America Needs Another George F. Kennan Today

George Kennan pretty much got nearly everything right when it came to foreign policy both in his long career as a State Department functionary and later right up to his death as part of high-level academic think tanks and as a prolific writer. Our idiotic government led by the half-lunatic Donald Trump has got our nation into an incredible jam in the Middle-East and West Asia with really no positive solution in sight that doesn’t involve national humiliation. As America’s greatest international relations genius, Kennan would know what to do. Sadly though, Mr. Kennan died in 2005 at the age of 100.

Technically, the highest level job George Kennan ever held was ambassador to the Soviet Union, briefly under Truman. Later under Kennedy he was ambassador to the then Yugoslavia. However, his influence on foreign policy was profound. He joined the foreign service in 1925 and held a succession of minor posts. He was a bold man, in a subtle Presbyterian way, and started the habit of writing memoranda to higher ups at State. The modern State Department, which today runs on the American business model, where underlings are considered sub-human, would probably not permit such a thing. However, back then, the bosses in the State Department bureaucracy would take time to read stuff from the lower-ranks. Kennan wrote beautifully. I know it’s hard to believe, but someone can write with beauty on foreign policy, but it’s true. Thirty years ago, I was picking through the tomes at a large used book store, I examined one of the volumes of his extensive memoirs, read one paragraph, chosen at random, and was hooked for life. I knew about Kennan back then but never read any of his works. His memos to the big shots actually made him influential.

I won’t bore you with the details of George F. Kennan’s long career, but I will list some of his accomplishments and also warnings which were largely ignored. His chief accomplishment was his theory of containment of Soviet Communism rather than the popular rollback theory, which advocated for the total eradication of the Soviet Union and its minions. Kennan advocated for a subtle policy of when and where to challenge the Soviets, rather than a full scale national objective of eventually marching on Moscow and Peking. He liked the Marshall Plan and opposition to the Reds taking over Greece. He was even OK with Korea, as long as we didn’t stray above the 38th Parallel.

Here are a few briefly stated.

1. After the French were defeated in Vietnam, he opposed US ambitions in that country because he considered it a strategic backwater and not worth our time and effort.
2. He opposed US support for the creation of Israel in 1948. He felt that it would strengthen the hands of the Soviets and sour American/Arab relations.
3. Kennan was strongly anti-Immigration and opposed Third-World immigration to the US. He felt it would destroy American culture, create internal stress and harm the environment. It was his belief that America would be a dumping ground for the impoverished of the world.
4. He thought the UN and other Moralistic and Idealistic agencies were foolish.
5. While a New Deal Democrat, he hated the New Left and Black Power movements.
6. He felt that spreading “democracy” and “human rights” abroad was a fool’s errand.
7. He opposed the Clinton war in Kosovo and said it would worsen relations with the Russians.
8. Virtually on his deathbed, he thought NATO expansion eastward was entirely misguided. If the US followed this advice there would be no major Ukraine War.
9. He opposed the 2003 Iraq War.

What can George F. Kennan teach us today? If he were living he would tell us that our approach to countries we find problematic is crazy. Our tactic today is that nations we don’t like must be destroyed and a puppet government installed. This never really seems to work out in the US favor. If a country really is troublesome to genuine national objectives, it’s much better to contain or blunt that nation rather than destroy it. This should not apply to the Iranian situation because there was never any reason for the US to be defenders of Israel, a view which Kennan held anyway.