When It Comes to Our Enemy Russia

George F. Kennan was the Wisest Man

By any measure, Russia is, as it has been for most of the past century, our enemy. It is aggressive, subversive, repressive. Yes, China is increasingly formidable, and Taiwan is the twenty-first-century Berlin, a flashpoint for potential catastrophe. But China and Russia are different. The United States is so deeply entangled with China financially and economically that no matter how many iPhones Apple assembles in Vietnam, we are dependent on “Made in China” in too many ways to dismiss.

There is nothing about Russia that is admired these days, except Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader and the subject of this year’s Oscar-winning documentary. Navalny is in solitary confinement in the gulag. so there’s not much he can do with the honor the film about him received.

The question is: Could it have been different?

After 1991, we celebrated a triumph when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics imploded in an essentially bloodless revolution. The fifteen resulting states and the former Eastern European “satellites” embarked on what the West hoped would be an embrace of capitalism and democracy. We know now how that has turned out.

So, again, could it have been different?

George F. Kennan believed it could have. In words too many to count, he contended that Russia could be “contained.” That was the term he used to describe the policies he put forward in the years immediately after World War II, as our wartime ally became a fearsome foe.

I have just finished re-reading my dog-eared copy of Memoirs 1950-1963, published in 1972 by Atlantic Monthly Press. And I encountered but have not yet read a new biography called Kennan: A Life Between Worlds by Frank Costigliola (Princeton University Press). The Financial Times calls it “magisterial” and says, “The greatest tragedy in the life of George F. Kennan arose from his greatest success.”

In the “Long Telegram,” written as a U.S. envoy in Moscow, and a Foreign Affairs article under the pseudonym “X,” Kennan argued that containing Russia from its ambitions of global dominance was the right approach, but significantly he did not advocate all-out military pressure. He believed that Russia was too weak after the war to embark on another major conflict. He also contended that over time the inherent contradictions in the Soviet model of ideology, politics, and economics would lead to its downfall.

Instead, his “containment” concept was interpreted as the basis of the decades of U.S. grand strategy during the Cold War, in which (among other things) a nuclear arms race defined relations between the Soviet-led East and the American-led West.

So, who was Kennan? He was the quintessential American man of a specific type. Born in the Midwest in 1904, a WASP who went to Princeton, he was an archetypal “Wise Man” -- and they were all men who gathered around official tables assessing the world, almost, in today’s terms, laughably look-alikes. There was no Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in those days.

He became a Soviet expert after serving in the American consulate in Riga, Latvia, before the recognition of the Kremlin in 1933 and later served in Moscow as a political attaché. He was briefly the U.S. ambassador in the early 1950s until he blurted on a trip outside the country that being in Russia was like being in prison. He was declared persona non grata, to his embarrassment and lifelong dismay.

His greatest influence was in the late 1940s as the alliance that had defeated the Nazis became a dangerous East-West competition in which the U.S. made anti-Communism the guiding principle of strategic action. This evolved into the vexed period of McCarthyism in which many of Kennan’s peers saw their careers destroyed by hints of sympathy or support for the Kremlin.

Kennan was spared that ignominy, but his stature was undermined. Except for a Kennedy-era assignment as the U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia, he was on the academic sidelines -- eloquent, extraordinarily productive, but with little actual influence.

Kennan’s position was that successive American administrations had exaggerated the scale of the Soviet threat as a justification for U.S. military activity and buildup. His recollections are chilling of how the United States (under the banner of the United Nations) turned the conflict on the Korean peninsula into a war in which the “Red” Chinese almost drove the UN forces into the sea. It was a war that to this day has left Korea divided and dangerous.

As the first head of the State Department’s policy planning staff and beyond, Kennan believed that programs like the Marshall Plan for rebuilding Europe were more effective over time than waging war. This also applied to Vietnam, where to the great cost and regret of successive U.S. administrations, Communism could not be “contained.”

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Kennan opposed the expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders. As a student of Russian history, he recognized that the characteristics of the country, its cultural complexities of ethnicity, orthodoxy, autocracy and deep-seated insecurity, would lead it to see NATO and the European Union as what Vladimir Putin would later call an “existential” threat to the very survival of Russia.

Today Putin, like his predecessor Joseph Stalin, is a genuinely evil factor on the world scene. The question once again is how far to go and in what ways to restrain him.  For now, the burden is on Ukraine to represent Western values – currently in a violent standoff.

Kennan was a man of his time. Today his presence would be considered lofty, even arrogant, and perhaps it was. But he did not insist on a military imposition of discipline to assert victory. His approach was subtler than that which was harder to explain and achieve.

A great debate is whether after 1991 there was a way to put the Russians – if not their dispersed empire –on a course other than what we now confront.

Reading Kennan’s memoirs and other writings over his long life (he died in 2005 at the age of 101), I conclude that he was a better guide than those we have followed instead.