Article published September 1979
This article was written in response to an interview with George F. Kennan published in U. S. News and World Report. Kennan was then attached to the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton University, after his distinguished career in the United States State Department. The Carter Administration had continued the policy of détente with the Soviet Union, more or less as designed by President Nixon, continued by President Ford, and implemented under both of those administrations by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. The argument against détente was gaining traction, however, and the policy would be jettisoned in the subsequent administration of President Reagan. Kennan’s interview was intended to answer the critics of détente.
George F. Kennan is rivalled only by Henry Kissinger as the most influential scholar-diplomat of postwar America. In his seminal article, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” published in 1947, he warned that the Soviet tendency to dangle the bauble of cooperation before wishful American eyes was a tactic, not an offer, unworthy of “gleeful announcements that `the Soviets have changed.'” He proposed the policy of “containment,” whereby the West would apply “counterforce as a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points,” counterforce that was to be “political,” not military. Indeed, in 1947 the Soviet Union did not pose a military threat to the United States, so the `militaristic’ interpretation of the Kennan article, widely made at the time, was incorrect. Whether the article itself was incorrect in its “political” (that is, diplomatic) approach to the Soviet Union is a question for thoughtful historians.
Today the relevant question is the one Mr. Kennan raises in his most recent interview: is a policy of military containment, as advocated by the critics of U. S.-Soviet détente, mistaken and dangerous? His answer is that such a policy is indeed dangerous, that we must avoid war and try to “break out of the straitjacket of military rivalry and to strike through to a more constructive and hopeful vision.” Detente’s critics are “alarmists.”
They are alarmists, he contends, for several reasons. The Soviet nion has no purpose for which to fight a war, and countries do not fight without reason. Marxist ideology predicts the triumph of communism by means of “the action of the proletariat and of right-thinking people within the countries themselves”–“an action in which the Soviet armed forces help,” but only help. And there are practical reasons, Kennan says, for the Soviets to avoid war: the Chines threat being the most important, but also the danger of unrest in eastern and central Europe and within the Soviet Union itself. Soviet leadership is “very conservative,” “composed very largely of people quite advanced in age,” with “many problems to solve at home (most of them economic, some “spiritual”), ruling subjects who “feel very strongly” opposed to any prospect of a Third World War.
American statesmen, Kennan argues, should contribute to an “environment” which includes “incentives to move” in the direction of better relations, so that Soviet rulers of today and tomorrow are not forced into continued military escalation. This is especially important because “life is better than death.” “Countries do survive all sorts of vicissitudes short of annihilation. They survive occupation, they survive being satellites, and eventually people get their own independence again… I would say, `Rather red than dead'”–better a subject under a communist regime than killed in a war over communism.
Rarely have the assumptions that underlie détente received such precise expression. In this Kennan has out-Kissingered Kissinger. Such a precise expression deserves an equally precise refutation.
The argument that Marxist ideology precludes military triumph over its enemies, that military action must be the handmaiden of revolutionary class struggle is, at least, novel. Characteristically, the détentists contend that the Soviets have abandoned Marxism for nationalism. Perhaps seeing such an abandonment, if real, would make the Soviet Union as dangerous as “before,” Kennan avoids it like the intellectual plague it is. But instead of the plague he succumbs to the pox, for the Soviets never hesitated to impose their revolution on such countries as Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia (both in 1948 and in 1968 under Premier Brezhnev’s “conservative” leadership). If yours is “the country of the Revolution,” if your people, and especially your leaders, embody the vanguard of the international proletariat, you can easily justify a war of `liberation’ based, if not on actual indigenous sentiment, then on the `objective’ interests of oppressed people.
The practical reasons for avoiding war which Kennan imputes to the Soviet leadership might be convincing if they were not based on his failure to account for the advance of modern technology. Domestic unrest and `pacifism’ in the Soviet Union, the danger o European and/or Chinese attack–all of these will eventually come to nothing as Soviet military technology progressively widens the gulf between rulers and ruled, between major power and secondary powers. The Soviet-style mass revolution based on the 19th-century barricades and the power of `the people’ is today impossible in extended and technologically advanced dictatorships. A ruler without humanitarian scruple, whether of the `Left’ or the `Right,’ can easily crush such movements long before they gain momentum. As for China and Europe, the former will never equal the Soviets’ technological prowess unless it contrives to skip all intermediate stages–an unlikely trick. Meanwhile, Western Europe lacks the political will and the political unity to match the Soviets step for step, and Eastern Europe is already broken. Only the United States can equal, perhaps surpass, the Soviet Union in the invention and deployment of the weapons that will eventually render nuclear missiles as obsolete and the barricades and pickaxes of the 19th century. In assuming that nuclear weapons are `the ultimate weapon,’ Kennan reveals himself as hopeless reactionary.
Finally, there is the moral argument. Life is indeed better than death if that life is not lived under tyranny. The ideology of Marxism and the genuinely revolutionary technological means that it will soon possess makes Kennan’s naïve pronouncement on “time softening these things” a symptom of a peculiar disease caused by the twin viruses of cowardice and complacency. His “more constructive and hopeful vision” is a fever-dream mistaken for a prophecy.
The ongoing technological revolution will bestow even more extraordinary power upon those who control the machines. The victory of the Soviet Union at this crucial juncture of world history–a victory for which every statement and every action of the Soviet leadership prepares–would end the brief life of political liberty on earth.
2016 NOTE: This article was one of several written in collaboration with Professor Paul Eidelberg, who was then teaching at Bar Ilan University in Israel. As in any such collaboration, some articles were written mostly by him, some mostly by me, and some by both. The articles posted here are the ones I wrote, with editing by him.
The article fails to anticipate the collapse of the Soviet empire, some ten years later. But that occurred after Reagan ended the policy of détente and began to apply pressure to the Soviets in collaboration with U. S. allies–perhaps most notably the Saudis, who lowered oil prices at exactly the time when the Soviets desperately needed oil revenues. That weakened the Kremlin’s grip on Central Europe and led to exactly the kind of popular uprisings that I didn’t foresee when American foreign policy was trending in the opposite direction
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