The U.S. does “not have a foreign policy worthy of a great power.”
I am happily reading the memoirs of George Kennan, famous author of the “X” telegram credited with inspiring the “containment” strategy the U.S. took toward the Soviet Union in the Cold War. I don’t know how I had managed to neglect Kennan’s wonderfully literate reflections for so long. The X telegram—aka the “long telegram”—I had read years ago and been surprised on the upside.
Kennan had been represented to me as an appalling moderate on the Soviet question and “containment” all to close to appeasement.
To the contrary the telegram is a profound, scathing critique of not only the USSR but Communism. Its relentless message, based on long, practical experience as a US diplomat based in Russia, was that no Communist regime could be trusted, and not just because the Russians were villains. They could not be trusted because Communists can’t be.
While noting that Communism was convenient for traditional Russian nationalism and even paranoia, he nevertheless saw that it had introduced a new element.
“Marxist dogma . . . became a perfect vehicle for sense of insecurity with which Bolsheviks, even more than previous Russian rulers, were afflicted. In this dogma… they found justification for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not dare not to inflict…In the name of Marxism they sacrificed every single ethical value... Today they cannot dispense with it. It is fig leaf of their moral and intellectual respectability…. This is why…no one should underrate importance of dogma in Soviet affairs.”
The Communists could not be trusted to tell the truth for, as Kennan argued, they have little apprehension of it themselves. The Soviet regime “is seemingly inaccessible to considerations of reality… For it, the vast fund of objective fact about human society is not, as with us, the measure against which outlook is constantly being tested and re-formed, but a grab bag from which individual items are selected arbitrarily and tendentiously to bolster an outlook already preconceived.”
With nearly his entire career focused on the Soviets and Nazi Germany, Kennan had an excellent grasp of how uniquely ideological were totalitarian governments and much the Cold War was an ideological conflict. Ideology makes totalitarians. No government would expend such resources on internal control unless their purpose was to remake reality in service of an ideal.
In the memoirs Kennan is sadly eloquent on the exceptional difficulties the US has in formulating a coherent foreign policy or conveying that policy to foreign governments or U.S. citizens.
To convey this he relates a story from the first time in which his duties required him to assess Soviet behavior for a U.S. policy position. Prior to Roosevelt establishing diplomatic relations with the USSR in 1933, Congress wanted assurances that Americans doing business in the USSR would not be harassed and detained by the Secret Police, an already not uncommon occurrence.
Kennan reviewed the agreements worked out between the USSR and other Western nations on just these points and pointed out dangerous ambiguities in the language. These, he explained, had been exploited by the Soviets to arrest businessmen from the signatory nations and detain them indefinitely often without notice to the relevant embassy.
He strongly advised against the US agreeing to similar language. He offered substitute language, albeit with the warning that the Soviets would ignore any language they found inconvenient.
In the event, the relevant U.S.-Soviet agreements included, down to the letter, the wording Kennan had warned against. He reflects that he never learned whether Roosevelt had not warned of the danger or if “he knew this and did not care, considering merely that to an uncritical public, and particularly to a congressional public, the passages would look good…
“This episode [w]as the first of many lessons I was destined to receive…on one of the most consistent and incurable traits of American statesmanship—namely, its neurotic self-consciousness and introversion, the tendency to make statements and take actions with regard not to their effect on the international scene to which they are ostensibly addressed but rather to their effect on those echelons of American opinion, congressional opinion first and foremost, to which the respective statesmen are anxious to appeal.
“The question, in these circumstances, became not: how effective is what I am doing… but rather: how do I look, in the mirror of domestic American opinion, as I do it?…A long series of American statesmen have behaved this way…
“FDR did so on many occasions. Harry Truman [later] did so when he gave to the “Truman Doctrine” message a universalistic and pretentious note, appealing to the patriotic self-idealization which so often sets the tone of discussion about foreign policy in our public life, but which is actually unrealistic and pernicious in its effect on the soundness of public understanding of our international situation…
“This list of examples could be continued indefinitely. I do not say that they are all reprehensible,” for politicians must compromise “in order to retain the privilege of conducting foreign policy at all….
“But I do say that this tendency has often placed on American statesmanship the stamp of a certain histrionic futility, causing it to be ineffective...allowing it to degenerate into a mere striking of attitudes before the mirror of domestic political opinion. Until the American press and public learn to detect and repudiate such behavior, the country will not have a mature and effective foreign policy, worthy of a great power.”
How little has changed.