But while Truman dodged X’s advice,
George W. Bush should follow it. Kennan was wrong about how we would win the
cold war, but right about how to fight the war on terrorism.
In the July 1947 issue of Foreign
Affairs, Kennan, who was then the State Department’s policy planning chief,
gave American strategy a name, but not much else. He argued that we didn’t have
to actively defeat the Soviet Union, only outlast it. Communism held inside
itself “the seeds of its own decay.” The United States should refrain from
provoking Moscow, whether through confrontation or histrionics. Patience would
lead to success.
The article’s influence was grounded
in a misunderstanding. Kennan didn’t make clear whether he intended containment
to be primarily a political or military strategy. Despite the article’s
ambiguity, everyone assumed the latter. The most important columnist of the
time, Walter Lippmann, wrote a series of consecutive critical essays about the
X article — later collected in a book that coined a phrase with its title, “The
Cold War” — declaring that containment was a military doctrine and a bad one at
that.
But in a letter to Lippmann that
Kennan never mailed (most likely because his boss, Secretary of State George
Marshall, had chastened him for causing a ruckus), Kennan explained that he
didn’t mean containment with guns. He didn’t want American armed forces to
intervene in countries where the Soviets were mucking around but hadn’t gained
control, like Greece, Iran and Turkey.
The Soviets are making “first and
foremost a political attack,” Kennan wrote. “Their spearheads are the local
communists. And the counter-weapon that can beat them is the vigor and
soundness of political life in the victim countries.”
American policy makers viewed
containment in military terms. We soon built up our forces to defend Western
Europe, created NATO and engaged in a huge arms race. Eventually containment
would mean soldiers in Vietnam and thousands of nuclear weapons pointed at the
Soviet Union.
Kennan opposed every one of these
actions. Long called the man who defined our cold war policies, Kennan was
probably containment’s most consistent, and persistent, critic. He spent
decades denying paternity of the doctrine everyone credited him with creating.
Today we face vastly different
challenges from those the nation confronted right after World War II. Our enemy
is dispersed; there’s a constant threat of suicide attacks; nuclear weapons can
be hidden in suitcases instead of dropped from airplanes. Still, when it comes
to overarching strategy, Kennan’s desired but never executed policy from 60
years ago offers profound wisdom for today.
Kennan’s insight was that a
long-term, complex struggle wasn’t best judged in terms of winning or losing.
Communism wasn’t something we could immediately conquer. The same holds true
for Al Qaeda, a movement that, like Soviet communism, offers its subjects
oppression and poverty. Time is on our side — particularly if we act in a way
that doesn’t inflame our enemies’ pride and anger and win them new recruits.
Kennan’s insistence on a political
strategy, rather than a military one, makes more sense now than it did when he
published his essay. Applied today, that advice would entail spending more time
and money building up our Muslim allies. The Center for Strategic and
International Studies reports that only about $900 million of the $10 billion
we’ve given Pakistan since 2002 has gone to health, education and democracy
promotion. Most of the rest has gone to the military. The Bush administration
has recently taken steps to change this ratio. But Kennan, one of the authors
of the Marshall Plan, would have wanted the numbers to be closer to the
reverse.
A 21st-century rendering of X’s
vision of containment would involve the closing of the Guantánamo Bay detention
camp, an unambiguous renunciation of torture and an abandonment of the notion
that our legal and moral norms don’t apply to the current struggle. Kennan
believed we gave our opponents a propaganda victory each time we acted in a
manner unfitting of our ideals.
“To avoid destruction,” Kennan
concluded the X article, “the United States need only measure up to its own
best traditions and prove itself worthy of preservation as a great nation.”
We can’t know for sure how his
recommended, wholly political version of containment would have fared in the
cold war. But we do know that a militant foreign policy didn’t lead to nuclear
war and did, eventually, help bring about the collapse of Soviet communism. We
also know that a strong offensive policy has yet to succeed against Al Qaeda.
Kennan died two years ago at the age
of 101. One of his last public statements was a critique, in 2002, of the
looming Iraq invasion. War, he said, was too unpredictable, and this one wasn’t
worth it. As he wrote to Lippmann six decades ago, “Let us find health and
vigor and hope, and the diseased portion of the earth will fall behind of its
own doing. For that we need no aggressive strategic plans, no provocation of
military hostilities, no showdowns.”