Containment's Comeback

...Though it briefly went out of rhetorical fashion when Eisenhower and Dulles "unleashed Chiang Kai-shek" and encouraged "liberation" in Eastern Europe, containment remained the basis of their diplomacy...

...To these questions, alas, he did not speak...

...Like the Church," George Kennan wrote in 1947, "[the Kremlin) is dealing in ideological concepts which are of long-term validity, and it can afford to be patient...

...A dominant impression was the spectacle of admiring acolytes more committed to containment than the Old Master himself and hardly as softskulled as many on the right believe...

...It is also customary at such gatherings to follow the Old Lions with a few yelping cubs, who pounce on their elders with varying degrees of seriousness...

...If one considers the alternatives, it has been a success, not a "brilliant success" perhaps, but about the best that could be expected given the history of the last forty years...

...It is clear from John Lewis Gaddis's careful reconstruction of Kennan's thinking that he envisioned containment primarily as a diplomatic and economic program, but his language, however much he might attempt to ex-plain it away in later years, clearly implied more...

...Or, as a Czechoslovakian commentator once blurted out, ecological decay would be nonexistent were it not for "non-socialist individuals still surviving in the country...

...Participants included scholars and intellectuals from around the country, numerous military officers in staff positions or in training at the NDU, and several second-level Administration officials...

...Eisenhower and Dulles, after all, backed away from that game nearly thirty years ago...

...What one does discern are leaders steeped in a secular philosophy of human nature and the historical process...

...but the most venerable of them all, still wonderfully articulate at 81, was George Kennan himself...

...In the six-ties, he gave succor to the anti-Vietnam movement by advocating a curious, almost certainly unworkable "enclave" strategy...

...It will risk no backlash from its own population and will receive little rebuke from a world that simply assumes the Soviet Union will conduct itself in that fashion...

...One heard the phrase "brilliant success" on two or three occasions...

...Called back to the United States shortly afterwards, Kennan made himself the nation's foremost foreign policy thinker, and in 1947 won wide public recognition with probably the most influential article ever run by Foreign Affairs magazine, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct...

...Why had the times changed so much...

...It is by now evident that rational Marxian planning is no better equipped than anarchic capitalism to cope with the complex array of environmental problems which inevitably follow in the wake of industrialization...

...The way Kennan stated the Soviet problem bore the marks of two grim years in Moscow...

...Containment again reigns supreme under Reagan as the fundamental principle of American foreign policy...

...Inadvertently, he reminded his audience of the way containment has facilitated special pleading from combatants in regional disputes...

...In the seventies and eighties, Kennan, like so many contemporary intellectuals, has displayed an obsession with nuclear weapons that seems oddly out of proportion to the tiny possibility of a general Soviet-American war...

...The first purpose of military power, after all, is to awe and to intimidate, "to Finlandize...

...Is containment actually a "brilliant success" because the West has demonstrated its economic superiority...

...If Communist regimes were to publish ac-curate statistics for foul air and polluted water (most do not), they would discover that in this one area Marxism has caught up with and even surpassed the democratic world...

...Persuaded that the USSR was expansionist, but not recklessly adventurist, Kennan advocated "a policy of firm containment, designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counter-force at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world...

...What then was the thinking of the pilgrims from the academy...

...As for the in-escapable existence of pollution in the Soviet bloc: "In a society with public ownership of the means of production, environmental disruption will in-variably be accidental...

...Granted that the USSR, like all nations, moves to protect its perceived vital interests, and that like traditional nations it feels an impulse to expand into areas adjacent to its imperial boundaries...

...Norman Podhoretz, and Professor Rashid Khalidi...

...Afghanistan also raised the question of Soviet military power...

...Recalling the atmosphere of 1946, Kennan described to a worshipful audience how World War II had left all of Europe vulnerable to internal, pro-Soviet Communist movements...

...18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1986...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1986 17 d etre...

...The audience, perhaps mindful of the degree of stability in Lebanon or along the Iran-Iraq frontier, appeared skeptical...

...Unlike the Kennan of those years, however, he urged a "Wilsonian crusade" against Soviet power...

...Neither economic example nor ideological' at-traction, for example, had much to do with the Soviet campaign to keep American missiles out of Western Europe...

...Most of the academics, however, appeared to lean toward the second option, partly because it represented the sort of thinking with which they are most comfortable, partly because it would hold out hope for a settlement of the Cold War...

...Marxism-Leninism gives Soviet leaders the lenses through which they view the world, and provides the logic and rhetoric with which they explain it...

...Alonzo L. Hamby teaches history at Ohio University...

...Its imminent death seems as unlikely as the renunciation of Immaculate Conception by the Vatican...

...Assorted Third World dictators, one participant told me, were more interested in justifying authoritarian rule than in workable plans for economic development...

...Beyond that, he discerned other problems at least as serious as those presented by the Soviet Union: chaos in South Africa, Moslem fundamentalism and terrorism, "the world environmental crisis," the general failure of the American people to make their government work, our tendency "to live beyond our means," illegal immigration...

...It was scarcely concealed nu-clear blackmail—and it almost worked...

...Wallop emphasized the alleged sins of Democratic Presidents, conveniently omitting Republican contributors from Harding to Reagan...

...It assumed that the USSR until very recently had been so weak that its power could have been rolled back and its system destroyed by index-finger pressure—gain without pain...

...A cranky participant questioned the characterization of Afghanistan as the Soviet Vietnam...

...But isn't it equally possible that the Soviet commissars, blessed with extensive control over the expectations of their people, will muddle along in their present rut...

...Typically, Soviet ideologists blamed "anarchy and uncontrolled development in the capitalist world, the pursuit of profit, the legacy of colonialism" as the overriding causes of ecological problems throughout the world...

...Is there nothing left to be contained...

...Originally formulated to save Western Europe, containment has enjoyed at best mixed success in the non-European world...

...foreign policy should have focused single-mindedly on Soviet power from 1917 on, never mind such diversions as World Wars I and II...

...If the ecological crisis originates in the capitalist world," Soviet philosopher I. T. Frolov posited, "then it is necessary to rebuild substantially the capitalist system in order to remove the ecological threat...

...Robert A. Taft, Sr., Joe McCarthy, and the young Richard Nix-on would have loved his speech...

...His message was clear, carefully garbed in the rhetoric of scholarship, and as effectively stated as it could be: Containment was failing in the Mideast because of U.S...

...Was it really true that the pragmatic failure .of Soviet ideology destroyed its allure...

...During the Carter mushiness it went into eclipse...

...Such meetings are always begun by trotting out the Old Lions, at least those among them still capable of constructing complete sentences...

...His ad-dress, presented in the form of a fictional speech to the Soviet Politburo by Comrade Boris Ponomarev (an actual minor Soviet functionary), was a remarkable display of the persistence of Old Right mythology...

...Are they pEimarily ideological, or is the USSR at bottom just another expansionist great power in the tradition of imperial states from Alexander's Macedonia to Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany...

...He argued that a Soviet regime unable to expand must eventually either collapse or transform itself into a more rational creature capable of dealing with the West on a traditional basis...

...The yelps at this conference came from three after-meal speakers: Senator Malcolm Wallop (R-Wy...

...It was the primary justification for wars in Korea and Vietnam...

...There was also excessive optimism and two-dimensional thinking, intently focused on political and economic matters, heedless of military matters...

...For historical and, above all, ideological reasons, he asserted, Stalin and his associates were irredeemably hostile to the West...

...All were critical in one way or another of how containment has been practiced...

...Is the Soviet Union no longer expansionist...

...Where has the advance of Soviet guns been stopped by good GNP figures...

...How susceptible to the pragmatic test are matters of faith in any event...

...Kennan, of course, has backed away from the assumptions he so baldly stated in 1946 and 1947...

...Implicit in his talk was the assumption that U.S...

...the proposals seemed impractical to Acheson and Dulles alike...

...By the time he had finished, not much was left of containment in the 1946 sense...

...It has developed dubious formulas for dealing with Soviet military action by proxy, "wars of liberation," and limited, brushfire conflicts...

...Still, what drives it into Cuba, Nicaragua, or Angola, if not ideology...

...Are today's Soviet leaders less ideological...

...Some believed, however, that it should be possible to challenge Soviet imperialism in peripheral areas beyond any natural Russian sphere of influence...

...From 1946 on, containment was the Cold War...

...Nevertheless, the most troubling question about containment is whether, as actually practiced, it implies acceptance of any Soviet gain...

...Because it has been a more feasible and reliable approach than "liberation," "detente," and "human rights," it has survived them all as the cornerstone of American foreign policy...

...Containment is all that is left...

...Embassy in Moscow...

...Until quite recently, official Communist dogma treated environmental deterioration as an exclusively capitalist phenomenon...

...They do what they have to do to survive, but the state ideology gives their regime both its distinctive character and its raison Kennan has displayed an obsession with nuclear weapons that seems oddly out of proportion to the tiny possibility of a general Soviet-American war...

...Judging from the mutterings and gnashings of teeth at my table, the Senator was fortunate that his audience didn't have ready access to rope, tar, and feathers...

...Notably, Iheard no denunciation of aid to the contras in Nicaragua...

...The choices on such a planet are few...

...it could be done elsewhere...

...In February 1946, the American foreign policy establishment, baffled and disturbed by a series of difficulties with its World War II ally, the Soviet Union, received an 8,000-word dispatch from the counselor of the U.S...

...Nor can one discount Soviet military power simply because Soviet marshals are not counting down toward a general war...

...At another seminar, a speaker connected with the Reagan Administration exulted that Afghanistan has become the USSR's Vietnam...

...George F. Kennan's "long telegram" was the first document to state a compelling long-range strategy for dealing with Soviet hostility...

...The Soviet system as we know it, he said, would likely crumble within a generation...

...George Kennan had once hoped that containment would lead to the break-up of the Soviet empire...

...If the answer is ideology, as Kennan seemed to think in 1946, then surely a long twilight struggle lies ahead of us...

...The audience didn't...

...Central to such musings is a question that liberal-minded, pragmatic American academics find difficult...

...He gave one the feeling of having stepped through a time machine...

...It coexisteduneasily with detente, under Nixon and Kissinger...

...The label, "environmental crisis," overused and depreciated in the United States, is an appropriate description of current conditions in the more economically developed countries of Eastern Europe and parts of the Soviet Union...

...Soviet Union and its 'Communist neighbors, the "accidents" have been fast accumulating over the years...

...The USSR, he argued, has changed little in its internal organization or expansionist ambitions since the death of Stalin...

...Nor is there good reason to accept challenges in areas where this country has no compelling geopolitical interests...

...Several attended this one...

...It seemed altogether fitting, therefore, that the National Defense University recently sponsored a well-attended fortieth-anniversary symposium on containment and the future...

...But one wonders if Stalin in his most optimistic moments could ever have expected, short of the ultimate collapse ofcapitalism, that a generation after his death Soviet power would reach as far as Ethiopia and sub-Saharan Africa, Cuba and Nicaragua, Cam Rahn Bay and Saigon...

...Again like many Western intellectuals, Kennan has been prone to see every Soviet dictator since Stalin as, if not a closet liberal, someone more amenable to rational negotiation...

...How well do they remember detente...

...In truth, not even the United States can create a world in which every Soviet-encouraged movement can be contained every time...

...Thus, the George Kennan of 1946-47 makes more sense than the George Kennan of today...

...If, as seems probable, the USSR re-mains much the same, the world willcontinue to be a troubled, dangerous place throughout our lifetimes, and the Soviets likely will keep busy doing what they can to make it more troubled...

...Where, he asked, were the grisly combat pictures and critical commentaries on Soviet evening news, the editorials in Izvestia and Pravda demanding withdrawal, the mass demonstrations in front of the Kremlin...

...support for Israeli "terrorism...

...neoconservatism may be gaining ground on some campuses, but it's hardly an approved label among leading academic fashion plates...

...Arch Puddington EAST BLOC ECOLOGY Smoke gets in their skies...

...As a practical matter, moreover, Soviet leaders needed Western enemies to justify their totalitarian rule...

...There seemed a large measure of agreement that containment had in fact worked well...

...Soviet leadership is less sinister...

...Although the quotations above were gleaned from fairly recent articles in the Soviet bloc press, they are not (or, to be precise, are no longer) representative of Communist writings on environmental matters...

...It can maintain a difficult, costly military commitment indefinitely, destroy villages systematically, employ chemical warfare, scatter booby-trap toys to maim children...

...A government that controls the news, he argued, controls the thoughts of most of its people...

...Its greater strength, in fact, makes it a more dangerous enemy...

...He reminded his listeners of the especially menacing character of Stalin's rule...

...Still, Podhoretz's pronouncements won a more mellow response than Wallop's...

...Among some, however, doubts remained...

...Does economic strength override military strength...

...To-day's situation, he said, is different...

...One noxious sub-species generally absent was the anti-anti-Communist, making the conference a relatively faithful representation of the range of views among those types that our colleagues at the Nation might call the NATO intellectuals...

...It apparently was dead, the victim of its own success in holding the line against Stalin and producing a more reasonable Soviet government...

...At one of the many small seminars, a distinguished scholar asserted that Marxist-Leninist socialism was "a dying ideology" within, as well as without, the Soviet Union...

...Marxist-Leninist ideology, devoid of appeal outside the Communist orbit, no longer presents a threat to the West...

...But then neither were most Popes...

...Containment had been a blessing to the USSR, he argued, allowing it to consolidate its gains from one stage of advance to another...

...There was a broad consensus among the academics that in a nuclear world it would be simply too dangerous to challenge the core area of Soviet dominance, Eastern Europe...

...Neither Gorbachev nor the dictators who preceded him are ideologues who act without reference to the real world...

...Withdrawal would be dangerous folly, condominium—call it detente or what you will—unrealistic...

...Kennan, together with George Mar-shall, Dean Acheson, Robert Lovett, and, hardly least, Harry S. Truman, presided over some of the greatest achievements of postwar American foreign policy—the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, NATO—and brought a feared Communist advance into Western Europe to a halt...

...Just what are "the sources of Soviet conduct...

...Whatever Kennan's intentions, containment required enough military power to deter ventures outside the boundaries of the Soviet empire...

...Where in the whole dreary record of Communist expansion has economic failure led to the collapse of a Communist regime...

...opposed to the establishment of NATO and to the development of the hydrogen bomb, he quietly left the government to take up the life of a scholar and policy critic at Princeton...

...Most of the academics clearly wanted to believe that it does...

...Unfortunately for the people of the Arch Puddington is on the staff of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in New York...

...Tivo of the more interesting studies are Joan DeBardeleben's The Environment and Marxism-Leninism (Westview, $32.50) and .Christine Zvosec's article "Environmental deterioration in Eastern Europe" (Survey, Winter 1984...

...Even many of those who agreed with Podhoretz's assessment of the Soviet Union must have wondered if it were not a difficult enough task to make the world safe for the . United States without embarking upon a crusade for global democracy as well...

...Several scholars cited the generally recognized failure of the USSR to serve as a model for Third World economic development...

...Wallop's yelps, delivered to a lunch-eon at which Kennan was guest of honor, were the loudest...

...It had been done in Grenada...

...Mr...

...At a plenary session, a major historian dared to hope that he might live to write about the end of the Cold War...

...Early in 'human's second term, his influence within the State Department began to ebb...

...but it was rehabilitated after the invasion of Afghanistan persuaded the sage of Plains, Georgia, that the Soviet rulers were bad folk after all...

...In the fifties, he developed proposals for the reunification and neutralization of Germany and for the removal of nuclear weapons from central Europe...

...If capitalism created pollution, then logically capitalism should assume the burden of pollution's elimination...

...That is the starting point of their cognition...

...Especially in heavily industrialized countries like Poland, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia, the official media have been striking an uncharacteristically despondent theme of looming catastrophe, ' The problem of environmental decay in the Communist world has recently elicited the attention of Western journalists and scholars...

...Also worth-while are the research bulletins prepared by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty...

...Soviet military power, he conceded, is incomparably greater today and hence a cause for 16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1986 concern—but not much concern, because the Soviet leadership does not want war...

...His most recent book is Liberalism and its Challengers: FDR to Reagan (Oxford University Press...

...Khalidi, possibly Yasir Arafat's favorite academic, served a different function...

...Podhoretz also faced a skeptical audience...

...What, finally, were one observer's conclusions after two days of exposure to the academic foreign policy establishment...

...The word "crisis" has even begun to creep into official language...

...Treated more as an enemy envoy than an ally, Kennan in viewing the effects of the Stalinist totalitarianism all about him possessed none of the illusions still at large in Washington about establishing a climate of trust between Soviet and American leaders...

...The ex-ample of China gives some reason for hope that the USSR might move in the direction of a freer, more productive economy...

...To withdraw support from such loathsome Israeli activities as military attacks on PLO targets—the moral equivalent, Khalidi seemed to believe, of shooting old men in wheelchairs—would be to remove the major source of instability in the region and transform it into an anti-Communist bulwark...

...For Kennan, the only great danger today is the nuclear arms race...