Truman Defeats Kennan

...Unlike Nazi Germany, however, it had no timetable...

...They clearly considered themselves realists, more so than Ken-nan because they felt that effective containment required hard military power...

...Even then, the administration kept the Korean fighting localized...

...George F. Kennan, who died last year at the age of 101, was for a half-century a hallowed name among scholars of American foreign relations...

...When the Western European allies sought American defense guarantees, Kennan quietly opposed the resulting North Atlantic Treaty and the establishment of NATO...

...Nonetheless, it would haunt Truman after he unexpectedly became president on April 12, 1945, and found himself forced to deal with a Soviet nation that had become an important and oft-sentimentalized wartime ally...

...Most of us probably think containment was developed by George E Ken-nan a year or so after the end of World War II—first in a "long telegram" from the American embassy in Moscow, then in the anonymous "X" article ("The Sources of Soviet Conduct") for Foreign Affairs about a year later...

...cuff remark as evidence of a reactionary and mean-spirited attitude that led to a long, needless Cold War...

...Cognizant of Communist millennialism, Kennan worried about a dangerous and costly American counterpart...

...Neither man, however, was a systematic thinker...

...Nonetheless, Spalding makes rather too much of his religious faith, which was real but more nominal than it may seem from the perspective of an age in which atheism has become the default religion of the intellectuals and Christianity has been relegated to the status of a cult...

...Here was an unabashed elitist, downright disapproving of democratic politics...

...A little over a year later, President Truman asked Congress for a package of aid to Greece and Turkey, both threatened by Soviet designs...

...It was Harry Truman who defined containment, not George Ken-nan...

...Kennan, by then back in Washington and head of the State Department's Policy Planning staff, approved of the aid program...

...Truman prevails as surely and as surprisingly as he prevailed over Thomas E. Dewey in 1948...

...Operationally, the sentiment was little different from Ken-nan's prescription, but it was backed by more power and push than Kennan would have preferred...

...What Truman saw as a ringing endorsement of democratic self-determination, Kennan envisioned as a millennial declaration that severed necessary and inevitable relationships between ends and means...

...A broader public thought Kennan was the author of the Truman Doctrine and an anti-Communist paladin...

...Impervious to logic of reason . . . it is highly sensitive to logic of force...

...In this book, Ken-nan is a proxy for Nixon and Kissinger, Truman a proxy for Reagan...

...She subjects key texts by both Ken-nan and Truman to the close analysis reserved for systematic political thought...

...He also proclaimed the Truman Doctrine: "[I]t must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures...

...The Soviet Union, motivated by a combination of ideology and historic Russian expansionism, Kennan asserted, was implacably expansionist and irredeemably hostile to the Western world...

...A graduate of the notorious Pendergast machine in Kansas City, he knew that the term "free elections" was a relative one...

...Eranklin D. Roosevelt, who conceived of the neo-Wilsonian United Nations as an idealistic cover for the practice of power politics...

...A hard, practical politician, he realized that the wider world, as much as his own domestic political universe, was riddled with imperfections that would not disappear overnight...

...Elizabeth Edwards Spalding sees Truman's words as evidence of his insight: Her assertion that he was "the first Cold Warrior" is meant as a tribute...

...The new secretary of state, Dean Acheson, thought Kennan impossibly soft-minded, eased him out as Policy Planning director, and replaced him with Paul Nitze...

...A "long telegram" he sent from there to Washington in February 1946 provided a new and much-needed paradigm to an American foreign policy establishment befuddled by manifestations of discord and hostility from the Soviets...

...He likewise considered himself a Roo-seveltian and never missed a chance to tell people he was pursuing what he believed to be EDR's policies...

...Truman Defeats Kennan The lines are drawn for the postwar world by Alonzo L. Hamby In June 1941, just after Germany had invaded the Soviet Union, Senator Harry S. Truman commented: "If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don't want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances...

...Truman's farewell speech as president, in 1953, reflected his considered sentiments...

...His divided impulses took him back and forth...

...Eoreign policy realism, once a doctrine of arch-conservatives such as Met-ternich and Bismarck, has been in bad odor among American conservatives for a generation now...

...By 1949, George Kennan was perhaps the most visible Foreign Service officer in American history...

...Spalding's treatment of Kennan is a bit one-dimensional, but she is unequivocally correct in declaring that his response to Soviet imperialism was far too tepid...

...The differences between them were substantial but less fundamental than the author would have us believe...

...An ideologically driven maker of American foreign policy at a time when one was badly needed, Truman was willing to spend military and economic resources to fulfill his sense of America's mission in the world...

...Neither of them think anything of their pledged word...

...Truman's foreign policy, despite Kennan's fears, was selective about the fights it picked, defending only the defensible: Western Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Middle East...

...Writing of the obsequious State Department deference to Senator Arthur Vandenberg, the Republican leader who made Truman's foreign policy possible, Kennan commented: "I could not accept the assumption that Senators were all such idiots that they deserved admiring applause every time they could be persuaded by the State Department to do something sensible...

...The sentiment was common at the time...

...He also was probably the most misunderstood, and increasingly at odds with his superiors...

...At first bluntly protesting Soviet failure to adhere to the letter of the Yalta agreements on Poland, he backed off in order to secure Soviet cooperation on the establishment of the United Nations...

...Spalding places Truman at the end of a continuum of the three major Democratic presidents of the 20th century, all of whom presented themselves as defenders of liberal democracy: Woodrow Wilson, who put all his faith in a universal international assembly...

...Meeting Stalin at Potsdam, he saw, as did many other Americans, a Russian version of a tough American political boss who might give his word reluctantly but would keep his pledges...

...Always skeptical of the Soviet Union, Truman was nonetheless committed to the alliance when he became president and especially anxious to secure Soviet participation in the final stage of the war against Japan...

...For this reason it can easily withdraw—and usually does—when strong resistance is countered at any point...

...The president did not sign off on NSC-68 until the Korean war was three months old...

...Truman had both, and he understood that they had to be expressed as simple truths...

...It wrote off China as less essential to American interests and beyond American resources...

...Realists reject moralistic approaches to the conduct of diplomacy, which they believe should be about the advancement of national interests— limited and sharply defined...

...He had seen the Berlin blockade of 1948-49 as an opportunity for a diplomatic initiative to establish a reunified, demilitarized Germany...

...He appears to have arrived at something approaching Reinhold Niebuhr's sense that moral behavior was difficult and ambiguous in an amoral world...

...As Kennan noted at the time, the Marshall Plan did not represent a universal model...

...His version of containment—deployment of the Navy to the eastern Mediterranean, the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift, NATO, and a limited military intervention in Korea—was much more ambitious than Kennan's...

...The containment that Harry Truman implemented—based on ideological politics and a "universalist" doctrine— was robust, got the job done, and stemmed directly from Truman's innermost convictions...

...Spalding tends to depict Kennan and Truman as polar opposites...

...By and large, he thought the United States could and should deal with the Soviet Union as if it were a traditional nation state...

...but like most Western liberal diplomats, he thought the task of diplomacy was the avoidance of war...

...An honest man who had come up the political ladder surrounded by crooks and grafters, he had long, firsthand experience in dealing with moral ambiguity...

...He was, she believes, the authentic author of containment...

...Nitze was soon at work on NSC-68, a policy statement that embraced ideological struggle and called for a vigorous rearmament program to counter a worldwide Communist threat...

...Spalding is one of many intellectuals on the right who have found forceful advocacy of democracy at once exhilarating and effective...

...Realism can vary considerably with the temperament of a particular realist, but it has certain general characteristics...

...In the end Truman's temperament was more important than his intellect, and Kennan never quite grasped the need for a guiding cause in American foreign policy...

...Aid to Greece and Turkey was a rousing success...

...He also preferred a diplomacy unsullied by politicians...

...She is strongest in her argument that Kennan saw the Cold War as just another episode in a long international history of balance of power politics and had an excessively limited view of American power (soft and hard), weakest in her assertion that he posited "moral equivalence" between the Communist and liberal democratic worlds...

...Kennan's long telegram doubtless helped crystallize these sentiments for him...

...Vision and ideals have to come from the top...

...No pacifist, he favored a limited military response to the invasion of South Korea in 1950...

...To block Soviet expansion was to guarantee eventual change in the Soviet Union...

...Truman's ideas on foreign relations were never as fully developed as Ken-nan's, but they had a long history, dating from his service in World War I. As a senator (1935-45), he had been increasingly apprehensive about the menace of totalitarianism, strongly supportive of large increases in the military budget, and anti-isolationist...

...The means by which interests are pursued must be feasible...

...The use of nuclear weapons and the consequences of a nuclear war were unthinkable, he declared...

...Her central concern is an implied contest of ideas between Truman and Kennan...

...Spald-ing reminds us that the containment Kennan, a classical "realist," advocated would have been weak and ineffectual...

...He later wrote that it "placed our aid to Greece in the framework of a universal policy" and established an open-ended commitment...

...In the long run," he declared, "the strength of our free society, and our ideals, will prevail over a system that has respect for neither God nor man...

...Moreover, the Truman Doctrine was overshadowed by the Marshall Plan, which greatly facilitated the economic recovery of war-ravaged Western Europe and effectively stalled Communist drives for power in France and Italy...

...Cousin of an important late 19th-century writer on Russia, educated at Princeton, trained to be a Russian specialist in the Foreign Service of the 1920s, he was minister-counselor at the American embassy in Moscow by the end of World War II...

...Realism, as Kennan understood it, took national power— military and otherwise—into account, but it was primarily about compromise and finding a tolerable balance of power among adversaries...

...It is tempting to argue with this book on many secondary issues, but Elizabeth Edwards Spalding has the one big issue right...

...In the beginning, these were qualms...

...The author, a political scientist trained in foreign policy, international relations theory, and political thought, concentrates on the intellectual basis of the Cold War...

...Ear from defining the Cold War as a military confrontation, Truman slashed military expenditures with reckless abandon until the Korean war forced a reversal...

...Instead, the United States and its allies resorted to a dramatic and successful airlift...

...Europe's needs were "clear in outline, readily susceptible of short-term solution, and of urgent importance to the interests of this country...

...Aside from retaining areas already under its military occupation, the Soviet Union tended to back off when confronted with American firmness, thereby vindicating both Ken-nan's analysis and Truman's instincts...

...His concern, which remained private until he left the Foreign Service, centered on Truman's doctrine...

...And that was a good thing...

...In fact, he was a professional diplomat of the highest caliber trained in a traditional school of foreign policy "realism," a deceptively simple term that deserves more exploration than it gets in this study...

...Mounting tensions over Soviet behavior in Iran, Turkey, and Greece, continued consolidations of Soviet power in Eastern Europe, and squabbling over the sharing of atomic energy led Truman to believe, by early 1946, that Moscow was more foe than friend...

...In later years, a generation of New Left historians would cite Truman's off-theAlonzo L. Hamby, distinguished professor of history at Ohio University, is the author of Man of the People: A Life of Harry S. Truman and, more recently, For the Survival of Democracy: Franklin Roosevelt and the World Crisis of the 1930s...

...Spalding is on firm ground when she argues that the document is best read as a statement of values and a long-term strategy of waiting-out the Soviet Union rather than as preparation for an inevitable global war...

...Kennan clearly detested Stalinism, but he was a midlevel diplomat trained to deal with the world as it was, not as he would have preferred it to be...

...But let it be noted also that Acheson and Nitze had no particular quarrel with Kennan about realism...

...The establishment of West and East German states followed...

...Yet Truman considered himself a Wilsonian and had admired Wilson for more than 30 years when he became president...

...The Communist world operated under a set of fatally flawed assumptions...

...Read by administration officials from the president on down, the telegram was the catalyst for a policy of containing Soviet ambitions, primarily in Europe and the Middle East...

...There was no doubt in his mind about the efficacy and the righteousness of American power...

...They contrast what they believe to be the defeatist compromising of realists Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger to Ronald Reagan's blunt ideological Cold War-ending rhetoric...

...and Truman, for whom "free peoples and free governments were always more essential . . . than any specific international organization...