was both uncomfortable (even when right)
and beyond the outer limit of their immediate concerns on the
tactical level. And the various protest movements, which took up
some of his ideas, added to his discomfort because he could never
share their single-minded self-righteousness.
Dean
Acheson wrote that separation from high office is like the end of a
great love affair — a void left by the disappearance of
heightened sensitivities and focused concerns. What is poignant
about Kennan’s fate is that his parting came before he reached
the pinnacle. He spent the rest of his life as an observer at the
threshold of political influence, confined to what he called “the
unbroken loneliness of pure research and writing.”
Though
he lived until the age of 101 (dying in 2005) and saw many of his
prophecies come into being, even the collapse of the Soviet Union
did not confer on him the elation of vindication. Rather, it marked
in his mind the end of his literary vocation. The need for his
influence on policy making had irrevocably disappeared. “Reconcile
yourself to the inevitable,” he confided to his diary, “you are
never again, in the short remainder of your life, to be permitted
to do anything significant.” He put aside the third volume of his
majestic history of pre-World War I diplomacy. He had no further
lessons to teach his country.
We
can be grateful to John Lewis Gaddis for bringing Kennan back to
us, thoughtful, human, self-centered, contradictory, inspirational
— a permanent spur as consciences are wont to be. Masterfully
researched, exhaustively documented, Gaddis’s moving work gives
us a figure with whom, however one might differ on details, it was
a privilege to be a contemporary.
Early
in his career, Kennan wrote that he was resigned to “the lonely
pleasure of one who stands at long last on a chilly and
inhospitable mountaintop where few have been before, where few can
follow and where few will consent to believe he has been.” Gaddis
had the acumen to follow Kennan’s tortured quest and to convince
us that Kennan had indeed reached his mountaintop.
Kennan漫長的一生十分精彩，他的著作等身，也很值得大家來閱讀與研究，但這些都不是我們在本文中要談的，我們要談的以及已經談的，只限於他所提及的台灣前途解決方案。
「台灣建州運動」發起人周威霖
Founder,
Formosa Statehood Movement
(an
organization devoted to making Taiwan a state of the United States)
