When a Kennan Falls in the Forest Posted by Heather Hurlburt

I have been waiting in vain since the weekend for someone to explain why folks who are neither Sovietologists nor Cold War historians nor American diplomats should care about the passing of George Kennan. Looks like I’m going to have to do it myself.

Kennan represents two vanishing strands in US public service: a class of people who believed in, or aspired to, the noblesse oblige, allegedly disinterested service of the upper classes; and a political culture where individuals with ideas could – and did -- change the substance of US policy and the frame in which it was presented to the country.

Go back and look at Kennan’s "Long Telegram" and "X article"; they are profoundly intellectual documents, spelling out his assessment of a foreign culture, its abilities and aspirations, and how the US might respond. They are devoid of domestic political calculation; they are not written to appeal to this wing or that of an Administration. Kennan was to be greatly frustrated later, when he became head of the Policy Planning staff, that he could not cut through the politics that surrounded the Secretary and dominated his calculations.

‘Twas ever thus.

Yet Kennan’s observations were hugely influential not just at the moment they were made, but later, when the framework he put forward ultimately withstood the assaults of John Foster Dulles and his proposals to replace Kennan’s “containment” with “rollback.” One article published in Foreign Affairs actually set both the framing and content of US policy toward our primary adversary for decades to come. No polling, no message-testing, no national listening tours to build support.

Much as we all pant to publish in Foreign Affairs, when’s the last time something published there enjoyed this kind of influence? Remember when Francis Fukuyama tried to pull something like it off at the Cold War’s end?

It’s not merely that Kennan was both brilliant in his thinking and lucky in his timing. Any one person’s ability to bestride the foreign affairs establishment is gone because that tiny, narrow elite establishment has been replaced, for better and worse, by … well, by us.

The old-style culture of public service, particularly in foreign policy, as the proper preserve of the wealthy and educated, filtered through just a few universities, banks and law firms, did spit up some tremendous minds, Kennan among them. But it disdained the minds of women, ethnic and religious minorities, state university graduates, and those of limited means. It encouraged America’s diplomats to think that their calling was higher than mere politics, though it involved understanding and manipulating the politics of others. And it encouraged American citizens to pay only the broadest attention to what their leaders did abroad in their name.

In the years after Vietnam, the diversification of elite education, the women's movement, and ethnic consciousness-raising caught up with those assumptions and the foreign policy elite that had encouraged them.

But the collapse of trust in public service, heightened partisanship over foreign policy, and the overwhelming flow of data we live with now also conspire to drown out a single voice speaking truth. If there is a George Kennan for militant Islam, say, could we remember the broader national interest long enough to listen?

How much has our culture, and the kinds of messages we expect from our leaders, changed since 1947? Look at the conclusion of the “X article.” Would any Secretary of State, or even any political figure, dare tell us this now?

The issue of Soviet-American relations is in essence a test of the overall worth of the United States as a nation among nations. To avoid destruction the United States need only measure up to its own best traditions and prove itself worthy of preservation as a great nation.

Surely, there was never a fairer test of national quality than this. In the light of these circumstances, the thoughtful observer of Russian-American relations will find no cause for complaint in the Kremlin's challenge to American society. He will rather experience a certain gratitude to a Providence which, by providing the American people with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent on their pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear.

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