Worldmaking (45 page)

Kennan's Long Telegram was insightful and measured, and it took care to assail the Soviet Union as a system, not Russia as a nation. The population trapped inside Stalin's dystopia, Kennan wrote, “are by and large, friendly to [the] outside world, eager for experience of it, eager to measure against it talents they are conscious of possessing, eager above all to live in peace and enjoy [the] fruits of their own labor.” But these people have little option but to privilege survival over principle in a state ruled through savage internal repression. “At bottom of Kremlin's neurotic view of world affairs is [the] traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity,” Kennan observed, but this flaw in the nation's historical consciousness was ruthlessly exploited by an ideology that fed off paranoia and insularity. He continued:

Only in this land which had never known a friendly neighbor or indeed any tolerant equilibrium of separate powers, either internal or international, could a doctrine thrive which viewed economic conflicts of society as insoluble by peaceful means. After establishment of Bolshevist regime, Marxist dogma, rendered even more truculent and intolerant by Lenin's interpretation, became a perfect vehicle for sense of insecurity with which Bolsheviks, even more than previous Russian rulers, were afflicted. In this dogma, with its basic altruism of purpose, they found justification for their instinctive fear of 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 in their methods and tactics. Today they cannot dispense with it. It is fig leaf of their moral and intellectual respectability.

The combination of Marxian ideology and Russia's peculiar psychology had created a perfect anti-Western, anticapitalist storm.

In regard to the actual threat posed to American interests, Kennan believed that Stalin was naturally cautious, taking what was possible where “it is considered timely and promising,” but temperamentally disinclined to push to the point of open conflict. Thus “these efforts are restricted to certain neighboring points conceived of here as being of immediate strategic necessity, such as Northern Iran, Turkey, possibly Bornholm.” Soviet grand strategy, unlike the expansionist dogma of Nazi Germany, “is neither schematic nor adventuristic. It does not work by fixed plans … [It is] impervious to the logic of reason, and it is highly sensitive to the logic of force.” Moscow was always likely to desist from adventurism in the face of serious Anglo-American resistance, making Stalin a rational actor in this one important respect. Here was cause for hope, because if Moscow's “adversary has sufficient force and makes clear his readiness to use it, he rarely has to do so. If situations are properly handled there need be no prestige-engaging showdowns.” Give Stalin an opening and he will exploit it ruthlessly. Communicate a clear sense of boundaries, however, and the postwar world could be as peaceable as the era that followed the Congress of Vienna.

In reference to multilateral institutions such as the World Bank, IMF, and United Nations, Kennan believed that “Russians will participate officially in international organizations where they see the opportunity of extending Soviet power or of inhibiting or diluting power of others. Moscow sees in UNO [United Nations Organization] not the mechanism for a permanent and stable world society founded on mutual interest and aims of all nations, but an arena in which aims just mentioned can be favorably pursued.” In this sense Kennan did not believe that Moscow was exceptionally culpable; rather, the creators of the United Nations had declined to heed the self-serving proclivities of all states. Soviet policy toward “colonial areas and backward or dependent peoples,” meanwhile, “will be directed toward weakening of power and influence and contacts of advanced Western nations, on theory that in so far as this policy is successful, there will be created a vacuum which will favor Communist-Soviet penetration.” The Third World would become a battleground only if the West vested in it sufficient prestige to make it a proxy fight worth having. Best of all was to ignore what Kennan would later dismiss as the “periphery.”

The tone of Kennan's telegram was generally dispassionate, shielding the reader from the anger he clearly felt when dictating it to Hessman. But Kennan failed to present the entirety of his case with scholarly detachment. The prescriptive part of the telegram was condensed in the following terms: “In summary, we have here a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with US there can be no permanent
modus vivendi
, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure.”

This line has been often quoted by scholars keen to identify in Kennan a visceral anticommunism.
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But words such as “fanatically,” “broken,” and “destroyed” are the exceptions rather than the rule. To take just one example, Kennan was careful to stress that the United States had vexing issues of its own to address. Paramount was the requirement that policymakers apprehend the Soviet threat with “courage, detachment, objectivity, and same determination not to be emotionally provoked or unseated by it … We must see that the public is educated to realities of the Russian situation.” This vital pedagogical undertaking had to be completed in sober terms and with a cool head, a manner of comprehension and communication that Americans, a people tending toward absolutes, had historically found challenging. “I am convinced,” Kennan wrote, “that there would be far less hysterical anti-Sovietism in our country today if realities of this situation were better understood by our people. There is nothing as dangerous or as terrifying as the unknown.” If America heeded his warning, and ignored its sorry history of simplifying complex events and relationships, then the nation, and its allies, had nothing to fear, and civil liberties would be protected. If extremism was given free rein, however, then the newly atomic world would become incredibly dangerous: “We must have courage and self-confidence to cling to our own methods and conceptions of human society. After all, the greatest danger that can befall us in coping with this problem of Soviet communism, is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping.”

This was a bravura performance that justly found an influential audience. Before Kennan's telegram, nobody in the employ of the U.S. government had articulated a cohesive American strategy toward Moscow in the postwar world—Lippmann had performed this role from the outside. As Truman's aide, George Elsey, remarked, “Kennan tied everything together, wrapped it together in a neat package, and put a red bow around it.”
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Kennan's gift to American grand strategy was circulated quickly and widely upon its arrival—championed by Harriman, who was in Washington at the time—and was read by the secretaries of war and the Navy, and later by Truman himself. Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal was bowled over by its force of argument. He had the telegram copied and sent to other members of the cabinet, also insisting that it become required reading for senior members of the armed forces. The telegram was cabled to America's embassies and missions abroad. Kennan was soon receiving glowing endorsements from the audience he respected most: professional diplomats.

The U.S. ambassador to Cuba, Henry Norweb, wrote to Kennan, describing the telegram as “about the best piece of political reporting I have seen in my thirty years in the Service … It is a masterpiece of ‘thinking things out,' realism devoid of hysteria, of [a] courageous approach to a problem.”
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It met with near universal acclaim from fellow diplomats, politicians, and members of the military. A rare dissenting voice was that of General Lucius Clay, the American military governor in Germany who was still managing to get along with his Soviet counterparts. Of course, the connected Walter Lippmann also soon got the gist of Kennan's telegram, which caused him considerable concern. He redoubled his journalistic efforts to convince Americans of the merits of U.S.-Soviet collaboration. Lippmann also wrote to General Dwight D. Eisenhower to compliment him on “the speech you made the other day in which you spoke of how vicious it is to be thinking of another war … I almost feel that the soldiers are going to have to save the peace which the diplomats and politicians will, if they don't look out, most surely wreck.”
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Lippmann was depressed that Kennan's telegram had engendered such unity of anti-Soviet purpose.

The main problem with Lippmann's championing of “closer diplomatic contact” with Moscow, Kennan told Forrestal, was that it “reflects a serious misunderstanding of Soviet realities.”
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The growing closeness between Kennan and Forrestal—who bonded for reasons beyond a common dismay with Lippmann's apparent naïveté—was the critical spur to Kennan becoming a person of influence. Forrestal had enjoyed a spectacularly successful career with the venerable investment bank Dillon Read before becoming secretary of the Navy in 1944. He was ambitious, drove himself and his subordinates to the point of exhaustion, and was a formidable presence in Truman's cabinet, gaining influence vis-à-vis the fading Byrnes. Forrestal had become Kennan's champion in Washington, and the transformative effect on the diplomat's career, which had stalled through the war years after starting so brightly, was immediate. Within three months, Kennan, now age forty-two, was hurried back to Washington (with his young family) to become deputy commandant for foreign affairs at the National War College, an institution established that same year to educate diplomats and midranking military officers. In the summer of 1946, Kennan was dispatched on a nationwide speaking tour, before being instructed to deliver seventeen lectures at the college in the autumn—detailing at greater length the strategic purpose of the Long Telegram. Like Mahan, Kennan had secured for himself a happily contemplative setting on the northeastern seaboard. The Truman administration tasked Kennan with performing the function he had deemed essential in his telegram: educating the public and the military, in measured tones, on the actual threat posed by the Soviet Union to American interests. This threat, Kennan maintained, was surmountable if the right type of knowledge was applied.

*   *   *

Kennan spoke to a variety of audiences over the summer, ranging from atomic scientists in California, captains of industry in New York City, and academics at the elite universities. Among the intellectuals and scientists he encountered, across the full range of disciplines, Kennan detected two worrying trends: first a Lippmannesque tendency to view Moscow as a credible ally; second a Beardian inclination to view the Soviet Union as a noble experiment that the United States, scarred by poverty and societal discord, had no special right to judge. Kennan nonetheless generally impressed his audiences, and the State Department, with the clarity of his message, which focused on America's failings as well as the USSR's. Anticipating the development of a significant domestic problem, he told an audience at the University of Virginia, “I deplore the hysterical sort of anticommunism which, it seems to me, is gaining currency in our country.”
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After concluding his national tour, Kennan delivered a series of lectures at the National War College, their contemporary focus illuminated by telling references to Gibbon and Clausewitz. Kennan had neglected to mention the atomic bomb—or the potential benefits of the U.S. monopoly on that weapon—in the Long Telegram. It was a peculiar omission given the weapon's vast geopolitical ramifications. Kennan addressed this lacuna by observing that the destructiveness of atomic weaponry made it vital that the United States confront the Soviet Union with nonmilitary means, so as to avoid fighting a third total war with consequences for humanity far graver than those of the two that preceded. It was inevitable that Moscow would develop and test a similar device. And there was no question of America pressing its atomic advantage during the interregnum. The reputational damage would be too severe, the very notion offensive. “Does not [the] significance of atomic weapons,” Kennan observed hopefully, “mean that, if we are to avoid mutual destruction, we must revert to strategic political thinking of [the] XVIII century? Total destruction of enemy's forces can no longer be our objective.” Here was the nuclear age's silver lining, reasoned Kennan, who was of course fond of the eighteenth century. His affinity for eras that predated the establishment of representative democracy (and factories, roads, large cities, etc.) was made clear in his observation that “there is a little bit of the totalitarian buried somewhere, way down deep, in each and every one of us.”
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On September 16, 1946, Kennan delivered an important speech, “Measures Short of War (Diplomatic),” which detailed a full spectrum of U.S. strategies for the atomic age. Kennan first dwelled on the totalitarian repertoire, in which “no holds are barred.” Stalin could apply or threaten a combination of any of the following: “persuasion, intimidation, deceit, corruption, penetration, subversion, horse-trading, bluffing, psychological pressure, economic pressure, seduction, blackmail, theft, fraud, rape, battle, murder and sudden death.” Some of these options clearly fell outside Truman's executive purview, hence American strategy had to draw from three less diabolical nonmilitary strategic clusters: psychological, economic, and political.

In reference to psychological warfare, Kennan included “informational activity like propaganda, or radio broadcast or distribution of magazines.” Thankfully, Kennan observed, “our government has begun to appreciate the fact that anything it does of any importance at all has a psychological effect abroad as well as at home.” Second, America's economic arsenal included trade embargoes, aid programs, and the granting or refusal of trading preferences. Finally, Kennan defined political warfare broadly, which he took to mean “the cultivation of solidarity with other like-minded nations on every given issue of our foreign policy.” These were the nonmilitary weapons at America's disposal. But Kennan understood that maintaining a strong conventional military held everything together. “You have no idea,” Kennan told his audience to appreciative laughter, “how much it contributes to the general politeness and pleasantness of diplomacy when you have a little quiet armed force in the background.”
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