Nicholas Thompson: What Kennan could teach us about fighting terrorism
[Nicholas Thompson, a senior editor at Wired magazine, is writing a book about George Kennan.]
SIXTY years ago this month, writing under the byline of X, George Kennan supposedly laid out America’s cold war foreign policy. Kennan’s essay is often said to be the most influential article in the history of this country’s foreign policy, but neither Harry Truman, nor any president after him, actually followed X’s recommendations. “Containment,” the word the essay introduced, was applied in a bellicose way that Kennan didn’t intend.
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....
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.”...
Read entire article at NYT
SIXTY years ago this month, writing under the byline of X, George Kennan supposedly laid out America’s cold war foreign policy. Kennan’s essay is often said to be the most influential article in the history of this country’s foreign policy, but neither Harry Truman, nor any president after him, actually followed X’s recommendations. “Containment,” the word the essay introduced, was applied in a bellicose way that Kennan didn’t intend.
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....
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.”...