Kennan: A Life Between Worlds — lessons for the containment of Russia
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Amid the discussions that marked the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, another date is worth remembering: the 77th anniversary of the “long telegram” sent by diplomat George Kennan. In February 1946, as the US chargé d’affaires in Moscow, Kennan offered his advice to the Truman administration on how Washington should respond to the Soviet threat.
As we enter a new cold war with Russia, it is important not just to recall Kennan’s lessons, but to remember how he turned against the ways in which they were implemented by Washington. As Frank Costigliola writes in his magisterial new biography Kennan: A Life Between Worlds: “The greatest tragedy in the life of George F Kennan arose from his most famous success.”
In his memo, Kennan — who was also the first head of the policy planning staff at the US state department — set out what became the doctrine of “containment” of the USSR and Soviet communism: that further advances by Moscow should be met with firm resistance, but that there was no need to undertake the horrible risks of actually trying to overthrow the Soviet system. With rare prescience, Kennan argued that the system would collapse of its own accord, under the weight of its accumulated oppressions and economic insanities.
But Kennan came to essentially agree with the journalist Walter Lippman, his most incisive critic of the time, that he had exaggerated the extent of the Soviet threat and helped to empower paranoia, militarism and ideological hysteria within the US. Lippman argued that Kennan had both ruled out the possibility of compromise with Moscow and committed America to go to war to resist Soviet influence in regions that were of no real interest to the US.
Kennan was to repeat such arguments in his own later opposition to US intervention in Vietnam and to the disastrous absurdity of the “domino theory”, which posited that communist success in Vietnam or elsewhere would lead to revolutions and invasions ending with the destruction of the west. Almost 40 years later, Kennan also opposed the US invasion of Iraq.
Kennan’s lamentable indifference to Asia, Africa and Latin America could be seen as a reflection of his upbringing in the mid-century American upper classes, where such attitudes were widespread. But it did help him reach one vital perception: that the US and the Soviet Union could safely fight proxy wars on other continents, while doing so in Europe would run an acute risk of nuclear cataclysm.
On this basis, Kennan, with the backing of President Eisenhower, achieved perhaps the greatest unsung triumph of his career. In the “Solarium” exercise of summer 1953, Kennan and his team persuaded John Foster Dulles, then US secretary of state, and Republican hardliners that an attempt to “roll back” Soviet rule over eastern Europe was too dangerous to be contemplated, and that America should stick with containment.
Kennan’s understanding of state interests and Russian history underpinned the last struggle of his long life (he died in 2005, aged 101). He opposed the expansion of Nato after the cold war, which he called “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold war era.” Kennan believed that once begun, Nato expansion would be impossible to stop and would eventually lead to war in Ukraine (these warnings were echoed by a later envoy to Moscow, William Burns, now director of the CIA). With the communist threat eliminated, Kennan could see no national interest in this project.
The west is now engaged in what Kennan sought to prevent: a proxy war with Russia in Europe. Due to his criminal folly in invading Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin has put Russia in a position where its vital interests as a great power are involved in avoiding complete defeat. The west has already helped Ukraine to defeat most of the objectives with which Moscow launched the invasion.
If Kennan were still alive today, he might write a new version of his long telegram, modified by Lippman’s critique and by his own regrets. In such a vision, Russia would be contained; the pursuit of total victory would be eschewed as both unnecessary and monstrously dangerous; and every opportunity for reasonable compromise would be seized.
Kennan: A Life Between Worlds by Frank Costigliola, Princeton University Press £35, 648 pages
Anatol Lieven is director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft
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