The voluminous responses to the death on 17 March of George Kennan at the age of 101 had two striking features. First, in encompassing his work as a United States diplomat and policy expert during the cold war and his writings about world politics and the conduct of American foreign policy, they highlighted a neglected issue that Kennans own career in its way embodied: the role of ideas in public life.
Second, their sheer range drew attention to another aspect of Kennans life too little discussed in an age of technocratic administration under the pressures of globalisation: the utility of a broad humanistic culture including knowledge of history, languages and literature in comprehending the contemporary world.
A man of history
I met George Kennan in 1995, as part of a series of extended retrospective interviews with cold-war-era strategists in the United States (the others were Henry Kissinger, Paul Nitze, Robert MacNamara and Robert Gates). Kennan was installed in his book-lined office in the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton, an elite research centre separate from the university, where his rooms looked out over Princeton Field, a battleground of the war of independence.
He had inhabited that office since his first retirement from the US foreign service in 1953, and the sense of encountering a historic figure was already strong. It became even more tangible in the course of our conversation, when it transpired that Kennan had sent his soon-to-be-famous long telegram from the US embassy in Moscow the formative document of the cold war on the day I was born: 22 February 1946.
Kennan was an original and independent-minded intellectual although he would almost certainly have shared Anglo-Saxon dislike of that term. His quirkiness emerged in our conversation in his insistence that only people brought up with farm animals could grow up to be rounded human beings and in his dating of Americas decline from the start of mass immigration in the 1840s (a view that, as I pointed out, would be unwelcome in the country I came from, Ireland).
While very much a figure of the east coast intellectual elite, he was strongly opposed to much US foreign policy during the cold war against the war in Vietnam, sceptical of Americas nuclear policy. There was also an element of unrealism, even metropolitan abstraction, in his view that the third world did not really matter much and should in large measure be left to have its revolutions and social upheavals without undue American interference.
In their formative period, Kennans central ideas concerned the conflict in the developed world between two models of modern life, the capitalist and the Bolshevik. These themes were first outlined in the long telegram and later developed in the article The Sources of Soviet Conduct (Foreign Affairs, July 1947). The latter was attributed to Mr. X, the anonymity a reflection of his then status as a career diplomat. In it he argued against two then influential currents of thought: a western pessimism that foresaw inevitable triumph for Soviet communism, and the militant alternative strategy of rollback, meaning war.
Kennans third way he called containment a combination of stout defence (resisting the extension of Soviet power by holding the line in, for example, Germany and Greece) and counterforce (selective, covert actions, such as the guerrilla actions he helped organise in Poland).
The key to Kennans argument lay in his own answer to the question suggested by the title of his 1947 article. Kennan had lived in Russia during the war and enjoyed the brief period of anti-fascist solidarity in which American diplomats were free to talk with Russian officials and intellectuals. His memoirs recall with affection his weekend visits to Peredelkino, the writers colony outside Moscow, where Boris Pasternak (later to write Dr Zhivago) was among those he met.
But Russia was not the Soviet Union. Kennans voracious reading of history convinced him that the Bolshevik revolutions dependence on a faith about the direction of world history that it would lead to the collapse of its capitalist rival was a fatal flaw. Provided the western world could preserve its superior economic and political system, the Soviet leaders (the ravens of Red Square, as he called them) would gradually lose this faith and see their system implode.
The lesson of Lübeck
Kennan illustrated his argument with reference to Buddenbrooks, Thomas Manns novel of a merchant family in Lübeck which was decaying at the centre even as its commercial empire spread across the world. The Soviet authorities were for Kennan like that Lübeck family: a field-fire engulfing neighbouring fields but whose own originating spark had died. Resistance demanded holding firm containment; in the end the revolutionary system, resting as it did on an apocalyptic and fundamentally distorted global vision, would fail.
Nearly sixty years after Mr X drafted and sent his telegram, it is clear that Kennans prescient argument about the cold war, its causes, course and outcome the dominant struggle of the second half of the 20th century was vindicated to a degree greater than that of any other writer on the subject. The vindication is in two directions: against establishment figures like John Foster Dulles and Ronald Reagan, who sought victory through military confrontation with the USSR, and against radicals like C Wright Mills, Noam Chomsky and many intellectuals associated with the 1980s peace movement in Europe, who argued that the cold war was an imaginary or confected conflict designed primarily by the elites of both sides to subdue their own domains.
George Kennan himself saw the cold war as an unnecessary, fearfully expensive and disoriented process. But his belief that it was a real conflict, for all the rhetoric and exaggeration involved, proved correct. It took time for the Soviet leadership and its east-central European allies to lose their inner belief in the overall project, the construction of socialism. At varying speeds, they arrived at a devastating recognition of the superiority and durability of the west military, political and social, but most fatally for their own viewpoint, economic.
Mikhail Gorbachevs own political trajectory, from enthusiastic party secretary in Stavropol to disillusioned and ultimately powerless Communist Party of the Soviet Union leader in Moscow, bore out Kennans prediction. For Gorbachev, as for many around him, it was the encounter with the very normality and consumerist abundance of western societies that dealt a severe blow to their faith in the communist model.
The vindication here is not just Kennans but Lenins. In perhaps the only prescient remark the first Bolshevik leader ever made, he criticised the voluntaristic dreams of his followers by insisting that two conditions were needed for a successful revolution: the ruled could not go on being ruled in the old way, and the rulers could not go on ruling in the old way. This, to a remarkable degree, describes what happened in east-central Europe and the Soviet Union in the 1980s: there was some resistance from below, above all in the form of Solidarity in Poland, but to a great extent it was the loss of faith and dynamism of the communist rulers, not the resistance of the people, that led to the final collapse of 1989-1991.
Fifteen years on, the Lübeck analogy offers a highly relevant lesson for the current global struggle involving Islamist political radicalism. As Sunni militants inflame Iraq and hit at targets far to the west, the forces of Islamic revolution are dying in the countries where they first took power: Iran, Afghanistan, and Sudan. The architects of the war on terror could still learn from George Kennan.
