Kennan’s Penultimate Prophecy

Michael F. Duggan

George F. Kennan was not a perfect man. His diaries reveal him to be a self-torturing, eccentric, and probably a depressive.1 But then his importance is to be found in his adumbrate and insight and not in his foibles and shortcomings. He had a knack for prediction in geopolitics and was the most notable Cassandra of the Cold War. Of his own powers he observed with some frustration “…I have usually been several years ahead of my time, but by the time the opinion of the journalistic-political establishment begins (sometimes too late) to struggle up to the same opinions, everyone has forgotten I ever voiced them.”2 In this assessment, he appears to have been right. Most of today’s journalists and policy makers still have not caught up to some of his final prophecies.

On February 22, 1946, Kennan sent the famous 8,000 word Long Telegram from the United States embassy in Moscow alerting official Washington of the Soviet menace. It was published as “The Sources of Soviet Conduct”—the “X” Article—in the July 1947 number of Foreign Affairs. In it he framed the grand strategy (containment) that, in spite of much modification, tampering, and outright vandalism, allowed the West to prevail in the Cold War. He also predicted the fall of the Soviet Union during this time. More than four decades later, this prophecy came true.

Kennan was not always right; he advocated a German reunificaiton 40 years before it actually happened, which was certainly too early. Once or twice he was way off; in 1949 he advocated booting the Nationalist Chinese out of Taiwan, a recommendation he immediately withdrew.3 Some critics have observed that Kennan was wrong in his prediction of a nuclear holocaust, but then, there is still time—the Bomb still exists along with human fallibility, irrationality, and a dangerous new international crisis.4

What else did he do? He was the primary architect of the Marshall Plan, and, as the first Director of Policy Planning at the State Department, he was a player in the rebuilding of Japan, the two most successful U.S. foreign policy initiatives of the 20th century.5 In 1950, he warned that if U.S. forces pushed north of the 38th parallel in Korea, it would lead to a dangerously expanded war (it did).6 He famously opposed the war in Vietnam and disowned it as an example of his concept of containment. On a side note, in a diary entry dated march 21, 1977, he predict a world ecological catastrophe by the mid-21st century, a prediction that seems more plausible by the day.

Kennan lived to be 101, and more than 15 of those years were after the fall of the Berlin Wall (he died 17 years ago tomorrow). On December 9, 1992, the day after U.S. Marines landed in Somalia, he predicted the failure of the mission.7 In a diary entry late in 2001, he confided skepticism about the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan8

On September 2002, Kennan gave an interview to Albert Eisele of The Hill in which he expressed his opposition to the invasion of Iraq, noting that “Anyone who has ever studied the history of American diplomacy, especially military diplomacy, knows that you might start in a war with certain things on your mind as a purpose of what you are doing, but in the end, you found yourself fighting for entirely different things that you had never thought of before… In other words, war has a momentum of its own and it carries you away from all thoughtful intentions when you get into it. Today, if we went into Iraq, like the president would like us to do, you know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end.”9 This might have been his last public prophecy about an impending U.S. foreign or military policy.

But in October 1997, years before the American post-September 11 adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, Kennan opined on the Clinton administration’s plans to Expand NATO into Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic—countries whose cultures and histories straddle Eastern and Western Europe. During a dinner speech, Kennan called the idea a “strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions.”10 In January of that year he had written in his diary that “the Russians will not act wisely and moderately to the decision of NATO to extend its boundaries to the Russian frontiers is clear,” and predicted a new bloc consisting of Russia, Iran, and China. In the same entry he foresaw “a renewal of the Cold War.”11 A few weeks later he observed that “The deep commitment of our government to press the expansion of NATO right up to Russia’s border is the greatest miscalculation of the entire post-Cold War period.”12 Since then NATO has expanded further east into Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia (2004), Albania and Croatia (2009), Montenegro and North Macedonia (2020).

We all have sympathy for the innocent victims of Russia’s illegal war. But if George Kennan could see this crisis coming a quarter of a century ago, it seems that today’s policy planners might have been able to do something to help avert it last month.

Notes

  1. See generally The Kennan Diaries, Frank Costigliola, ed.
  2. Diaries, 517. This quote is taken from the entry of February 4, 1979. See also entry for August 10, 1960, Diaries, 406-407.
  3. John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan, a Life, 357.
  4. See Andrew J. Bacevich, “Kennan Kvetches,” Twilight of the American Century, 43.
  5. Diaries, 363.
  6. George F. Kennan, Memoirs 1950-1963, 23-24.
  7. George F. Kennan, “Somalia, through a Glass Darkly,” At a Century’s Ending, 294-297; Diaries, 630-631.
  8. Diaries, 677
  9. Albert Eisele, “George Kennan Speaks Out against Iraq,” The Hill, October 2002.
  10. Gaddis, 680-681
  11. Diaries, 655.
  12. Diaries, 656.