Words of wisdom from a ‘realist’ in a time of war

THE latest book by John Lukacs, a preeminent historian of the mid-20th century, is a pocket biography of George Kennan, the diplomat and framer of much of America’s early Cold War policy. The subject is too obscure to make a bestseller, and Lukacs explicitly states that this is a character study and not a major biography. So, what gives? Perhaps there’s one simple answer: the Iraq war.

If a conflict ever were anathema to Kennan, it would be this one. He died two years ago, at age 101. Had he lived, he would have been firing arrows from every quiver. He loathed war, valued America’s alliance with Europe and preached frugality for individuals and the Pentagon. He would have wanted nothing to do with occupying what he once described as “a country in which man’s selfishness and indifference have ruined all natural productivity.” Lukacs has published a straightforward chronology of Kennan’s life with a straightforward objective: to remind people of this sage whose influence is fading as the need for it is increasing.

Kennan’s political philosophy is sometimes dubbed “realism,” a term rendered useless by a generation of twisting and misappropriation. It’s clearer to note that Kennan spent most of his life urging caution of every sort. He gained fame by proposing in the 1947 so-called X article in the journal Foreign Affairs that the U.S. should “contain” the Soviet Union. It was our enemy. But victory required only that we put a fence around the Soviets while they destroyed themselves. For the next 50 years, Kennan turned the argument around, saying the U.S. needed to contain its enthusiasms. He counseled against building a hydrogen bomb and then in favor of dismantling our arsenal. He opposed intervention in Vietnam. He thought sending aid to Africa was a waste.

Until he turned 50, Kennan worked inside government, rising to become head of the State Department’s policy planning staff. He served as ambassador to the USSR. He then moved to Princeton and spent his last 50 years writing. His Pulitzer Prize-winning work on U.S. intervention in Russia at the end of World War I detailed the pointless trouble this nation caused there. Lukacs says the most telling sentence Kennan wrote was, “No people is great enough to establish world hegemony.”

On the eve of the Iraq war, when most American commentators showed at least mild enthusiasm, Kennan wanted none of it. Ninety-eight years old, and interviewed in a nursing home, Kennan lambasted the Bush administration’s bluster and the timidity of the Democrats. “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.”

Kennan’s fundamental problems were quite different from those of most other early critics. He wasn’t a pacifist or a believer that the U.S. fights wars for oil. He just believed that most of the time, when the U.S. engages with other countries, it makes things worse. Kennan would have no interest in intervening in Darfur, for example. Nor is this the position of a typical isolationist. He loved other cultures and countries and spoke many languages. He counseled caution because he considered it best for everyone, not because he held other nations in contempt.

Today it’s very hard to find a politician who would agree with all of Kennan’s views. But maybe that’s not surprising. Kennan wasn’t a man in sync with this modern age. He condemned promiscuity in personal and international life. He took every decision seriously and often seemed to want to reverse time.

Lukacs has long shared many of these views. Two years ago he wrote a book called “Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred,” which asserted that the country is in social decline and that U.S. foreign policy isn’t necessarily a force for good. The two men were also friends for decades. Perhaps this is why this book occasionally sounds like a eulogy. At one point, Lukacs cites a clever point of Kennan’s and adds: “I fear that such prose (and wisdom) in the words of an American official we shall not see in the next one thousand years.”

That’s probably going 995 years too far. But Kennan did have a great mind and wielded an incisive pen. Here’s a passage written half a century ago that has an uncomfortable relevance to today, and the conflict that likely inspired this book. Democracy, Kennan said, is like “one of those prehistoric monsters with a body as long as this room and a brain the size of a pin: he lies there in his comfortable primeval mud and pays little attention to his environment; he is slow to wrath -- in fact, you practically have to whack his tail off to make him aware that his interests are being disturbed; but, once he grasps this, he lays about him with such blind determination that he not only destroys his adversary but largely wrecks his native habitat.”

Nicholas Thompson, a senior editor at Wired magazine, is writing a book on the rivalry between Paul Nitze and George Kennan.