Retreat from Doomsday/Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy/War and Peace in the Nuclear Age:
Morris, Charles R
WAR ON ITS WAY OUT? RETREAT FROM DOOMSDAY The Obsolescence of Major War John Mueller Basic Books, $20.95, 327 pp. KENNAN AND THE ART OF FOREIGN POLICY Anders Stephanson Harvard University,...
...Nuclear weapons were irrelevant in the Korean War-their use against the Chinese, Newhouse suggests, would have prolonged the fighting...
...Staring episodes, like that in the Middle East in 1973, have been both infrequent and circumspect...
...In Newhouse's hands, Cold War history is an exceedingly simple story: American scientists invented some fearsome weapons...
...Arms Control and Disarmament Agency during the Carter administration...
...The peculiar emphasis of Newhouse's book is probably explained by the author's service in the U.S...
...The RAND corporation is never mentioned...
...He finds Kennan's distinctions between "civilized" and "uncivilized" nations simply incoherent...
...Casual asides or personal letters dashed off in haste are submitted to the same relentless scrutiny, the same tireless search for contradiction or internal inconsistency as the weightiest state papers...
...Anders Stephanson's Ken-nan and the Art of Foreign Policy is the academic book supreme-elegant, highly intelligent, beautifully argued, and utterly sterile...
...Newhouse's War and Peace is a good example of the thinking that Mueller is targeting...
...Newhouse's single-minded focus on nuclear issues creates an oddly misshapen book...
...The reason for hope in the present era is not because we are on the threshold of new arms agreements, but because the Communist nations are showing signs of adopting some of the values and aspirations of the liberal democracies...
...Stephanson purports to show through a close textual analysis of two decades of Kennan's dispatches, letters, speeches, and public writings, how egre-giously Kennan, and through him the rest of the American foreign policy establishment, misunderstood Stalin's motives and intentions and so helped bring on the Cold War...
...KENNAN AND THE ART OF FOREIGN POLICY Anders Stephanson Harvard University, $35, 380 pp...
...Bernard Brodie, arguably the father of nuclear strategy, is quoted but once, and, I believe, out of context, to the effect that nuclear weapons mean the end of all strategy...
...Despite much huffing and puffing, Newhouse never succeeds in demonstrating his thesis...
...War among developed countries," Mueller concludes, "has gradually moved toward terminal disrepute because of its perceived repul-siveness and futility...
...In a non-nuclear world, once American troops were gone from the continent, a Soviet assault might have enjoyed early successes...
...As Newhouse would have it, "The effect of nuclear weapons on relations between adversaries...is without precedent...
...The Communist rulers themselves, with their string of recent admissions of judicial murders, the death camps in the Ukraine, the slaughter in Katyn Forest, seem to concede as much...
...The Cold War seems to spring autonomously from the presence of the American and Soviet nuclear arsenals...
...In China, in the western and southern border areas of the Soviet Union, in Poland and Hungary, there is a massive, grass-roots rejection of the Marxist-Leninist vision that, since 1917, has been the sole justification for inflicting terror, death, and human degradation on an unimaginable scale...
...Pity anyone subjected to such examination...
...Mueller's Retreat from Doomsday is not without its flaws...
...George F. Kennan, of course, was one of the few seminal thinkers in American foreign policy and the articulator of the policy of "containment" which has structured American-Soviet relations since 1946...
...Although he seems prepared to admit that Stalin was a bit of a ruffian, the blame for subsequent unpleasantness rests squarely on the United States...
...The recent horrors in China's Tiananmen Square, in a perverse way, help reinforce that view...
...Stalin had plenty of reason to fear American power with or without nuclear weapons...
...Taken as a whole, Newhouse's book stands in stark contrast to the balance and common sense of Mueller's book...
...But earlier he said that Marxism was "a prism through which the world is viewed...
...In the first place, there is no attempt to tailor the analysis to the occasion...
...Stephanson is an accomplished stylist, steeped in American and European political literature...
...the Soviets, perforce, frantically copied them...
...Stephanson pounces triumphantly: to see through a prism is a much different proposition from mere "coloring...
...Nuclear weapons or not, the Cold War will persist or be resolved as the factors that gave rise to it are addressed...
...Mueller does not believe that Stalin ever intended to launch an invasion of Western Europe, although he does not belittle contemporary fears...
...The nuclear "war-fighting" theories on the febrile right are as far removed from reality as the eschatologi-cal hand-wringing on the left...
...Stephanson is clearly entitled to his viewpoint...
...Stephanson's dogmatic insistence that there was nothing extraordinary about Stalin's state is bizarrely anachronistic, an echo of radical 1960s' revisionism...
...It ignores the Kennedy administration's substantial contribution to the persistent crisis atmosphere of the 1960s...
...Nuclear weapons were only modestly relevant in determining either the contours or the progress of the Cold War...
...He merely assumes it as the context for his critique of Kennan...
...Relations between Zbigniew Brzezinski and Cyrus Vance receive far more attention than those between Roosevelt and Stalin...
...Newhouse writes that the 1974 Vladivostok accords- the never-accepted forerunner of the never-ratified SALT II-were "historic," and "a major reference point for the nuclear age...
...The fact that he offers little comfort to ideologues of either the left or the right is a measure of the good sense of his thesis...
...And even in Cuba, Mueller argues, the recently released "Ex Comm" transcripts and other background material suggest that the actual risk of war was much more remote than generally believed...
...But these are small oases in long stretches of arid logic-chopping, much of it tortuous, trivial, and irritatingly tendentious...
...There is a scant paragraph on Stalin's Eastern European policy and only two passing mentions of Yalta, none of Teheran...
...Kennan is obviously very confused, and Stephanson follows with a full page analyzing Kennan's "analytical predicament...
...More puzzling, there is scarcely any attention given to nuclear strategy...
...Issues swim in and out of our ken primarily as they come up in arms control negotiations...
...Save for some discursive asides in the book's notes, Stephanson fails to make his argument in any sustained manner...
...START talks, and their various progeny, like the SALT agreements before them, are similarly of limited relevance, except as practice exercises in developing normal diplomatic relations...
...When that happens, and the huge military establishments come to seem unnecessary, even somewhat silly, they will gradually melt away by themselves.ill gradually melt away by themselves...
...Charles R. Morris There is a building sense in the Western community that the Cold War, the forty-year contest between the industrialized liberal democracies and the Communist dictatorships of Asia and Eastern Europe, if not exactly over, is rapidly running its course...
...Readers expecting to find an analysis of George Kennan's career as a diplomat or a coherent history of American postwar diplomacy will be sorely disappointed by Anders Stephanson's Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy...
...Stephanson's method is a detailed textual critique of virtually everything Ken-nan said or wrote from the 1930s through the 1950s...
...at the very least, it probably squelched any lingering Communist appetite for invading neighboring states...
...There are pages of eye-glazing detail on the Guadeloupe conference, hardly one of the momentous gatherings of modern times...
...It is a welcome tonic to turn to John Mueller's Retreat from Doomsday, a straightforward, common-sensical, thoroughly engaging, and strikingly original account of the decline of war as a problem-solving tool in disputes between great powers...
...But the Soviets certainly understood that sooner or later America's "lethargic juggernaut" would haul itself back to Europe and grind them to bits...
...While the prospect of a nuclear Armageddon added a certain literary resonance to the horrors of a future global war, all of the European nations-winners or losers, Russia included-had suffered horrors enough in the just-ended "conventional" war to be amply deterred from a casual resort to arms...
...WAR AND PEACE IN THE NUCLEAR AGE John Newhouse Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., $22.95, 480 pp...
...But, along with the work of other younger scholars like John Lewis Gaddis, it does draw attention to both the fundamental postwar conflicts of interest between the United States and the Soviet Union and the powerful stake both countries have had in avoiding a military confrontation...
...The same may be said of their effect on relations between allied countries....The nuclear weapon, as distinct from traditional considerations, has defined these relations and set the history of our time on its curious course...
...They will find, instead, an awkward mixture of political history and literary criticism, a "poststructural-ist" look at the Cold War, in the spirit of Foucault and Derrida...
...John Newhouse's War and Peace in the Nuclear Age, a deeply confused book, is the companion volume to the thirteen-part PBS television series on the nuclear age...
...The great virtue of Mueller's book is to put some reasonable perspective on the American intellectual obsession with nuclear weapons...
...The present turmoil in the Communist world, however, drives home forcefully that the Cold War, after all, was about something...
...Following World War II, after some hesitation in facing up to the nature of Stalin's rule in Eastern Europe, the United States interposed its power to block any further extension of European communism...
...The Korean War, far from legitimizing "limited war" in the nuclear age, demonstrated that any conventional confrontation between major powers would be extraordinarily costly...
...there was a crisis in the early 1960s, after which, just one tick ahead of a relentless doomsday clock, nearly thirty years have been consumed desperately negotiating nuclear arms control agreements-recounted here in the most tedious detail...
...Khrushchev bullied Kennedy at Vienna even though the U.S., as Kennedy knew, enjoyed overwhelming nuclear superiority, and so on...
...Occasionally, as in his analysis of the roots of Kennan's "organi-cist conservatism," his writing is a sheer pleasure...
...Nuclear weapons "have not had an important impact on this remarkable trend....Rather, it seems, things would have turned out much the same had nuclear weapons never been invented...
...Kennan, for example, wrote in one instance that ideology "colors what the Russians see...
...With the possible exception of the Cuban missile crisis, the two superpowers have stayed well away from direct confrontations ever since...
...Two of the three books under review here are still relatively oblivious to this recognition...
...It is the more the pity that Mueller's level gaze, his lack of cant, and general good humor, should be such an exception in the mountain of writing on military and strategic developments in the postwar era...
...The entire exercise, therefore, seems meretricious, a slothful trick to avoid the hard work of defending a thesis...
...But he suggests that American nuclear capability was, at best, marginally relevant in determining the final shape of the uneasy postwar European settlement...
...Since he is obviously a capable scholar, it would have been interesting to see him argue it...
Vol. 116 • October 1989 • No. 17
