By Michael F. Duggan
On March 17, thirteen years ago, George Kennan, died at the age of 101. One of the original Wise Men of the immediate postwar period, he devised the grand strategy of Containment that (along with numerous organic factors inside the Soviet Empire) led to the end of the Cold War and eventually the demise of the USSR. Over time he had come to see the struggle as stupid, wasteful, and excessively dangerous, and loathed the fact that his strategy was hijacked by a succession of lesser men in both Democratic and Republican administrations who unnecessarily ratcheted-up tensions with the Soviets.
Kennan for the most part designed and administered the European Recovery Program—in its details and implementation, the Marshall Plan was more Kennan’s than Marshall’s—and was an influential voice on the rebuilding of Japan, the most successful foreign policy initiatives in U.S. history. He supported the UN “police action” to restore the prewar border in Korea, but opposed MacArthur’s provocative drive north of the 38th parallel that brought the Chinese into the fight late in 1950. At the Fullbright Hearings in 1966, he eloquently opposed continued U.S. involvement in Vietnam. He opposed the deployment of American forces to Somalia in 1992, and in his last interview in 2002, spoke out against the planned invasion of Iraq.
In the 1980s he came to see nuclear weapons as the real enemy rather than any temporal human regime. In 1996-97 he publicly opposed President Clinton’s support of the expansion of NATO further east. This enlargement of the pact would eventually take it deep into the Russian sphere of influence (“The deep desire of our government to press the expansion of NATO right up to the Russian borders is the greatest mistake of the entire post-Cold War period” and “a blunder of potentially catastrophic proportions”). This continuing policy has dangerously renewed tensions with the Russians and will likely push them closer to the Chinese.
In foreign affairs, he was right almost all of the time, and in the few instances when was wrong, his ideas were still interesting, and, more often than not, were simply ahead of their time (e.g. he spoke in favor of German reunification in 1948, which was too early). He came to believe that one of his biggest mistakes was his early support in helping to bring about the CIA. He also had social views that reflected a dark side of his time and class.
Kennan wrote more than 20 books in some of the most elegant prose of recent American non-fiction, won two Pulitzer Prizes in history and a Bancroft Prize. The first president Bush—who presided over the last administration to embrace foreign policy realism—awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. More than anything, Ambassador Kennan embodies reason, intimate historical understanding, expert diplomacy, and civility in the pursuit of interest-based policy. As a friend of mine once noted, Kennan reminds us that it is a person’s insights rather than ideology that counts and which makes him or her interesting or not. He is the incarnation of the good government official. Although some of his private views were insufferable and tarnish his legacy and are rightly criticized, I wish we had people with his professional qualities in government today.