The death last month of George Kennan, at the age of 101, has provided opponents of President George W. Bush’s strategy in the war against terrorism with an opportunity to oppose the world vision of that grand old man of American diplomacy to what they see as policies espoused by “bunch of adventurers seeking global dominance.”
“Kennan’s generation was burnished Eastern Establishment; this Bush generation is rough-and-tumble frontier America,” writes one Chicago Tribune columnist.
Kennan, in a 2002 interview, had opposed the liberation of Iraq. His opposition, however, was not prompted by moral considerations of the kind the anti-war crowd has claimed since 2001. Kennan was against the war because he thought the US wouldn’t be able to see it through.
“Are we willing to bear this responsibility?” he asked. “We are not. Our government is technically incapable of conceiving and promulgating a long-term consistent policy toward areas remote from its territory. Our actions in the field of foreign affairs are the convulsive reactions of politicians to an internal political life dominated by vocal minorities.”
The history of diplomacy remembers Kennan as the father of containment, a doctrine that he sold to President Harry S. Truman and his Secretary of State Dean Acheson. The idea, formulated in the aftermath of World War II, was that the United States and its democratic allies, rather than seeking to remove the threat of Soviet Communism by force, which could mean a new world war, should adopt a policy aimed at preventing the expansion of Josef Stalin’s empire.
The idea appealed to Truman because he knew there would be no popular support for another world war. It also suited Stalin and his Foreign Minister Vyacheslaw Molotov who knew that their newly expanded empire would not survive a war against a US that, at the time, had a monopoly on nuclear weapons. Kennan’s doctrine made a virtue out of necessity.
To claim, as some have done in recent days, that it was Kennan’s containment doctrine, not Ronald Reagan’s “rollback” strategy that ended the Cold War in favor of the democratic world requires a considerable leap of faith.
To suggest that the current war on terrorism, seen by some as a new world war, could also be won through containment, rather than the energetic rollback of powers that support terror, is both naïve and dangerous.
Containment never works because political power is by its nature dynamic. This is especially so with totalitarian regimes based on a real or imagined messianic mission. Such regime either advances or retreats; they never remain frozen in the place assigned to them by their adversaries.
Kennan’s doctrine was officially adopted by the Truman administration in the crucial period of 1946-47. But the supposedly contained beast broke out of its demarcated confines almost immediately. Assured that the US and its allies would take no military action against them, Stalin attacked on the diplomatic front by creating the so-called peace movement that extended Soviet influence to the heart of the newly liberated Western Europe. At the same he was able to allocate more resources to the Chinese Communists who seized control of the country in 1949, bringing almost a fifth of mankind under the Red Flag. Some containment! Almost at the same time, the supposedly “contained” Soviets were busy fomenting war against the French in Indochina. A few months later the Communists who had seized North Korea attacked the South, once again rendering containment meaningless. If South Korea was saved it was because Truman decided, in that particular case, to put “containment” aside.
By 1953 the supposedly contained beast had also acquired nuclear weapons, ending the American monopoly and pushing another nail into the coffin of a status quo that Kennan had so desperately tried to preserve.
The 1950s saw the expansion of Soviet influence first into the Middle East where Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and eventually Libya switched sides, and then to Southeast Asia and Africa. The Bandung Conference of 1955 launched the so-called nonaligned movement that, in practice, became a global anti-American front backed by the Soviet Union. The “contained” Soviet Union felt confident enough to crush democratic revolts in Poland and Hungry in the 1950s and in Czechoslovakia in 1968. In 1954 the Soviets, acting through their new Egyptian allies, helped radicalize the Algerian liberation movement and transformed it into a full-scale war designed to neutralize the French Army, at the time NATO’s largest outside the United States.
As early as 1953 John Foster Dulles, President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s secretary of state, had recognized the dangers of the containment doctrine. But, being intellectually unable to break with the concept, he concocted a more muscular version of it labeled “quarantine the aggressor”. Needless to say that led nowhere. Just two weeks after Dulles had announced the new doctrine during a visit to Tehran in June 1958, pro-Soviet officers seized power in Baghdad, ending the pro-West monarchy. The Baghdad Pact, the centerpiece of Dullesian strategy in the Middle East disintegrated.
The ghost of containment was hard to dispel.
In 1962 it came back to dictate President John Kennedy’s policy on Cuba. The famous Cuban crisis has entered American folklore as a great diplomatic victory for Kennedy who supposedly managed to persuade the Soviets to remove the nuclear missiles they had placed on the island. The truth, however, is that the crisis ended with a major victory for the Soviets, and a reaffirmation of the doctrine of containment. In exchange for the removal of the missiles, Kennedy committed the US to taking no military action against Castro’s regime.
When containment started in the late 1940s the Soviet Empire consisted of seven countries, or nine if we consider the Ukraine and Byelorussia of the time as separate entities, with a total population of 187 million. Two decades later the “Evil Empire” had expanded into 73 countries with a total population of 1.4 billion. Some containment!
By 1970 it was the turn of Henry Kissinger, President Richard Nixon’s principal foreign policy aide, to question the wisdom and practicability of containment. But like Dulles before him, Kissinger ultimately failed to break out of the conceptual straitjacket Kennan had sewn. Kissinger came out with the concept of détente, which could be seen as containment-plus. The plus in this case meant actually helping the USSR expand in exchange for strategically meaningless concessions.
As Soviet troops marched into Kabul at the end of 1979, a hapless President Jimmy Carter, at a loss as how to respond, ended up with a boycott of the Moscow Olympics.
Ronald Reagan, who also did not belong to the “Burnished Eastern Establishment”, understood that with both containment and détente the US had been sold a bill of goods. He was not content with shouting “Ich bin ein Berliner!”, a pretty rhetorical phrase that was both untrue and ultimately meaningless. Reagan’s version was “ Mr. Gorbachev! Tear down that wall.”
Someone who is calling for a wall to be pulled down is not playing containment or détente. He is playing “rollback”.
Some may wish to pretend that it was Kennan or even Kissinger who won the Cold War. But the former Soviets know the truth.
Now, let us return to the present day.
The containment and détente party are still around.
Between 1993 when the World Trade Center was first blown up and 2001, the Clinton administration practiced both containment and détente.
A string of Clinton aides, including his UN Ambassador Bill Richardson went to Kabul to beg Mulla Muhammad Omar to rein in his bosom body Osama Bin Laden. They promised the mulla loads of goodies, including oil and gas pipelines from Central Asia. The mulla took whatever was offered but refused to give anything in return. Why should he? As he made plain in an interview in 1999, he saw the flow of American emissaries to his court as a sign of US weakness. “They come begging us to forgive America’s crimes against Islam,” the mulla’s Foreign Minister Ahmad Wakil Mutuwakkil was to claim a bit later.
For eight years the Clinton administration practiced “dual containment” against both Iraq and Iran. Kissinger is already on record against détente with terrorist powers. It is a safe guess that Kennan, who opposed the Iraq war because he thought the Americans lack the resolve to stay the course, would not have preached containment against forces which, in a 1987 interview, he described as “fanatical and widely destructive religious fundamentalists which often resorts to terrorism.”
