March 21, 2005
SIXTY YEARS OF ERROR:
Foreign Affairs has done something shockingly worthwhile, making everything George Kennan wrote for them available on-line.
It affords a good opportunity to see just how wrong the Realism of which he was the primary spokesman really was, as here:
[L]et us recognize that the functions, commitments and moral obligations of governments are not the same as those of the individual. Government is an agent, not a principal. Its primary obligation is to the interests of the national society it represents, not to the moral impulses that individual elements of that society may experience. No more than the attorney vis-à-vis the client, nor the doctor vis-à-vis the patient, can government attempt to insert itself into the consciences of those whose interests it represents.Let me explain. The interests of the national society for which government has to concern itself are basically those of its military security, the integrity of its political life and the well-being of its people. These needs have no moral quality. They arise from the very existence of the national state in question and from the status of national sovereignty it enjoys. They are the unavoidable necessities of a national existence and therefore not subject to classification as either "good" or "bad." They may be questioned from a detached philosophic point of view. But the government of the sovereign state cannot make such judgments. When it accepts the responsibilities of governing, implicit in that acceptance is the assumption that it is right that the state should be sovereign, that the integrity of its political life should be assured, that its people should enjoy the blessings of military security, material prosperity and a reasonable opportunity for, as the Declaration of Independence put it, the pursuit of happiness. For these assumptions the government needs no moral justification, nor need it accept any moral reproach for acting on the basis of them.
This assertion assumes, however, that the concept of national security taken as the basis for governmental concern is one reasonably, not extravagantly, conceived. In an age of nuclear striking power, national security can never be more than relative; and to the extent that it can be assured at all, it must find its sanction in the intentions of rival powers as well as in their capabilities. A concept of national security that ignores this reality and, above all, one that fails to concede the same legitimacy to the security needs of others that it claims for its own, lays itself open to the same moral reproach from which, in normal circumstances, it would be immune.
Whoever looks thoughtfully at the present situation of the United States in particular will have to agree that to assure these blessings to the American people is a task of such dimensions that the government attempting to meet it successfully will have very little, if any, energy and attention left to devote to other undertakings, including those suggested by the moral impulses of these or those of its citizens.
No idea ever did more damage to America than that the Soviets too had legitimate interests that we had to respect. Posted by Orrin Judd at March 21, 2005 2:54 PM
"Legitimate Interests" was often code words for "We don't want to get nuked," which was a sub-section of the idea that nothing is worth dying for -- or at the very least, an aggressive foreign policy to free other countries isn't worth dying for, as long as we're fat and happy over here. It just sounds better in foreign policy-speak to add several thousand words to that explanation.
Posted by: John at March 21, 2005 3:17 PMI think one must keep in mind that the world in which Kennan, Acheson, McCloy, Henderson and their ilk was raised in was much different from our own. They were suffused with the notion of Anglo-Saxon supremacy, and that all others were 'Untermenschen' in varying degrees. Even alleged scientists like the director of the American Museum of Natural History, Madison Grant, were purveying racist doctrine that would not have been out of place in Mein Kampf. Popular culture was infested with this nonsense too, films like Birth of a Nation and the recurring use of blackface characters as clowns or near-simians. Anti-Catholic bigotry was certainly a fact of life in the period between 1900-1950, and anti-semitism reached its zenith in America in that period as well.
Because of this, it was easy for the 'legitimate interests' crowd to write off the Captive Nations. After all, they were only Slavs, inferior races meant to be nothing but slaves, incapable of even the merest culture. Let the Soviets have them.
Kennan was always extremely hostile to the movement to free Soviet Jews. He viewed it as an attempt by ignorant people to interfere with what he saw as the necessary continuation of foreign affairs between nations. He had no understanding that the fight to free the Jews of the Soviet Union and the fight to free the Captive Nations were integral to the definition of what it meant to be 'American.' We are a nation of ideas, of principles, not one based on blood or ethnicity. To Kennan, if you weren't part of his narrow group, you were an interloper only in America on sufferance.
Posted by: bart at March 21, 2005 3:36 PMMost of us here are old enough to remember the threat of nuclear war hanging over our heads.
Dr. Strangelove was a comedy but also serious.
Sometimes I wonder if the fact that we are all still alive might not be corroboration for the multiple universes theory. Perhaps, in the majority of branches in the tree of history, a glitch in computer software, or a crazed general, triggered a nuclear conflagration and a billion dead.
Posted by: Eugene S. at March 21, 2005 8:02 PMKennan was a useful idiot.
Posted by: Fred Jacobsen (San Fran) at March 21, 2005 8:09 PMKennan's essential insight, about the
authoritarian nature of the Russian
bear; was right; their post-Soviet
resumption of the Chechen/Tran Caucusus
campaing; along with their coddling of
Iran bears it out. The problem, is by
the ned; he was using as an excuse against
NATO enlargement; or any putative measure
against Russia
Kennan's essential insight, about the
authoritarian nature of the Russian
bear; was right; their post-Soviet
resumption of the Chechen/Tran Caucusus
campaing; along with their coddling of
Iran bears it out. The problem, is by
the ned; he was using as an excuse against
NATO enlargement; or any putative measure
against Russia