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...
...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...
...but we are also talking about the disintegration of the old forms of great-power imperialism...
...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...
...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...
...It does seem to me that the West cannot win in terms of either of your scenarios...
...No one can seriously believe that Angola will be turned into a Soviet republic on the Uzbekistan model...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...At one time the Minister of the Interior was a Communist, and the police were also under Communist control...
...Kennan: ...And they reach for the false ones if they cannot find genuine certainties...
...No human life is without these tragic elements, and anyone who promises to create paradise on earth is perpetrating an inexcusable deceit...
...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...
...and this method of governing the United States is quite possibly better than the alternatives would be...
...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...
...The East European governments, particularly those straining for greater freedom from Soviet control, are going to say: "Why must we submit to this...
...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...
...and he expresses the hope that East European aspirations for greater autonomy, which he supports, will be contained within the Soviet geopolitical context...
...Internally they do not challenge the legitimacy o f the Soviet model of society...
...The same is true in East Germany...
...Kennan: I can explain the phenomenon, and yet I cannot really understand it...
...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...
...Western Europe is far too addicted to its material comforts, and values prosperity far too highly, to make the necessary sacrifices...
...Moreover, every society has specific qualities of its own that we in America do not understand very well...
...We have, of course, been aware, at least since Tocqueville, that the political perspectives of democracy are always short-range and therefore debilitating...
...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...
...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...
...As things are, we won't have any policy for it--we won't have any place for it...
...There is also the reluctance to see the client states acquire certain liberties and living standards which the Russians themselves cannot afford to have...
...We could be much bolder, not so much in the negotiations, as in our unilateral policies...
...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...
...We have been putting the emphasis in the wrong places...
...No one is more aware than you that the internal American political process is diffuse, impenetrable, and chaotic...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...for it runs counter to the optimistic, problem-solving, this-worldly credo of American culture...
...Today the Finns enjoy complete freedom in their internal affairs...
...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...
...But I have, as you know, always very emphatically rejected the concept of the universality of the American experience...
...and the approaching crisis in Yugoslavia with Tito's death...
...but it must now end...
...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 would include industrialization...
...We were in the middle of the Cold War...
...but, still, it is a way of living, and it does not mean the end of the experiment of human civilization...
...V/ill Soviet power wait for our moral renewal...
...Kennan: In Western Culture the churches have kept their eyes on the moral responsibility of the individual in the face of his own conscience...
...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...
...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...
...that is to say, by one-sided American gestures which were expected to appeal to the Soviet leaders, and especially Stalin, personally...
...I f so, isn't Eastern Europe up against an immovable object...
...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...
...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...
...Isn't your critique o f the big city really a critique of the degeneration, as you see it, of American society and culture...
...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...
...instead of concentrating on what he is doing...
...I want it myself for ecological reasons rather than social ones--so that may have something to do with it...
...Or am I misguided in linking your attitude tO the American background, and should I simply ask : why do you bold this particular view...
...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...
...In any case a significant loosening-up of Moscow's control of Eastern Europe does not at all appear to be an American priority...
...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...
...But, on the other hand, the denouement may be quite different...
...Never again will it be given to a national society to develop a vast, unpopulated area in the northern, temperate zone of the world...
...What is our policy going to be if one of the East European countries does manage to free itself from Soviet tutelage...
...Obviously there is not one shred of reality in this view-no interest at all in the objective truth about Albania...
...Calls for social and, really, spiritual regeneration are never absent from your writings...
...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 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...
...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...
...Kennan: Possibly, possibly...
...but for us the dangers are not significant...
...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...
...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...
...Copym'ght 1976 Encounter Ltd...
...In fact, the Russians are much better in holding pornography at bay than we are...
...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...
...I don't even mean that we should do anything abruptly to curtail our commitments anywhere...
...In a revealing comment you speak of the "discomfort I experience in my status as a contemporary of the 20tb century...
...The nuclear weapon is simply not a rational means of political pressure or The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1976 11 action...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...There is no more justi - fication for the Soviet control of half of Europe...
...I do not think that our political system is adequate to the needs of the age into which we are now moving...
...It is an appalling regression...
...You are deeply revolted by every form of ugliness, bad taste, and (my linkage is deliberate) disrespect of tradition...
...This is childish...
...Their vices may be different but that makes them no less reprehensible...
...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...
...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...
...We are not departing from Marxism, and we are not joining the enemy...
...You are "totally caught.., totally helpless.., in black despair.., horrified ...lonely...extremely lonely...afflicted by loneliness...profoundly depressed...vulnerable...
...But Western Europe has, since the War, leaned on us more heavily than is good for Western Europe itself...
...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...
...But I have no such feeling for the fragmented and dispersed urban sprawls of the United States of the 1970s...
...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...
...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 don't take this to be a great black mark against America, or a sign of the inferiority of American society...
...George Washington himself was a case in point...
...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...
...We greatly exaggerate the hazards of doing so...
...For the mass of people there, life is not intolerable...
...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...
...The party may hold together, younger men may be brought in without friction or upheavals, and so on...
...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...
...Are you advocating unilateral nuclear disarmament...
...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 cuts both ways...
...You also tell us that "For years, Gibbon's dictum 'Under a democratic government the citizens exercise the powers of sovereignty...
...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...
...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...
...Kennan: Of course not...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...You have just asked: how would the West react_ i f some of the East European countries tried to liberate themselves from Russian hegemony...
...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...
...It was clear to me that, so long as the Russians entertained such ideas, we had no hope of dealing with them" effectively...
...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...
...Of course, nothing at all may happen...
...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...
...don't think men were meant to live in such monstrous accumulations...
...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...
...George F. Kennan has had a distinguished career as diplomat and historian...
...Look at what the Rumanians have accomplished...
...the same is true in Hungary...
...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...
...Kennan: The whole concept of Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe is unsound even from the Russian point of view...
...Our national experience was never shared by any country and will never be shared by any country in the future...
...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...
...One of the dominant elements in your intellectual temper seems to me to be aesthetic...
...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...
...Wouldn't it, above all, deliver Western Europe to the Soviet Union ? Kennan: We should not cut our commitments to Western Europe abruptly...
...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...
...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 wonder whether there is room for this kind of sentiment in the hard world of international competition...
...To take it into NATO would be to make a military demonstration against Moscow, which Moscow can't accept...
...It may be there are dangers for the Angolans...
...Moscow's tactical permissiveness in Eastern Europe can go quite far...
...they were part of their time, they shared its scientific optimism, and they could not foresee the consequences of what they were doing...
...And what is one to think of the failure of the Berlin Senate to prevent the destruction of the Free University...
...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...
...It simply does not recognize the main problem in the lives of ordinary people...
...So long as the system is not frontally provoked...
...So I don't think they will capitalize in the near future on the disturbing state of Western Europe...
...But from the ecological catastrophe that looms in front of us there is no recovery...
...With the exception of Eritrea, the Russians have had nothing but serious reversals in their African policies...
...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...
...you raise "anguished objections...
...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...
...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...
...Let me say a word at this juncture about the intellectual background of the growing respectability of West European Communism...
...no great government behaves in that way, and the Russians are not going to...
...that there is bereavement...
...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: 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...
...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...
...And I am fairly sure that the nuclear weapon, the possibilities and impossibilities of which everyone misunderstood except Stalin, encouraged this line of thinking...
...He entered the United States Foreign Service in 1926, andin 1952 was appointedAmbassador to the USSR...
...it leaves the way open for further developments...
...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...
...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...
...Hungary seems to be a borderline case...
...I do not mean to reproach our forefathers...
...the degradation of taste...
...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 I think it is fair to say that you were, by temperament, a "resigner...
...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...
...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...
...But if that is so, "Finlandization," if it ever comes, will be a self-inflicted wound...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...The same thing is true oFthe German student disorders which still remain a serious matter in a number of universities...
...I now see all these assumptions crashing to pieces around us...
...Kennan: This is a deeply personal matter and almost one of religious conviction...
...It may or it may not...
...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...
...That it hasn't the military muscle which it ought to have is entirely due to a lack of political will...
...In any case, the external dangers are (you argue)probably imaginary, whereas the internal ones are real...
...Such indeed is their lack of sophistication that they have great difficulty in controlling even those parts of Europe which are under their hegemony...
...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...
...I am equally amazed by the inability of Denmark and Holland to put an end to the pornographic invasion that has overcome them...
...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...
...The ideological approach of the Soviet Union is at least 70-80 years out of date and has very small appeal anywhere...
...Washington was obsessed by the idea that the Cold War had to be thought of in exclusively military terms...
...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...
...and you are overcome by a sense "of the enormity of responsibility and of our inadequacy to it...
...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...
...There will not be one penny of American money, not a single American rifle sent to Africa...
...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...
...George Urban: I am struck by a cluster of broadly synonymous words which occur in your Memoirs with remarkable frequency...
...Take the French Communist Party...
...the disarray and uncertainty all over the Iberian Peninsula...
...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...
...The disarray in Western Europe is bound to unleash disarray in Eastern Europe...
...The decline of the West is not a fully accomplished fact, nor is our stumbling into this great physical catastrophe final...
...Clearly, you did not suffer fools gladly, especially those set above you in the bierarohy...
...This, we felt, was a danger of great seriousness which we had to combat...
...It is top-heavyand cannot be used for gaining political advantage except against people who, as Stalin said, have weak nerves...
...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...
...but the Marxist outlook does not...
...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...
...As (Aron said) the division o f Europe was absolutely dearcut and the absurdities were well respected, the division was acceptable...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...You have only to look at New York which was a great and most enjoyable city sixty years ago...
...But as soon as it is thought that the system itself is challenged, Moscow clamps down with great severity...
...Can the system be reformed with this end in mind...
...That they are desperately in need of a small number of simple certainties...
...We talk of saving Western civilization when we talk of a military confrontation with Russia--but, saving it for what...
...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...
...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...
...First, I did not think such an attempt would be successful...
...Excerpted with permission from Encounter...
...but that is no longer so...
...After all, people do live in the Soviet Union...
...We have been a form of escape for our European allies...
...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...
...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...
...We should come out firmly and frankly in the United Nations and say: "We are prepared to have nothing to do with this area...
...When I say that, I am thinking of certain well-known facts: that there are such things in life as accidents and tragic illnesses...
...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...
...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...
...His numerous works on history and foreign policy include The Realities of American Foreign Policy and American Diplomacy 1900-1950...
...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...
...I do not think that the United States civilization of these last 40-50 years is a successful civilization...
...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...
...Copyright Encounter 12 The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1976...
...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...
...I find this quite appalling...
...but let us at least walk like men, with our heads up, so long as we are permitted to walk at all...
...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...
...I find your trust in the power of example most appealing, for it assumes the basic goodness and rationality of man...
...I am deeply distressed that the United States government takes no helpful action along these lines...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...It is of the most profound importance that the proliferation of nuclear weapons be halted...
...Please understand that, for purposes of argument, I am given to overstating a case...
...And yet, here you have a great section of German, and French, and Italian student youth violently exercised in its favor...
...the conflict between Greeks and Turks...
...George Urban is a journalist and wm'ter on contemporary history, who lives in England...
...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...
...I do not like the word "isolationism" because it has connotations that are too extreme...
...This is what gives me a great sense of sadness...
...I don't believe in the ability of the Russians to control Western Europe...
...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...
...that people get old, that their power fails, that they have not accomplished what they would, and so on...
...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...
...If they could be induced to behave differently, we would have a breathing space...
...and, second, even if it were successful, I did not think we had an alternative to offer...
...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...
...The challenges are brutal and ubiquitous, the responses pitifully feeble or nonexistent...
...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...
...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...
...there is an even greater question which people very seldom ask themselves...
...We are all animals in part, and it does us good to be reminded of our affinity with growing things and the animal kingdom...
...The Yugoslavs have liberated themselves...
...But speaking for myself, I cannot help but long for that kind of life...
...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...
...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...
...But in the West, both in the traditions of Christianity and Judaism, we have been brought up to feel indi;eidual responsibility...
...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...
...and they express your loneliness and helplessness in the face of so much, as you see it, avoidable evil...
...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...
...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...
...One has also to take into account the state of Italy which is almost incapable of governing itself...
...It is pozsible that some parts of humanity may survive it...
...The Christian religion, whether one believes in it or not, had an answer to these problems of human exhaustion and failure...
...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...
...They follow in many ways, though not in all ways, a highly independent line...
...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...
...But as things are, I can see very little merit in organizing ourselves to defend from the Russians the porno-shops in central Washington...
...you feel "tossed" into some "impossible position between two worlds...
...They are too crude and clumsy for any such exploits...
...His most recent book is Detente...
...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...
...The great cities impress their characteristics through television and the motor car...
...He spent the years 1953-61 at the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, and from 1961-63 was Ambassador to Yugoslavia...
...The second of these two, if allowed to develop, may be final--there can be no real recovery from it...
...But this awareness has not helped us very much--rather has it added to our problems...
...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...
...The differences exist and they are important...
...They spill out like some great, slowmoving flow of molasses all over the countryside and change its nature...
...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...
...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...
...the urbanization of agrarian societies...
...The naivety of Marxism-Leninism, and its irrelevance to contemporary conditions, have been so amply demonstrated at every turn...
...My main reason for advocating a gradual and qualified withdrawal from far-flung foreign involvements is that we have nothing to teach the world...
...Doesn't this show that intellectuals are no better, even i f they are perhaps no worse, than other mortals...
...and I think the Russians are well aware of this...
...The effort to enlighten the United States was almost more successful than I had supposed...
...It is a fearfully polluting environment...
...V/estern Europe, which is decadent and sunk in s e l f seeking materialism, is hardly worth defending...
...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...
...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...
...Kennan: The Russians are not in a good position to take advantage of our great weaknesses today...
...The United States is no longer there as a great imperialistic power...
...In terms of population and industrial potential, Western Europe is at least fully equal to the Soviets...
...In the East, the appeal of Communism as an ideology is utterly exhausted...
...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...
...They just would not know how...
...and this is its great weakness...
...I notice that Dr...
...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...
...It is absent from the Chinese-Confucian concept of religiosity where there is no sin, only indiscretion or impracticability...
...It is not what these people would like...
...This could be very important...
...and, personally, I find them difficult not to go along with...
...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...
...Noted diplomat and historian George F. Kennan discourses on Western civilization, its underpinnings, its situation today, its future...
...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...
...and the shallowness, and ultimately the disappearance, of religion as a public experience...
...I saw no hope in it, and I did not believe that we should take part in any effort to overthrow the Soviet regime...
...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...
...the mere sewage that flows from our great cities is becoming a world problem...
...Secondly, that Western society will, in the short run, not change significantly enough to introduce a fundamentally new element into the EastWest relationship...
...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...
...and even today, I can find very little to fault in them...
...But let me remind you that Western Europe's troubles are not only of a moral and cultural character...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...The CIA will leave it totally alone on the assumption that the Soviet Union will do likewise...
...Kennan: I don't trust human beings to live successfully too far away from nature...
...One reason was the impossible situation of Berlin...
...Soviet-American relations could not be dealt with by those easy and really childish methods which commended themselves to FDR...
...Of course, there may be reasons for desiring a greater measure of dirigisme in public affairs in the Western countries...
...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 place was swarming with hippies--motorbikes, girl-friends, drugs, pornography, drunkenness, noise--it was all there...
...Cold Warrior or Revisionist Historian ? -- You have not quite satisfied my curiosit2...
...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...
...All this, of course, is not an easy thing to live with...
...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...
...ls it, on current showing, likely to be so reformed...
...Kissinger, speaking with the voice of Helmut Sonnenfeldt, appears to have more complex thoughts about the division of Europe...
...We saw this in 1956 and 1968...
...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...
...What are we going to do the next time there is trouble...
...Kennan: I can see no way in which the system can be reformed...
...You have a "foreknowledge of disaster...
...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...
...Otherwise we are going to face irrevocable disaster...
...All this wealth and space presented possibilities in America which have made the American outlook unique, and therefore inapplicable to any other society...
...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...
...Europe is no longer in a state of militant confrontation...
...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...
...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...
...that the people we love don't die at the same time we do and vice versa...
...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...
...They all have to do with yourpersonal anguish at seeing the world, and especially the contemporary world, governed by myopia, ignorance, and folly...
...Can America Continue as a World Super-Power...
...A reasonably close contact with nature seems to me one of the great sources of psychic health...
...I would not want you to think that the incongruity which you notice stems from some perverse obstructionism, or one-upmanship, on my part...
...today it is unfit for civilized living...
...Whether, of course, the license could be revoked is another matter...
...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...
...They have troubles of their own, enough to keep their attention riveted on other things (I need not rehearse what they are...
...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...
...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...
...What is the political context in which you would visualize such a liberation ? Kennan: Look at what has already happened in Eastern Europe...
...Do these factors tell us the whole story ? Kennan: No, they don't...
...I think this country is destined to succumb to failures which cannot be other than tragic and enormous in their scope...
...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...
...This is a rebellion against Western Europe--it is not one in favor of anything much else...
...Kennan: We are talking about the disintegration of both militant faiths and strong ideological beliefs...
...Some people would deny that and say: "The country people are just as crazy as anyone...
...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...
...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...
...By the same token, I don't believe in the ability of the United States to control any great part of the world...
...Nobody but the Angolans will make anything out of Angola--least of all the Russians with their multiple handicaps, especially in an African setting...
...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...
...Not only that, but we don't know what the future may bring...
...but I would say that such a country ought to follow a policy of minding its own business to the extent that it can...
...Don't you think this kind of attitude would leave the world wide open to Soviet territorial and political expansionism...
...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...
...But these are not my only reasons for opposing the division of Europe...
...it)---to emerge where everything from commercial to cultural life gathered in the vicinity of one or two natural points of arrival and departure...
...I was appalled by all this...
...In case of a full-scale war, complete victory was all but impossible, whether nuclear weapons did or did not exist...
...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...
...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...
...It u~ired peoplv" around the railheads: causing the>e :mtonishi,}gly creative: c, ocen~rations---the I91h-centur...
...I am not an urban person, and ! don't trust the great urban environment, especially of the contemporary sort...
...We are, then, talking of the clash of two secularisms, each groping for a new guiding principle...
...overrun by the enemy...
...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...
...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...
...Most of Western Europe is socialist...
...There is in America hardly any countryside left in the social sense...
...Of course, it wasn't at all, and I don't think I need go into arguing why...
...They cater to what is basest in the American electorate...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...So it is up to us to grasp the nettle and tell the world that we are willing to leave such territories alone...
...To do so would be a new offense in its own right...
...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...
...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...
...We are faced with two conceivable versions of catastrophe...
...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...
...But let me assume two things...
...And on nuclear competition you said: Let us divest ourselves of this weapon altogether...
...This does not, of course, mean to say that there should have been no technological improvements in the early 19th century...
...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...
...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...
...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 is, for example, no reason that I can see why Western Europe should not put up a respectable conventional force of its own...
...This betrays a terrible lack of self-confidence and a total confusion of values...
...Today, the Rumanians have a certain license because their dissent is limited to foreign policy...
...His outlook is one of pessimistic optimism...
...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...
...The railway by its very nature tee, ded to exercise a discipline on human habitation...
...Can one think of anything more miserable than the regime in Albania...
...This is not to be taken for granted...
...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...
...In many ways your structures of the big city have been in line with the thinking of traditional American anti-urbanism...
...One is a possible, but by no means certain, catastrophe in case we should militarily clash with the Russians...
...But you must realize that at the back of this whole great question of military competition...
...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...
...the despoliation of nature...
...Western Europe has lost a sense of the fitness of things, and that is the meaning of decadence...
...therefore I don't want to see us put in a position of taking responsibility for the affairs of people we do not comprehend...
...You are a man of great goodwill and, at heart, an optimist, though a pessimistic optimist...
...There is something to that, too...
...The net effect of what you are saying is: the United States is congenitally incapable of performing a consistently sustained world role...
...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...
...There, under protestations of external and internal orthodoxy, a good deal of economic and cultural liberalism is tolerated...
Vol. 10 • November 1976 • No. 2
