A Conversation with George Kennan
Urban, George
THE ALTERNATIVE: AN AMERICAN SPECTATOR VOLUME TEN, NUMBER TWO / NOVEMBER 1976 George Urban A Conversation with George Keuuau Is the West imperilled more by the Soviet threat or by its...
...I notice that Dr...
...It was my expectation-and I believe I can speak here for my late colleague, Chip Bohlen--that once we arrived at that point, we would sit down with the Soviet leaders and talk to them about the future of Europe in order to see whether we couldn't get some agreement on a general withdrawal of their power and our power, but on terms which would make it possible for the rest of Europe to live...
...V/ill Soviet power wait for our moral renewal...
...The Christian religion, whether one believes in it or not, had an answer to these problems of human exhaustion and failure...
...Can one think of anything more miserable than the regime in Albania...
...Cold Warrior or Revisionist Historian ? -- You have not quite satisfied my curiosit2...
...To take it into NATO would be to make a military demonstration against Moscow, which Moscow can't accept...
...and only, perhaps, an American ambassador...is effectively isolated, as though by an invisible barrier, from participation in the general beneficence of nature and human sociability...
...We could be much bolder, not so much in the negotiations, as in our unilateral policies...
...There is also the reluctance to see the client states acquire certain liberties and living standards which the Russians themselves cannot afford to have...
...I won' t go into details, but let me just mention a random sample of ominous developments such as the inability of Britain to improve its industrial productivity which is, incredibly, less than half of that of Germany, and to put the British trade union system on a modern footing...
...But I don't see any wide appreciation of the self-destruction of the United States in the country at large--I don't see it in the press, not in the political leadership, not even in academic life...
...Kennan: ...And they reach for the false ones if they cannot find genuine certainties...
...I asked a Norwegian student recently what it was that the radical students at the University of Oslo most admired--what did they look up to as an example of a hopeful civilization ? A~fter considerable brooding and thought-taking, he said it was...Albania...
...I want it myself for ecological reasons rather than social ones--so that may have something to do with it...
...You also tell us that "For years, Gibbon's dictum 'Under a democratic government the citizens exercise the powers of sovereignty...
...We don' t know what sort of an impact the forthcoming change in the Soviet leadership is going to have on the sensitive texture of East European politics...
...For the mass of people there, life is not intolerable...
...But I am still amazed at the shallowness of understanding that animates even people in Le Monde, and the double standards they so liberally apply...
...Kennan: If the idealistic component in American policy has ever been a force in its own right, it has been confused and really nullified by the crimes and mistakes of recent years: by Vietnam, by the Stupidities of the CIA, by the violation of the democratic process as witnessed by Watergate, and so forth...
...In the latter part of the War we had led Stalin to believe that Western Europe was being reduced to so~ a state in terms of military and economic power and self-confidence, and that the United States was motivated by such a sweeping naivety with regard to Soviet power, that without any further military action at all, the Soviet Union could soon eliminate the United States from the The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1976 9 whole Eurasian landmass and pretty much have its own way throughout the world...
...All this wealth and space presented possibilities in America which have made the American outlook unique, and therefore inapplicable to any other society...
...The naivety of Marxism-Leninism, and its irrelevance to contemporary conditions, have been so amply demonstrated at every turn...
...For a number of years it has been a party of protest, and it has occupied that part of the spectrum in French politics which is normally occupied by a strong movement of protest...
...and this is its great weakness...
...Under the Roosevelt administration, both before the War and during the War, there was a wide measure--and for many of us who were serving in Moscow, a disturbing measure--of naivety and shallowness in the judgments of our governmental leaders with regard to the Soviet Union...
...Things may occur which will suddenly confront Western Europe and the United States with the need to have something it has never had since before World War I, that is, a policy towards Eastern Europe, and a viable policy at that...
...This error, in turn, flows from the fact that Marxists attach no importance, and indeed give no recognition, to the element of tragedy that is built into the individual human experience itself...
...I am not so much interested whether this is a genuinely untypical American attitude, as in the more personal question: Why should a distinguished American put so much stress on a clearly unanswerable aspect of the human condition...
...They were there in your 195 7 BBC Reith Lectures, where you said tbat in the event of a Soviet-American disengagement, European defense should be based on paramilitary forces on the Swiss termtorial model: The training of such forces ought to be such as to prepare them not only to offer whatever overt resistance might be possible to a foreign invader but also to constitute the core of a civil resistance movement on any territory...
...I am not an urban person, and ! don't trust the great urban environment, especially of the contemporary sort...
...Soviet-American relations could not be dealt with by those easy and really childish methods which commended themselves to FDR...
...the degradation of taste...
...in fact, they are taking 10 The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1976 trouble to endorse it...
...We have to confess that we have not got the answers to the problems of human society in the modern age...
...His numerous works on history and foreign policy include The Realities of American Foreign Policy and American Diplomacy 1900-1950...
...Excerpted with permission from Encounter...
...Now this brings me back to a point where my own thinking parts company with that of the whole of the West European community, namely the question of nuclear blackmail and political/military pressure...
...But I have, as you know, always very emphatically rejected the concept of the universality of the American experience...
...Again and again you plead in your books for the "recognition that i f great masses of people are to be elevated out of degradation or vulgarity it is important that some people should set an example of gradousness and good taste...
...Clearly, you did not suffer fools gladly, especially those set above you in the bierarohy...
...You have just asked: how would the West react_ i f some of the East European countries tried to liberate themselves from Russian hegemony...
...After your Reith Lectures, Raymond Aron said in a famous symposium that Europe could put up with an absurd or even with an unjust situation, but it could not put up with an ambiguous situation...
...It would take a long period of withdrawal, a quiet time of minding our own business and rethinking our national purpose, to persuade the world that we had, i f we had, anything worthwhile to say to it...
...Can you see professional revolutionaries of the stamp of Stalin, or Lenin, or even of the present conservative but expansionist hierarchy, being swayed by this kind of consideration...
...To do so would be a new offense in its own right...
...George Urban: I am struck by a cluster of broadly synonymous words which occur in your Memoirs with remarkable frequency...
...By the same token, I don't believe in the ability of the United States to control any great part of the world...
...Kennan: Of course not...
...Even when people talk, as they now do, about the consequences of Soviet interference in Angola, the dangers of what is really involved in Angola for the United States are egregiously exaggerated...
...Let me jump to a major conclusion: the older I get, and the more I occupy myself with the history of the past century in Europe and the United States, the more I am persuaded that the Industrial Revolution itself was the source of most of the bewilderments and failures of the modern age...
...It is a fearfully polluting environment...
...Well, I discovered to my horror (and I had the same experience with my Reith Lectures in 1957) that very few people in the Western world wanted to have the division of Europe removed...
...and even today, I can find very little to fault in them...
...You talk about the defense of Western Europe--I am wondering whether "defense" is the right word, and whether the greatest danger to Western Europe is not within itself, for the general decadence of Western European society is one of the most tangible realities that hits even a fleeting visitor...
...and, personally, I find them difficult not to go along with...
...let us stake our safety on God's grace and our own good consciences and on that measure of common sense and humanity which even our adversaries possess...
...Kennan: We are talking about the disintegration of both militant faiths and strong ideological beliefs...
...and I think the Russians are well aware of this...
...It simply does not recognize the main problem in the lives of ordinary people...
...that people get old, that their power fails, that they have not accomplished what they would, and so on...
...The great good earth of Mother Russia, long ignored in favor of childish industrial fetishes of the earlier Communist period, seems once more to exude her benevolent and maternal warmth over man and beast and growing things together...
...American power, or NATO power, has not been able to stop the rot in Western Europe, whereas Soviet power has, brutally and repeatedly, stopped the disintegration of Eastern Europe and is, under the banner of proletarian internationalism, or some other slogan, certain to do so again, no matter how "socialist" Western Europe may become...
...A reasonably close contact with nature seems to me one of the great sources of psychic health...
...There is, for example, no reason that I can see why Western Europe should not put up a respectable conventional force of its own...
...His most recent book is Detente...
...This is childish...
...What is the political context in which you would visualize such a liberation ? Kennan: Look at what has already happened in Eastern Europe...
...I am afraid there is long going to be a tendency for individual legislators and politicians in this country to try to exploit the foreign policy process for their own domestic political ends...
...The railway by its very nature tee, ded to exercise a discipline on human habitation...
...There is in America hardly any countryside left in the social sense...
...Washington was obsessed by the idea that the Cold War had to be thought of in exclusively military terms...
...Kennan: I can explain the phenomenon, and yet I cannot really understand it...
...I am in despair about this country, not so much from the standpoint of what it is doing to other people, which has not been that horrible, as from the standpoint of what it is doing to itself...
...I would like to see us influence the world, if we can, by the power of our example to the extent that other people wish to follow it and find it applicable to themselves...
...You have only to look at New York which was a great and most enjoyable city sixty years ago...
...I was appalled by all this...
...and you are overcome by a sense "of the enormity of responsibility and of our inadequacy to it...
...But in the West, both in the traditions of Christianity and Judaism, we have been brought up to feel indi;eidual responsibility...
...In order that 20 or 30 years hence we may run out of oil, and minerals, and food, and invite upon humanity a devastating conflict between the overpopulated and undernourished two-thirds of the world and ourselves ? -- You have now put forward two powerful reasons for thinking that our concern to save Western civilization from any real or imaginary Soviet threat is misplaced and indeed erroneous...
...In any case a significant loosening-up of Moscow's control of Eastern Europe does not at all appear to be an American priority...
...Today, the Rumanians have a certain license because their dissent is limited to foreign policy...
...As things are, we won't have any policy for it--we won't have any place for it...
...In terms of population and industrial potential, Western Europe is at least fully equal to the Soviets...
...All this, of course, is not an easy thing to live with...
...This could be very important...
...But if that is the only way the country can govern itself, then it ought to recognize that this places certain limitations on what it can hope to do in the field of foreign affairs, and that its policy should be a very restrained one...
...I do not mean to reproach our forefathers...
...Guilty, above all, because it has not suffered where others have suffered, and has yet to be brought low before it can join the rest of mankind...
...They have troubles of their own, enough to keep their attention riveted on other things (I need not rehearse what they are...
...Kennan: I can see no way in which the system can be reformed...
...But isn't it grotesque to spend so much of our energy on opposing such a Russia in order to save a West which is honeycombed with bewilderment and a profound sense of internal decay...
...I would not want you to think that the incongruity which you notice stems from some perverse obstructionism, or one-upmanship, on my part...
...It u~ired peoplv" around the railheads: causing the>e :mtonishi,}gly creative: c, ocen~rations---the I91h-centur...
...But let me assume two things...
...Wouldn't we be better advised if we put our main effort into making ourselves worth protecting ? A couple of years ago, in the course of our usual summer cruise in the Baltic, my family and I put in at a small Danish port which was having a youth festival...
...There is something to that, too...
...In fact, there has been a tendency for latter-day Western Communists to associate themselves much more with anti-Western, nationalist, left-wing movements of the Third World than with Moscow...
...But as soon as it is thought that the system itself is challenged, Moscow clamps down with great severity...
...The Yugoslavs have liberated themselves...
...I f all this is true, doesn't your attitude amount to a kind o f political quietism which would, in effect, mean handing a world hunting-license to the Soviet Union ? Kennan: I don't believe it does...
...Kennan: The Russians are not in a good position to take advantage of our great weaknesses today...
...Kennan: I am an American and, like all of us, and especially all of us who were born at the time I was born and brought up--before World War I - - I grew up with a certain faith in American civilization and a certain belief that the American experiment was a positive development in the history of mankind, that it was a good thing that the United States had come into being and developed as it had developed...
...the mere sewage that flows from our great cities is becoming a world problem...
...In many ways your structures of the big city have been in line with the thinking of traditional American anti-urbanism...
...The place was swarming with hippies--motorbikes, girl-friends, drugs, pornography, drunkenness, noise--it was all there...
...you raise "anguished objections...
...In the face of all these predicaments affecting the non-Soviet part of Europe, I wonder whether there isn't a certain misplacement of emphasis on the external dangers which are said to be threatening Western Europe...
...I am equally amazed by the inability of Denmark and Holland to put an end to the pornographic invasion that has overcome them...
...What l have more particularly in mind is something you have, I know, always roundly condemned: the idealistic, moralizing streak in the American self-imaRe and American foreign policy...
...In the face of this crisis, which is predictable and now almost inevitable, how can we be so absorbed with the one that is not' inevitable--that is to say, the nuclear conflict with Russia--that we concentrate all our energies on she latter...
...Such indeed is their lack of sophistication that they have great difficulty in controlling even those parts of Europe which are under their hegemony...
...But let me remind you that Western Europe's troubles are not only of a moral and cultural character...
...In Democracy and the Student Left (1968) you clearly connect one with the other: I have the impression that the students who write these protesting letters are almost exclusively people of urban background, that student radicalism, in fact, is...an urban phenomenon...
...but let us at least walk like men, with our heads up, so long as we are permitted to walk at all...
...Are you advocating unilateral nuclear disarmament...
...IFhile, in 1976, this may strike one as arrogant or unsophisticated, it has, in the past 150 years, certainly been one of the great assets of American foreign policy...
...If we in the West could get over this fixation we have with the idea that the Russians are dying to drop bombs on us, and think, instead, of what is happening to our planet, and address ourselves, resolutely and rapidly, to preventing the catastrophe that looms before us, we would be doing a great deal better...
...Look at what the Rumanians have accomplished...
...I do not think that the United States civilization of these last 40-50 years is a successful civilization...
...This society bears the seeds of its own horrors--unbreathable air, undrinkable water, starvation~and until people realize that we have to get back to a much simpler form of life, a much smaller population, a society in which the agrarian component is far greater again in relation to the urban component--until these appreciations become widespread and effective--I can see no answer to the troubles of our time...
...The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1976 5 In this sense I am, I suppose, an 18th-century person, and I ' m persuaded that those of our forefathers who had their roots really back in the 18th century had more convincing values and better tastes than those whose roots were in the society that issued from the Industrial Revolution...
...I f so, isn't Eastern Europe up against an immovable object...
...Kennan: Possibly, possibly...
...Now you are assuming that the Russians would respond to our moral lead because they share with the rest of us some manifest desire to do the right thing by humanity...
...Kennan: One thing that has been widely missed by people in judging events in Eastern Europe is the Russians' willingness to put up with a great deal in terms of internal change in these countries, even in a direction they mightnot approve of, provided it is done with a hammer from the top and without any suspicion of spontaneity from below...
...We have, of course, been aware, at least since Tocqueville, that the political perspectives of democracy are always short-range and therefore debilitating...
...Noted diplomat and historian George F. Kennan discourses on Western civilization, its underpinnings, its situation today, its future...
...Obviously there is not one shred of reality in this view-no interest at all in the objective truth about Albania...
...Nobody but the Angolans will make anything out of Angola--least of all the Russians with their multiple handicaps, especially in an African setting...
...It is pozsible that some parts of humanity may survive it...
...They are too crude and clumsy for any such exploits...
...it)---to emerge where everything from commercial to cultural life gathered in the vicinity of one or two natural points of arrival and departure...
...His outlook is one of pessimistic optimism...
...But speaking for myself, I cannot help but long for that kind of life...
...One is a possible, but by no means certain, catastrophe in case we should militarily clash with the Russians...
...Internally they do not challenge the legitimacy o f the Soviet model of society...
...I feel sorry for children who are brought up without any sense of intimacy with dogs and horses and pigs, because living near animals teaches us something about ourselves...
...I don't believe in the ability of the Russians to control Western Europe...
...But many of them would not be able to--many of them are too run-down by drugs and the other effects of a permissive physical life...
...The extraordinary resistance put up by the Portuguese Socialists shows that even in a country as poor as Portugal and as lacking in democratic tradition, a totalitarian takeover can be, and was, effectively resisted...
...If you are going to govern, from a single capital, an area as large and variegated as that which constitutes the United States--everything from Florida to Alaska, and from Northern Maine to Southern California--the only way you can govern without coercion is by a never-ending, elaborate series of compromises between political groups and lobbies...
...We are all animals in part, and it does us good to be reminded of our affinity with growing things and the animal kingdom...
...And I am fairly sure that the nuclear weapon, the possibilities and impossibilities of which everyone misunderstood except Stalin, encouraged this line of thinking...
...They follow in many ways, though not in all ways, a highly independent line...
...He does recognize that the strained relationship between the peoples of Eastern Europe and Moscow is a great source o f instability in Europe, and a greater danger to world peace than the conflict between East and West...
...I don't take this to be a great black mark against America, or a sign of the inferiority of American society...
...George Urban is a journalist and wm'ter on contemporary history, who lives in England...
...We had many people here, of whom John Foster Dulles was one, who felt that the only way in which we could ever make headway against Moscow was to develop enormous military strength and get the Soviets to do what we wanted them to do by putting them under threats and pressure...
...After all, people do live in the Soviet Union...
...But, on the other hand, the denouement may be quite different...
...The disarray in Western Europe is bound to unleash disarray in Eastern Europe...
...And what is one to think of the failure of the Berlin Senate to prevent the destruction of the Free University...
...the despoliation of nature...
...I don't even mean that we should do anything abruptly to curtail our commitments anywhere...
...You have come a long way from advocating, as you did in American Diplomacy (1950, a policy of firm containment, designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counterforce at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interest of a peaceful and stable world...
...The ideological approach of the Soviet Union is at least 70-80 years out of date and has very small appeal anywhere...
...I find your trust in the power of example most appealing, for it assumes the basic goodness and rationality of man...
...Any regime that chooses to call itself Marxist can be sure that its brutalities and oppression will be forgiven, whereas any regime that does not is stamped as being of the Right, in which case the slightest invasion of the rights or liberties of the individual on its territory at once becomes the ob]'ect of intense indignation...
...but it does mean that the revolution in technology should never have been allowed to go uncontrolled as it did, that one should have examined each improvement in technology very carefully with a view to its total impact on society...
...And yet, here you have a great section of German, and French, and Italian student youth violently exercised in its favor...
...The effort to enlighten the United States was almost more successful than I had supposed...
...Show me first an America which has successfully coped with the problems of crime, drugs, deteriorating educational standards, urban decay, pornography, and decadence of one sort or another-show me an America that has pulled itself together and is what it ought to be, then I will tell you how we are going to defend ourselves from the Russians...
...I can see no reason for thinking that the Soviet government, or any militant government with enormous power in its bands, has ever acted or would ever act like that...
...My whole thought (to repeat a point I want to stress) in pleading initially for a firm Western stance was to enable us eventually to talk to the Russians so effectively that we could get them to withdraw from the center of Europe, for the Soviet presence there seemed to me catastrophic for the present and future of the entire continent...
...Take the French Communist Party...
...In fact, the Russians are much better in holding pornography at bay than we are...
...It may or it may not...
...George F. Kennan has had a distinguished career as diplomat and historian...
...My main reason for advocating a gradual and qualified withdrawal from far-flung foreign involvements is that we have nothing to teach the world...
...I am merely saying that I can't see the answer to the problems of modern civilization in the framework of our highly urbanized industrial society...
...So long as the system is not frontally provoked...
...Please understand that, for purposes of argument, I am given to overstating a case...
...but for us the dangers are not significant...
...Some people would deny that and say: "The country people are just as crazy as anyone...
...All this may strike you as trite and unctuous, but I deeply believe that kindliness and generosity in our personal behavior, and a refusal to be beastly to others even by way of reaction, are both moral and pragmatic qualities o f the highest order...
...Western Europe has lost a sense of the fitness of things, and that is the meaning of decadence...
...It does seem to me that the West cannot win in terms of either of your scenarios...
...There will not be one penny of American money, not a single American rifle sent to Africa...
...Marxism may be old-fashioned and irrelevant, but it has the soothing aura of faith, and that is what most intellectuals, and indeed most people, are really after...
...Never again will it be given to a national society to develop a vast, unpopulated area in the northern, temperate zone of the world...
...This is not to be taken for granted...
...Of course, it wasn't at all, and I don't think I need go into arguing why...
...Kennan: We have to lead step by step, and unless there is a response, there can be no more concessions for the moment from our side...
...It is absent from the Chinese-Confucian concept of religiosity where there is no sin, only indiscretion or impracticability...
...and the shallowness, and ultimately the disappearance, of religion as a public experience...
...that there is bereavement...
...But this awareness has not helped us very much--rather has it added to our problems...
...You don't think a "Finlandization" of Western Europe would eventually result from granting the Soviet Union what it would probably interpret as an unlimited right to prospect the world for influence ? Kennan: The comparison that has been drawn between Finland's position vls" -a _9 the Soviet Union and that of Western Europe is neitlaer fair to the Finns--whose position is not all that weak or humiliating (they have materially increased their freedom of action in the last 25 years)--nor is it fair to Western Europe, because the latter's relationship to Moscow rests on wholly different geopolitical, demographic, and economic realities than that The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1976 7 of Finland...
...This does not, of course, mean to say that there should have been no technological improvements in the early 19th century...
...Kennan: As Dostoevsky and many others have pointed out, one has to be extremely wary of a secular idealism that does not plunge to the depth of this tragic element in human nature...
...It is a self-defeating attitude which reminds me of the tennis player who takes his eyes off the ball because he is too conscious of the problem "How-am-I-going-to-look-hitting-the-ball...
...And on nuclear competition you said: Let us divest ourselves of this weapon altogether...
...that the people we love don't die at the same time we do and vice versa...
...Even a newspaper like Le Monde--one of the world's best papers--is now profoundly socialistic in spirit, and not just moderately socialistic, because whenever there is an issue between Peking or Moscow and the West, it instinctively supports the Communist side...
...and he expresses the hope that East European aspirations for greater autonomy, which he supports, will be contained within the Soviet geopolitical context...
...George Washington himself was a case in point...
...But as things are, I can see very little merit in organizing ourselves to defend from the Russians the porno-shops in central Washington...
...We are not departing from Marxism, and we are not joining the enemy...
...today it is unfit for civilized living...
...They cater to what is basest in the American electorate...
...The decline of the West is not a fully accomplished fact, nor is our stumbling into this great physical catastrophe final...
...We were in the middle of the Cold War...
...One reason was the impossible situation of Berlin...
...It may be there are dangers for the Angolans...
...They have seen us as saving them the necessity of having a policy either towards Eastern Europe or Germany, which is, of course, very agreeable to them...
...These weapons, which are much too terrible to be in human hands--ours or anybody else's--must be eliminated from the spectrum of possible military instruments...
...All these features are producing a state of affairs in Eastern Europe which is very different from what we saw there in the late 1940s and 1950s...
...We should come out firmly and frankly in the United Nations and say: "We are prepared to have nothing to do with this area...
...They all have to do with yourpersonal anguish at seeing the world, and especially the contemporary world, governed by myopia, ignorance, and folly...
...Or take Hungary, where the 1956 revolution, although ostensibly a failure, actually changed the internal situation materially for the better, so much so that in a curious way Hungary is leading a substantially independent existence under the Communist dispensation...
...there is an even greater question which people very seldom ask themselves...
...that is to say, by one-sided American gestures which were expected to appeal to the Soviet leaders, and especially Stalin, personally...
...and the approaching crisis in Yugoslavia with Tito's death...
...There is [in American culture] no strong and coherent religious faith, no firm foundation of instruction in the nature of individual man, no appreciation of the element of tragedy that unavoidably constitutes a central component of man's predicament, and no understanding of the resulting limitations on the possibilities of social and political achievement...
...overrun by the enemy...
...That it hasn't the military muscle which it ought to have is entirely due to a lack of political will...
...They could argue: "We find this or that commendable in Chinese, or Italian, or French Communist ideas which we think we ought to be able to adopt...
...The party may hold together, younger men may be brought in without friction or upheavals, and so on...
...It is top-heavyand cannot be used for gaining political advantage except against people who, as Stalin said, have weak nerves...
...The main source of yourpessimism would appear to me to be the disintegration of our traditional order, going back, I suppose, to the 18tb century...
...As (Aron said) the division o f Europe was absolutely dearcut and the absurdities were well respected, the division was acceptable...
...Think of the potential wealth of this continent, and the way in which people harnessed it to their needs, and also devastated, by their greed, its lakes and forests and seaboards...
...First, that the Soviet leaders mean what they say when they tell us that they have every intention to exploit the crises of Western society and to support, wherever they can, wars of "national liberation...
...That they are desperately in need of a small number of simple certainties...
...In a sense I am more worried about your insistence that the United States has nothing to say to the world than by the nature of the American system which, as you say, inhiln'ts the United States from putting across whatever it may have to say to the world, After all, the latter may be open to reform, whereas the evaporation of American selfconfidence is probably beyond repair in the foreseeable future...
...You are "totally caught.., totally helpless.., in black despair.., horrified ...lonely...extremely lonely...afflicted by loneliness...profoundly depressed...vulnerable...
...Kennan: The whole concept of Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe is unsound even from the Russian point of view...
...roosters crow, goats tug at their tethers, barefoot women hoe vigorously at the potato patches, small boys play excitedly in the little streams and ponds, family parties sit at crude wooden tables in the gardens under the young fruit trees...
...You have a "foreknowledge of disaster...
...Albania is picked up simply because it seems to be a club with a particularly sharp nail at the end of it with which to beat one's own society, one's own traditions, one's own parents...
...But if that is so, "Finlandization," if it ever comes, will be a self-inflicted wound...
...whether the symbiosis in your writings of the "Cold Warrior" and the "Revisionist" historian (and l am using both labels, faute de mieux, with great reluctance) is sufficiently explained by a kind of sublimated gut-reaction on your part to the conventional wisdom of authority...
...I was shocked by the simplicity of thought which was overtaking people in this country: they were putting Stalin into the image of Hitler, thinking that the Soviet threat was the same kind of thing the Nazi threat had been...
...I think we could, with such a policy, put great pressure, 8 The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1976 through African opinion, on the Soviet leaders...
...You are deeply revolted by every form of ugliness, bad taste, and (my linkage is deliberate) disrespect of tradition...
...I looked at this mob and thought how one company of robust Russian infantry would drive it out of town: Now many of these fellows would change their spots and prove very valiant people indeed if you appealed to them and presented to them a cause they thought wfis worth defending...
...In a revealing comment you speak of the "discomfort I experience in my status as a contemporary of the 20tb century...
...Of course, nothing at all may happen...
...Are you now really saying that the amount of freedom that exists, for example, in Hungary or Poland is enough to put these basically totalitarian states on a par with Holland or Britain, so much so that the whole concept of the defense of Western civilization is rendered hollow and (in the face of the possibility of an ecological catastrophe) essentially meaningless...
...The railway-based metropolis of the 19th century--the old London, or Berlin, or Edinburgh, or Chicago---was a marvelous city, and I have a certain nostalgia for that...
...Kennan: I don't trust human beings to live successfully too far away from nature...
...Our national experience was never shared by any country and will never be shared by any country in the future...
...This would include industrialization...
...We talk of saving Western civilization when we talk of a military confrontation with Russia--but, saving it for what...
...Am I right in detecting a puritanical sense of guilt in all this--afeeling that America is too rich, too powerful, too vulgar, too brash, and eo ipso: guilty...
...It is of the most profound importance that the proliferation of nuclear weapons be halted...
...But Western Europe has, since the War, leaned on us more heavily than is good for Western Europe itself...
...But there was also a deeper reason, which few have consented to recognize down to this day: even if we do accept the division of Europe (as apparently we do) with very little concern, we cannot be sure that it will be at all times acceptable to the people of Eastern Europe...
...The second of these two, if allowed to develop, may be final--there can be no real recovery from it...
...I sometimes wonder what use there is in trying to protect the Western world against fancied external threats when the signs of disintegration within are so striking...
...and, second, even if it were successful, I did not think we had an alternative to offer...
...And am I wrong to suspect that the tenderness with which you describe and eulogize the unsophisticated ways of the Russian people tells us something about the roots of your claim that you "had Russia in your blood," that there was "some mysterious affinity which I couldnot explain even to mysel)~ Was this affinity, I wonder, not really anchored in your yearning for the 18th century, which could be satisfied in the Soviet Union in the 1950s by simply observing and identifying with the life of the ordinary Russian ? Here, t f I may quote from your Memoirs, is George Kennan, United States Ambassador to the Soviet Union, describing, right at the end of Stalin's rule (July 1952), Russian life on the private garden plots on the edge of the city of Moscow: Everything takes place in a genial intimacy and informality: hammers ring...
...It is a minor blessing that, after Hungary and Czechoslovakia, Moscow has never recovered its prestige in the eyes of the West European Communists and thus ceased to be the automatic beneficiary of the radicalism of the West European student youth...
...In case of a full-scale war, complete victory was all but impossible, whether nuclear weapons did or did not exist...
...One is the decadence of the West: the disintegration of the moral fiber of society in Western Europe, and the inability of the United States to offer anything worth learning to the rest of the wbrld...
...I distrust people of good intentions who claim to be acting, not out of personl conviction, but on the imperatives of a superior order, for while they profess to love humanity, they are usually very uncharitable to those closest to them...
...Your second reasoning claims that our entire preoccupation with the danger of Soviet expansionism rests on a false conception of priorities: the ecological disaster will be a certain disaster whereas the Soviet threat is contingent--it will probably never materialize, and i f it does, we can survive it...
...the student's] estrangement from nature, his intimacy with the machine, his familiarity with the world of gadgetry, and his total lack of understanding for the slow powerful processes of organic growth, all these imbue him with an impatience and an expectation of an immediate connection between stimulus and effect...
...In the immediate postwar period, when I wrote my "long telegram," I was especially concerned to bring our people in Washington to understand that, before they could effectively deal with the Soviet leadership about the future of Europe or anything else, they would have to prove to it that we would not allow Moscow to win by methods of infiltration and concealed aggression--that the West had sufficient virility, sufficient firmness, and sufficient selfconfidence to prevent itself being undone by those means...
...You first talk of "great governments" which will not commit certain crimes because of some unspoken noblesse oblige principle which is implied in your use of the word "great...
...Since World War II, an unfamiliar responsibility--world leadership--has devolved on American shoulders, but it would seem that neither the American people nor the United States government is willing, or indeed able, to do justice to it in terms of adjusting the American system to its requirements...
...When people speak today of the Russians "getting" Angola, I don't know what they mean, any more than what they meant when they talked of our "losing" China...
...Now if--and it appears not impossible--the Italian Communists came into a position of power, this would affect the parties in Eastern Europe even more forcefully...
...One of the dominant elements in your intellectual temper seems to me to be aesthetic...
...What they cannot tolerate, and I suppose this was one of the key elements in the Czechoslovak situation in 1968, is any form of spontaneous reform...
...When I say that, I am thinking of certain well-known facts: that there are such things in life as accidents and tragic illnesses...
...This again was something I had to oppose--I never believed that the present division of Europe could be a lasting arrangement, and I stated my reasons for saying why it could not in my Reith Lectures...
...the conflict between Greeks and Turks...
...The challenges are brutal and ubiquitous, the responses pitifully feeble or nonexistent...
...Given an ideological alternative, the East European Communists could claim a degree of freedom from Moscow without suggesting that they were "going over to the capitalists...
...By the winter of 1947-48 the success of the exercise was amply demonstrated and the psychological triumph of the Marshall Plan clinched that demonstration...
...and those powers will be first abused, and afterwards lost, i f they are committed to an unwieldy multitude' has lain at the heart of my political philosophy...
...We have been putting the emphasis in the wrong places...
...The differences exist and they are important...
...We greatly exaggerate the hazards of doing so...
...The Finns, to whose plight the West Europeans love to compare themselves when they talk of "Finlandization," have, if anything, moved from a restricted sense of sovereignty to a much fuller sense of sovereignty, rather than the other way around...
...But such calls, while fully justified, tend to divert our attention from what we have to do right now in an unregenerate and ugly world, but the only world we have...
...When we come to the question of conflict between the Great Powers, there is no nuclear war that could be other than catastrophic for all countries indulging in it...
...The net effect of what you are saying is: the United States is congenitally incapable of performing a consistently sustained world role...
...We are faced with two conceivable versions of catastrophe...
...They will, for example, permit the East Germans to put into effect economic reforms much more far-reaching than those which were envisaged by Dubcek, as long as it is done dictatorially--as long as the Party is seen to be fully in control...
...Hungary seems to be a borderline case...
...There is, in the United States, no one to hold people to that today--the churches have lost the power to do so, the state cannot attempt to do so, and our two political parties would not know how to begin to do so...
...Western Europe is far too addicted to its material comforts, and values prosperity far too highly, to make the necessary sacrifices...
...don't think men were meant to live in such monstrous accumulations...
...We have been a form of escape for our European allies...
...A few people--yes--and many who have misgivings of one sort or another, but there are very few people in this country who have taken the measure of the inadequacy, not just of our traditional institutions, but also of our habits of thought and assumptions...
...The examples one could cite to support this assertion are so numerous, especially from Czarist Russia and Eastern and Southern Europe, where the promise of America was most widely appreciated, that I shall simply state the fact, wondering whether, i f your policy of what one might call American "self-containment" were here to stay, the United States would not be depriving itself of its entire historic magnetism...
...It was clear to me that, so long as the Russians entertained such ideas, we had no hope of dealing with them" effectively...
...Not only that, but we don't know what the future may bring...
...If they could be induced to behave differently, we would have a breathing space...
...but that is no longer so...
...and this method of governing the United States is quite possibly better than the alternatives would be...
...Their vices may be different but that makes them no less reprehensible...
...I find this quite appalling...
...I suppose we are at heart all children grasping for fatber-iraages, and the worse the chaos around us, the simpler the images that attract us...
...As long as they do this, they inflict a sense of incoherence on American foreign policy, because we are pushed into taking actions in the foreign field, not for their effectiveness in the matters with which they purport to deal, but for their ulterior function here at home...
...The great cities impress their characteristics through television and the motor car...
...Moreover, every society has specific qualities of its own that we in America do not understand very well...
...The same is true in East Germany...
...With the exception of Eritrea, the Russians have had nothing but serious reversals in their African policies...
...No one can seriously believe that Angola will be turned into a Soviet republic on the Uzbekistan model...
...Secondly, that Western society will, in the short run, not change significantly enough to introduce a fundamentally new element into the EastWest relationship...
...The CIA will leave it totally alone on the assumption that the Soviet Union will do likewise...
...Organized religion--whatever we may think of the weaknesses and hypocrisies of the clergy--has surely served us well, at least in the sense that it has been a constant reminder that the spiritual condition of man is, or ought to be, a central concern of our culture and society...
...Aren't we, then (to repeat something that can never be repeated often enough) being unrealistic in the amount of attention we devote to protecting ourselves from the Russians who, God knows, are not ten feet tall, who have all sorts of troubles of their own, who can' t run an agricultural system that really works, who can't adequately house their population, who are rapidly losing their prestige and leadership in the World Communist movement, and have to reckon with China on their long frontier in the East...
...The nuclear weapon is simply not a rational means of political pressure or The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1976 11 action...
...Let me say a word at this juncture about the intellectual background of the growing respectability of West European Communism...
...But I do feel that we should not accept new commitments, that we should gradually reduce our existing commitments to a minimum, even in the Middle East, and get back to a policy of leaving other people alone and expect to be largely left alone by them...
...But I have no such feeling for the fragmented and dispersed urban sprawls of the United States of the 1970s...
...They just would not know how...
...No one is more aware than you that the internal American political process is diffuse, impenetrable, and chaotic...
...but, still, it is a way of living, and it does not mean the end of the experiment of human civilization...
...Can America Continue as a World Super-Power...
...no great government behaves in that way, and the Russians are not going to...
...Isn't your critique o f the big city really a critique of the degeneration, as you see it, of American society and culture...
...Most Western Europeans were still more afraid of Germany than they were of Russia, so that the division of Germany, with the United States holding the fort with its troops in Germany, suited them rather well...
...Europe is no longer in a state of militant confrontation...
...Portugal has furnished an important lesson: it has shown that we have come a long way since 1917--we are not going to have a repetition of the October Revolution, we are not going to have a Bolshevik seizure of power in any of the West European countries...
...Whether, of course, the license could be revoked is another matter...
...He entered the United States Foreign Service in 1926, andin 1952 was appointedAmbassador to the USSR...
...Isn't it especially difficult for one brought up in the traditions of a foreign service officer who must surely feel it incumbent upon him to represent, not only the interests, but also the character of his country ? Kennan: I have never shared a sense of shame about my country vis-b-vis other countries, which you see reflected in the American press and in the sentiments of a large part of liberal and radical youth, because I don't think we are that much worse than anybody else...
...In practical life we must, on the strength of an entirely personal ethic, hold on to such elementary qualities as charity, decency, love, and a willingness to put ourselves in the position of the man in distress...
...He cautions against any excessive zeal on the part o f the United States to jeopardize the chances of a more organic relationship between the East European nations and Russia...
...Moscow's tactical permissiveness in Eastern Europe can go quite far...
...I now see all these assumptions crashing to pieces around us...
...I do not think that our political system is adequate to the needs of the age into which we are now moving...
...The last thing in the world they are going to do is to threaten other governments by saying: "You do what we want you to do or else we'll drop nuclear bombs on you...
...instead of concentrating on what he is doing...
...but the Marxist outlook does not...
...The other is an absolutely certain ecological and demographic disaster which is going to overtake this planet within the next, I would say, 60-70 years, but the effects of which will probably make themselves very painfully felt before the end of this century...
...This betrays a terrible lack of self-confidence and a total confusion of values...
...You must remember that as far as the pollution of the earth is concerned, this is largely the work of the great industrial nations which are spread out around the fertile zones of the northern hemisphere...
...it cuts both ways...
...Most of Western Europe is socialist...
...You are a man of great goodwill and, at heart, an optimist, though a pessimistic optimist...
...We are, then, talking of the clash of two secularisms, each groping for a new guiding principle...
...Statesmanship, even in the United States, up to the end of the 18th century was largely rurally b a s e d - - i t came from people with estates in the country who moved to the cities to do specific things for a limited duration...
...Or am I misguided in linking your attitude tO the American background, and should I simply ask : why do you bold this particular view...
...I think this country is destined to succumb to failures which cannot be other than tragic and enormous in their scope...
...but it must now end...
...Can the system be reformed with this end in mind...
...For example, I am persuaded that the Yugoslav defection had a great deal to do with the fact that the Rumanians broke ranks on certain important aspects of Soviet foreign policy...
...I do, of course, realize that the idea of setting the world an example by our Western works rather than power, and the related notion of passive resistance, are basic to youk approach to international affairs...
...they were part of their time, they shared its scientific optimism, and they could not foresee the consequences of what they were doing...
...Doesn't this show that intellectuals are no better, even i f they are perhaps no worse, than other mortals...
...Do these factors tell us the whole story ? Kennan: No, they don't...
...He spent the years 1953-61 at the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, and from 1961-63 was Ambassador to Yugoslavia...
...V/estern Europe, which is decadent and sunk in s e l f seeking materialism, is hardly worth defending...
...What are we going to do the next time there is trouble...
...Their reaction would not be that the Americans have shown a noble example which they (the Russians) must follow, but rather that American capitalism has become so weakkneed that they may safely push ahead wherever opportuni~d beckons...
...But these are not my only reasons for opposing the division of Europe...
...This is a rebellion against Western Europe--it is not one in favor of anything much else...
...Calls for social and, really, spiritual regeneration are never absent from your writings...
...Kennan: This is a deeply personal matter and almost one of religious conviction...
...for it runs counter to the optimistic, problem-solving, this-worldly credo of American culture...
...and I think it is fair to say that you were, by temperament, a "resigner...
...So it is up to us to grasp the nettle and tell the world that we are willing to leave such territories alone...
...the urbanization of agrarian societies...
...But I would now add that your emphasis, throughout your writings, on the inherently tragic element in human life, its finiteness and unpredictability, strike me as being "un-American, " i f you will...
...No human life is without these tragic elements, and anyone who promises to create paradise on earth is perpetrating an inexcusable deceit...
...But you must realize that at the back of this whole great question of military competition...
...I saw no hope in it, and I did not believe that we should take part in any effort to overthrow the Soviet regime...
...The United States is no longer there as a great imperialistic power...
...The motor vehicle carries exactly the opposite discipline: it tends to explode and fragment things--to reduce wholes into small pieces and to disperse these in every direction...
...Copyright Encounter 12 The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1976...
...When I say I am an "isolationist"--which in a sense I am - - I do not advocate that we should suddenly rat on NATO and abandon our West European allies...
...Kissinger, speaking with the voice of Helmut Sonnenfeldt, appears to have more complex thoughts about the division of Europe...
...and that it is, from such a base, extremely difficult to pursue a consistent and effective foreign policy, especially vis-a-vis a power that has a long-term strategy...
...This is what gives me a great sense of sadness...
...Copym'ght 1976 Encounter Ltd...
...Apparently the criterion of their affections is the degree of hatred of a given external movement for the West, and especially for their own societies...
...Compared to the dangers which confront us on the ecological and demographic front, the possibility of Soviet control of Western Europe, even if one thought that this was a likely thing to happen (which I don't) would strike me as a minor catastrophe...
...In the East, the appeal of Communism as an ideology is utterly exhausted...
...but I would say that such a country ought to follow a policy of minding its own business to the extent that it can...
...and they express your loneliness and helplessness in the face of so much, as you see it, avoidable evil...
...I do not like the word "isolationism" because it has connotations that are too extreme...
...Moreover, I would infer from the moral thrust of your reasoning that your tacit message is not only that the West cannot win, but that it doesn't deserve to win...
...It seems to me that the future of Western Europe lies along moderate socialism, and this socialization of Western Europe harbors dangers for the Soviet Union: the example of the West European nations opting for a generally socialist line of development and detaching themselves from the United States will put great strain on the Soviet hold over Eastern Europe...
...Kennan: In Western Culture the churches have kept their eyes on the moral responsibility of the individual in the face of his own conscience...
...THE ALTERNATIVE: AN AMERICAN SPECTATOR VOLUME TEN, NUMBER TWO / NOVEMBER 1976 George Urban A Conversation with George Keuuau Is the West imperilled more by the Soviet threat or by its own decadence...
...it leaves the way open for further developments...
...It is not what these people would like...
...That the decadence of our civilization should coincide with the infantilism of our poh'tical culture--doesn 't this have an awesome appropm'ateness about it...
...Of course, there may be reasons for desiring a greater measure of dirigisme in public affairs in the Western countries...
...Iam also struck by the preponderance of pastoral values in your personal aesthetics, and your portrayal of the good life in what one might call verbal tableaux of an idyllic, pre-industrial nature...
...I am reminded that in Dante's Commedia the Vestibule of Hell is occupied by the Indifferent, those "Who against God rebelled not, nor to Him / Were faithful, but to self alone were true/...deep Hell rejects so base a herd...
...We have already had two extremely serious warnings, in the Hungarian revolution and the 1968 Czc,.l~oslovak events, to mention only two of the major upheavals--and, you know, one isn't often given more than two warnings in life...
...The fa.~hi,, ~ab/e thing among "progre.rsive" inte!lectua/.r L~ to ,'~ The Alte~oativv: An :~m~q-ic~t~ Swct:mu November 197(', postulate the death of religion, especially Christianity, and to hope that a substitute ethic will somehow emerge from scientific humanism, ecology, emancipation, revolution, or some combination of these (a somewhat dffj~ vu idea at least since the French Revolution...
...At that point I found that I had, so to speak, oversold my bill of goods, that our people had become so persuaded of the hostility of the Soviet leaders that they would now wholly dismiss the idea of ever dealing with them about anything...
...One has also to take into account the state of Italy which is almost incapable of governing itself...
...Let me explain what the incongruity was about, and why each of the two, seemingly irreconcilable, strands of my argument was entirely justified in the context in which it was put forward...
...Otherwise we are going to face irrevocable disaster...
...I was shocked to discover that Rooseyelt had at one point invited Stalin to involve himself in American domestic politics by sending Stalin a private request to dissuade the United States Communist Party from supporting him at the presidential election lest this support should prove embarrassing to him...
...After all, every totalitarian movement and every despotism in history professed to be serving the good of the people, while also saying that cruelty and beastliness were the means whereby the public good was to be achieved...
...ls it, on current showing, likely to be so reformed...
...It is to me a tragedy that half of Europe is now constrained to live under a different intellectual and cultural disc?pline than the other half...
...Don't you think this kind of attitude would leave the world wide open to Soviet territorial and political expansionism...
...What is our policy going to be if one of the East European countries does manage to free itself from Soviet tutelage...
...the same is true in Hungary...
...This has been a deplorable development, and I hate to see other people, whether under the Communist slogan of abolishing the differences between the city and the countryside, or under the universal slogan of modernization, especially in the Third World, going the same way...
...The same thing is true oFthe German student disorders which still remain a serious matter in a number of universities...
...But from the ecological catastrophe that looms in front of us there is no recovery...
...But I understand from those who have tried to live by such a new ethic in the communal colonies of California that, when put to the test, the substitute ethic shows itself powerless to influence the minds of people, and the cry soon goes up for some genuinely spiritual concept, or else the ethic degenerates into a quasi-religious worship of human idols...
...but this would, at best, mean the beginning of a new Dark Age-all we have achieved in Western civilization over the last 2,000 years would be lost...
...Therefore, in 1945 and 1946, I urged Washington to stiffen up and disabuse Moscow of these illusions because I was convinced (and I said so in my dispatches) that only when we had proven to the Russians that they could not get what they wanted without dealing with us, would they consent to deal with us...
...This is a stance which ignores the restiveness of the East European nations and tacitly assumes that i f restiveness were to lead to renewed trouble, the Soviet divisions would act as they always have done, and the West would remain as inactive as it always has been...
...In any case, the external dangers are (you argue)probably imaginary, whereas the internal ones are real...
...He notes that the Kremlin has not been able to acquire any "organic" sense of loyalty in Eastern Europe, and that it relies, therefore, on the presence of sheer military power...
...There, under protestations of external and internal orthodoxy, a good deal of economic and cultural liberalism is tolerated...
...They spill out like some great, slowmoving flow of molasses all over the countryside and change its nature...
...But one would probably do well to think of it as no more than a courtjester's k'cense which stands to be revoked the moment it ceases to be a convenient way of relieving tension and begins to impinge on the system...
...I do not, of course, credit myself personally with that success because American opinion was in the process of undergoing a profound change which had deeper reasons...
...First, I did not think such an attempt would be successful...
...At one time the Minister of the Interior was a Communist, and the police were also under Communist control...
...the disarray and uncertainty all over the Iberian Peninsula...
...therefore I don't want to see us put in a position of taking responsibility for the affairs of people we do not comprehend...
...Let me mention, by way of an example, the incongruity which exists between your "long ~telegram" in the winter of 1946, and your 1952 dispatch "The Soviet Union and the Atlantic Pact...
...So I don't think they will capitalize in the near future on the disturbing state of Western Europe...
...Kennan: Not all at once, or not without reciprocation, but if no one takes the lead in imposing self-restraint in the development of these weapons, we are never going to get any reduction of them by negotiation...
...The East European governments, particularly those straining for greater freedom from Soviet control, are going to say: "Why must we submit to this...
...The greatest deficiency of Marxist thought, which, after all, has penetrated the consciousness of a great many people in Western society who are not aware of being Marxists at all, lies in the assumption that the ills of society can be cured by tinkering with social relationships...
...Wouldn't it, above all, deliver Western Europe to the Soviet Union ? Kennan: We should not cut our commitments to Western Europe abruptly...
...I am deeply distressed that the United States government takes no helpful action along these lines...
...but we are also talking about the disintegration of the old forms of great-power imperialism...
...you feel "tossed" into some "impossible position between two worlds...
...But if you look at French politics as a whole, I am struck there too (as I am when I look at other parts of Europe) by the sweeping power of Marxist ideas among the student youth and intellectuals...
...Today the Finns enjoy complete freedom in their internal affairs...
...A gradual American withdrawal, and a gradual assumption of much greater responsibilities by the West Europeans for what is, after all, principally their own defense and political future would be all to the good...
...But to come back to your point: what you are implying is that the age of faith has come to an end both in the East and the V/est--on our side, a profound skepticism has destroyed our adherence to formal religions and undermined our trust in the values, tastes, and sensibilities of what has traditionally been regarded as European culture...
...It is an appalling regression...
...but I wonder whether there is room for this kind of sentiment in the hard world of international competition...
...Won't East Germans, Poles, Czechs, and Hunga~ans, by virtue of their cultural seniomty, always demand certain things which the Russians will not demand, much less achieve...
...Moreover, the prospects of a continuing Soviet hegemony there are undermined by the gradual loss of Soviet leadership of the world Communist movement: as the large West European Communist parties become independent from Moscow, the East European parties will have alternative poles of orientation...
...This, we felt, was a danger of great seriousness which we had to combat...
...We saw this in 1956 and 1968...
...There is no more justi - fication for the Soviet control of half of Europe...
Vol. 10 • November 1976 • No. 2
