The Cloud of Danger, by George F. Kennan
Kristol, William
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "The Cloud of Danger, by George F. Kennan" Stail as a monster of ego drive with a mind more like a battering ram than a rapier. It wasn't the compliment Douglas seems to think it was. Ironically, she ends up doing less than justice to the...
...Whatever choice one would have to make in that case, it is not evident that we are forced to such a choice...
...We publish material that could be published in no other journal in the country, and we get away with this not only because we are so thoroughly relaxed about opinions at variance with our own, but also because of the singular quality of our readers...
...Kennan does not openly reject that understanding here...
...Instead he presents us with a simple choice: "one road leading to a total militarization of policy and an ultimate showdown on the basis of armed strength, the other to an effort to break out of the strait jacket of military rivalry and to strike through to a more constructive and hopeful vision of America's future and the world's...
...So deep does Kennan bow before this necessity, so convinced is he that nuclear weaponry is out of control, so much does he wish that the "cloud of danger" could be "dissipated," that he succumbs to simple wishful thinking about "the limitations of great-power imperialism" in our age and about the intentions of the Soviet Union, to say nothing of the possible benefits of the SALT negotiations...
...But "extremely slender support" is not no support...
...Kennan finds it "difficult to say how strongly [he] disapprove[s]" of suggestions that we "make use of the Chinese as an instrument for the advancement of our interests vis-a-vis Russia...
...Kennan apparently does not find such an attitude or policy on our part towards Eastern Europe "shameful...
...Every tin-pot dominion on earth is arming to the teeth and casting a greedy eye on its neighbor's jewelry...
...Kennan is also appalled at the United States' failure "to manifest some sense of its own dignity" in dealing with Third World countries, at our humiliating supplications to Third World dictators for goodwill and forgiveness...
...We offer no nostrums and preach no platitudes...
...We share an overriding interest in stability: The Soviets do not particularly want Eurocommunists to come to power in Western Europe, we do not want liberal democrats to come to power in Eastern Europe...
...And so it is today...
...It is not fearful...
...Manor The Irrationality of Separatism Peregrine Worsthorne In Defense of Class Christmas Book Recommendations that he is not a simple proponent of American self-abasement...
...Kennan refuses to consider to what extent that stability depends on our presence, or on our willingness to step in...
...The general argument of those whom Kennan hopes to discredit is of course not that the Soviet Union seeks war or that war is inevitable, but rather that the Soviets believe, not unreasonably, that superior military strength would help them to achieve their objectives without being challenged militarily...
...Kennan's 1947 understanding of the Soviet leaders—that they will take what they can get, and what they will try to take will in large measure depend on what we allow them to think they can get—has more or less governed American foreign policy for three decades...
...They, too, have The American Spectator November 1.977 43 committed themselves to the present line of division...
...Now, ladies and gentlemen, if you will excuse me, I need another drink...
...Almost all of them come from other magazines, manifest an impatience with yesterday's orthodoxy, and, it is my belief, constitute a new and rising force in the Republic...
...And we have a "commitment not to the Israelis but to ourselves" to see that this does not happen to Israel...
...Every month their numbers increase...
...We have an audience unlike any in the country...
...Carrying his assumption of parallelism in the positions of the West and the Soviet Union further, Kennan asserts: As things now stand, one must suppose that if any of the Eastern European countries was suddenly to emancipate itself from the Soviet tutelage and to require a new place be found for it in the European scheme of things, the Western NATO powers would be no less appalled by such a development than the leaders of the Soviet Union...
...Indubitably, we shall have our pratfalls, but the gluteus maximus is sufficient to the peril...
...In reading Kennan's book, I was convinced by his repeated assurances that war is not the Soviet Union's "favored means of achieving such of their objectives as seem to be in conflict with those of the United States...
...Kennan never explains his reasons for this single categorical reservation...
...The Soviet leaders are far more concerned with "security" than 42 The American Spectator November 1977 "expansion...
...Kennan does not draw the obvious conclusion from this: The primacy of "defensive considerations" in Soviet foreign policy, to the extent such considerations have been primary, has been due in large measure to our ability and readiness to make offensive considerations unattractive to the Soviets...
...Should we be willing to fight only for our "vital" interests...
...Kennan writes as if no one has ever made an argument such as the following: [The Soviet Union's) political action is a fluid stream which moves constantly, wherever it is permitted to move, toward a given goal...
...Kennan is, I believe, one of those who has chided American politicians for being obsessed with Munich and for reading the alleged lessons of Munich into foreign-policy situations of the past two decades...
...If our hardliners were to prevail, they would encourage "competitive military preparations," since they "see some sort of a military showdown as inevitable...
...Kennan nowhere considers the possibility that one's sense of security sometimes can be increased by expansion, or that an "unsettling" internal situation can be improved by foreign policy successes...
...Kennan, by contrast, supports "more positive ways" of improving our relationship with the Soviet Union, an improvement necessary "if the catastrophe we all fear is to be averted and if the great constructive possibilities of the Soviet-American relationship are ultimately to be realized...
...Its main concern is to make sure it has filled every nook and cranny available to it in the basin of world power...
...These past four thousand years of war, tyranny, thuggery, and generalized unpleasantness are not interpreted by us as evidence of impending Utopia, despite the views to the contrary earnestly expressedby so many other intellectual reviews...
...From our correspondence, readers' surveys, and the nature of the responses we get from promotion mailings we do to very diverse mailing lists, we have learned a good deal about our readers...
...The American hardliners whose influence Kennan fears believe, according to Kennan, that the Soviets want to "unleash a new world war" or a "major war," or believe at least that "an ultimate showdown on the basis of armed strength" is inevitable...
...Their hope for modest improvement is informed by an apparently invincible grasp on reality...
...Kennan sees the years before World War I as the model for our present situation, with the U.S...
...Ironically, she ends up doing less than justice to the richness of Margaret Fuller'sconsciousness by giving so little evidence of understanding Fuller's feminine yearnings and fulfillments...
...But he does deplore "the madness of universal involvement" of the postwar period, as well as "the extreme militarization of thinking about the Cold War" that followed Korea...
...What is more, it is an amazingly self-confident audience...
...We'd like to believe a woman who can do what Ann Douglas has done in this book can see it all...
...This book is intended to refute those politicians and analysts who give excessive weight to military considerations...
...this was "an inexplicable failure of statesmanship," it "defies comprehension...
...and the USSR as two "superpowers," fundamentally more alike than different...
...Kennan's attempt at exorcism is unlike that of many others in Corning Next Issue: Elliott Abrams Nixon's "Agency of Fear" F.S...
...It's too bad...
...This unfair and unintelligent caricature of his opponents' views suggests the extent to which Kennan's civility of manner and care in argument, evident where he deals with issues other than defense and Soviet-American relations, fade away as he turns to the "cloud of danger" of nuclear weapons and the "catastrophe we all fear" of a showdown between the U.S...
...they are more concerned with internal problems than external ones...
...Kennan callsrepeatedly in this book as elsewhere for a heightened appreciation by American statesmen of the limits to what we can accomplish in the world...
...he does not say that one of those perceptions is more honest or correct than the other...
...We apparently need not be willing and prepared to fight even for our vital interests, at least not against the Soviet Union...
...in the role of Imperial Germany...
...Though the theory of containment may have had its limitations, and the practice its difficulties, reading this book made me almost nostalgic for a statement like this one, from Kennan's 1947 article: [T]he Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the Western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and maneuvers of Soviet policy, but which cannot be charmed and talked out of existence...
...To edit a magazine is to be favored by the spirits of the upper atmosphere...
...A specter haunts American liberalism—the specter of military intervention...
...and the USSR...
...All this notwithstanding, there is an enormous pleasure to be derived from pondering the present and commenting on the ongoing atrocities...
...For "above all, the needs of national defense must not be presented to the American public in such a way as to suggest that a military outcome of our differences with the Russians is the most likely one, and military considerations are overriding in Soviet-American relations...
...Though Kennan laments that the character of our politics and the structure of our government make subtle diplomacy impossible and make our foreign policy too susceptible to the pressures of ethnic groups, he sees no real foreign policy implications from the Soviet Union's form of government...
...In fact it seems that our hardliners are more of a threat to peace than is the Soviet Union...
...Kennan is vague about these possibilities...
...According to Kennan, even "the traditional Russian tendency to border expansion" is not particularly to be feared...
...It knows its own prejudices and is agreeable to scrutinizing the prejudices of others...
...Kennan's book is written as if we did not have the last three decades as evidence that the possession of nuclear weapons need not lead to their use, that the "arms race" need not careen out of control, that taking "military considerations" into account need not lead to war...
...Indeed, the very thought of any sort of removal of the division of Europe is "abhorrent" to the West...
...This is simply false...
...Our readers share that belief...
...One can say whatever one believes serviceable at the moment, and that kind of freedom is unsurpassingly exhilarating...
...Because both sides realize or should realize this, "military considerations" are not or need not be "overriding" in Soviet-American relations...
...not require a reasonable willingness to commit armed forces if necessary to honor our commitments to ourselves...
...ON TEN YEARS OF PUBLIC SERVICE (continued from page 4) censorship so profound that editors do not realize they practice it...
...The civil-rights movement, once so admirable and auspicious, has degenerated into a vulgar con job...
...Kennan acknowledges that "the decision to intervene in Korea was a sound one...
...This is fortunate...
...The ignoramus has become a culture hero...
...Heterogeneity does not discomfit it...
...But the central one presumably coincides with "the main task of American statesmanship with relation to Russia," which is "to reduce the danger posed for both countries and for the world by the present military rivalry...
...Does Kennan find all of this "inexplicable" because he fails to draw any connection between a sense of dignity or self-respect and a willingness to stand up for oneself, which includes the willingness to consider "military considerations" ? According to Kennan, "probably the most important problem of international life in this epoch" is "bringing nuclear weaponry under control...
...Our opinion molders are bereft of any sensible understanding of sentimentand have lost all confidence in reason...
...Yet this commitment to ourselves can never demand "direct Military involvement...
...Though he cites Russia's need to keep troops on the China border as one factor proving Western fears of Soviet aggression in Europe to be mere "alarmist fantasies," Kennan says that "only from the most simplistic and militaristic of views (only from a view that sees war between the Soviet Union and the United States as virtually inevitable)" can it be argued that "the Chinese-Soviet conflict has benefitted the West in its conflict with the Soviet Union...
...This could well lead to war: Bismarck, in the final years of his active life, had to contend with just this problem in the tendency of the German military leaders, and many senior political officials in his country, to regard a German-Russian war as inevitable just because the elaborate preparations of the military establishments on both sides of the line made it appear so...
...Liberalism is the grease paint of the moral buffoon, and conservatism has yet to prove itself compelling...
...If I am not mistaken, neither the word nor the concept of "containment" appears in Kennan's new book...
...Kennan emphasizes, like Warnke, that the U.S...
...Kennan asserts time and again that a concern for "military considerations" is inseparable from, and tantamount to, a conviction that war is inevitable...
...Kennan's desperate wish to avert the need for military considerations in American foreign policy leads him to an extraordinary and obdurate refusal to take into account the implications for foreign policy of the differences between the Soviet and American regimes...
...As for the Chinese, the other check on the Soviets in Asia, we are not to do anything to help see to it that they remain a check...
...The main thing is that there should always be pressure, increasing constant pressure, toward the desired goal...
...Kennan's discussion of defense and military issues in this book on "Current Realities of American Foreign Policy" is carried on in the hushed tones that parents once used when discussing family scandals in front of the children...
...Perhaps the explanation lies in his decision that Israel, though a "serious" interest for us, is not a "vital" one...
...As for Kennan's assurance that those objectives do not "seem to be of such a nature as to challenge any vital interest of ours," I remember that according to Kennan, Israel is not a "vital" interest, and I came to wonder how long we will continue to have the spirit to acknowledge any vital interests beyond self-preservation...
...Simply put, it is at home in the free society...
...Readers wonder if the satirist is exaggerating or if his proffered absurdity represents conditions as they have evolved...
...But today "circumstances are quite different," the area is stable, and Kennan thinks that on balance we are not needed anymore...
...Our readers approve...
...Further, I believe that it is because of this stuffiness that The Alternative has been able to acquire a reputation for vigor...
...Yet he asks of American statesmen that they reduce the danger not only to America, or even to the world, but to the Soviet Union as well...
...Indeed, Kennan tells us, "the belief that stronger powers dominate over weaker ones and dictate terms to them simply by the possession of superior military force, or by demands placed under threat of the use of such force, has extremely slender support in historical experience...
...There is no political or ideological difference between the Soviet Union and the United States—nothing which either side would like, or would hope, to achieve at the expense of the other—that would be worth the risks and sacrifices of a military encounter...
...In Asia, for example, "the stalemate in Korea (after 1952) and the anxious vigilance of the Chinese made further expansion impossible except at the risk of a major war...
...The so-called women's liberation movement is a mere pretense for self-absorption and almost limitless mischief...
...each time Kennan is careful to add "the single reservation that it should not involve the dispatch and commitment of American armed forces...
...But surely replacing Munich as a guide by the even less analogous circumstances of world politics preceding Sarajevo is not going to help "to get our thinking straight...
...In the years ahead The American Spectator can only improve, for the louts in charge of the national enterprise have assured us that things will only get worse...
...And Kennan now stresses the importance of "defensive considerations" for the Soviet Union...
...In the years ahead we shall all have much to amuse us...
...Apart from the magnitude of this task, and admitting that it is sometimes in America's interests to reduce dangers to the Soviet Union, one cannot but be struck by how wonderfully impartial a prescription this is for American statesmen: They need not put America's interest ahead of the world's or even the Soviet Union's, for the interests of all three fundamentally, and conveniently, coincide...
...Thus, Kennan "stands stupefied at the frivolity and irresponsibility reflected" in our response —"or lack of response"—to the Arab oil embargo and price rise...
...Better writers arc appearing all the time...
...Paul Warnke reflected this view perfectly in his famous "Apes on a Treadmill" essay, an essay which helped Warnke secure employment from the only one of the two nations too sophisticated to be insulted by being called an ape...
...44 The American Spectator November 1977...
...Kennan's confidence in the predominance of "defensive considerations" in Soviet foreign policy allows him to be harsh on those who endorse such negative policies as playing China off against the Soviet Union, as well as on those who would prefer that we rely on our own arms rather than on Soviet defensiveness...
...by his belief that to be prepared for war is inevitably to invite it, which is why he imputes a belief that war is inevitable to those concerned with "military considerations" today...
...he ignores it, presumably to avoid having to confront it...
...Kennan knows that peoples can be "destroyed, enslaved, or driven into the sea by hostile" and presumably stronger neighbors...
...There is no political or ideological difference between the Soviet Union and the United States—nothing which either side would like, or would hope, to achieve at the expense of the other—that would be worth the risks and sacrifices of a military encounter...
...These are of course Kennan's words, from his famous analris of Soviet conduct published in 1947 in Foreign Affairs...
...A "reasonable sense of national dignity," for which Kennan appeals, does William Kristol is a graduate student in government at Harvard...
...Since the concept is not allowed to appear, one cannot say that Kennan explicitly disavows containment...
...Better targets are a certitude...
...They seem to appreciate the freedoms we have and the values that have sustained us...
...For if honoring our commitments required us to consider fighting for them, we should have to take military matters seriously, and this unseemly attention to "military considerations" would "run a strong risk" of causing the very war that we should be concerned to avoid...
...Democracy is making heavy weather of it all over the world, and even in Western Europe the gloomier political gospels are being heard again...
...The Soviet Union and the United States are therefore to be understood as mirror images of each other in international relations, neither more threatening than the other...
...As he has it, the hardliners believe incorrectly that the Soviet Union maniacally wants war, while he understands correctly that the "weight of defensive considerations in the total pattern of Soviet strategic-political thought" is overwhelming...
...All the powers of the foreign policy establishment have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter...
...During such times satire grows problematic...
...It is our promise to our readers that The American Spectator will continue to inform them of the true proportions of every issue and of the absurdity of every national messiah...
...Some magazines only exist to dispense the sacraments of their quack ideologies...
...Similarly, Douglas' failure to say anything about the central strain of homosexuality in Melville's personality and writing suggests serious blind spots about the way masculinity and femininity really manifest themselves in history...
...BOOK REVIEW The Cloud of Danger: Current Realities of American Foreign Policy George F. Kennan / Little, Brown / $8.95 William Kristol Three times in The Cloud of Danger George Kennan reminds us that the United States has "a commitment to do all in our power...to assure that Israel continues to exist...
...may seem as threatening to the Soviets as they do to us...
...But the distinction between "serious" and "vital" interests may not be crucial...
...Kennan is led to this odd analogy between the United States and Imperial Germany—Scoop Jackson as Kaiser Wilhelm...
...In this Kennan follows political scientists who treat the U.S...
...In vain, he pleaded with people to understand that Germany had no objectives with regard to Russia that were worth the sacrifices of a war—that war would bring disaster to both parties—such disaster that at the end of it people would no longer even remember the relatively trivial bones of contention out of which it had arisen...
...Few respect the fragility of our prosperity and our liberty...
...That is my money-back guarantee and my aspiration...
...The management will continue to make improvements...
...According to Kennan, the interests of the West and of the Soviet Union are parallel and complementary...
...But I came increasingly to wonder whether the Soviet Union would have to fight a war in order to achieve its objectives...
...Kerman writes as if the only choice we have in foreign policy is one between him and, say, Curtis LeMay...
...At home greed has become an approved motive for all sorts of political artifice...
...But if it finds unassailable barriers in its path, it accepts them philosophically and accomodates itself to them...
...This view is never alluded to by Kennan...
...All this makes them a congenial group to write for, but their tolerance for diverse ideas and their appetite for serious thought make them special...
...It is "shameful" that the United States "has shown itself incapable of any reaction beyond a pained and helpless wringing of the hands...
Vol. 11 • November 1977 • No. 1
