From The Montréal Review, May 2024:
It is hard to explain why George Kennan's voice was heard and proved right when he wrote the Long Telegram in 1946 and helped shape the post-World War II world, and then was left almost unnoticed when he wrote a short letter in the New York Times after the fall of the Soviets (just as he predicted) at the end of the Cold War. Why was Kennan right and heard for the fall of the Soviets and not right and heard for the expansion of NATO?
Kennan is perhaps the most recognizable and respected name in American diplomacy. Every first-year student of international relations knows him, every editor of an international media knows him, every politician in Washington knows him, and yet we are more likely to be reminded of Kennan's post-Cold War predictions not by an American academic or diplomat, but by marginal voices like that of Vladimir Posner, a Russian liberal democrat and critic of Putin.
A simple explanation is that the voice of reason speaks to a willing ear. It all depends on the position of the listener: if the listener is in a position of advantage, the ear is jammed; if the listener is in an uncomfortable place, in a corner, then attention is awakened. If Western policymakers had an ear for Kennan's advice on the policy of containment and his prediction that the communist regime would fall of itself, crumbling from within, they became deaf to his post-Cold War warnings because it would limit their ecstatic advances and visions. The simple reason for the lack of attention is hubris: the notion that you can do anything because you just can (very much without thinking about the inevitable long-term consequences).
George Kennan belonged to the so-called "political realism" school of international relations. He was against American overextension and against unfounded pacifism. His thinking was neither militaristic nor pacifistic, but rationalistic. The current American administration, as far as we know, just like the Obama administration, is well versed in Reinhold Niebuhr, another proponent of political realism, and is probably aware of Augustine, the ancient authority on the fall and demise of the Roman Empire. Kennan, Niebuhr, and Augustine were all realists. War is an option, they argued, a necessary option that should be used, but with the right motivation and great care. Otherwise, it turns from a solution to an end, that is, the final blow of a failed, reckless policy.
As the world hurtles toward nuclear Armageddon, we publish three articles that give us perspective, Kennan's perspective of reason.
“THE LONG TELEGRAM”
861.00/2 - 2246: Telegram
The Charge in the Soviet Union (Kennan) to the Secretary of State
SECRET
Moscow, February 22, 1946--9 p.m. [Received February 22--3: 52 p.m.]....*****
"THE SHORT LETTER"
A FATEFUL ERROR
By George F. Kennan
Feb. 5, 1997In late 1996, the impression was allowed, or caused, to become prevalent that it had been somehow and somewhere decided to expand NATO up to Russia's borders. This despite the fact that no formal decision can be made before the alliance's next summit meeting, in June.
The timing of this revelation -- coinciding with the Presidential election and the pursuant changes in responsible personalities in Washington -- did not make it easy for the outsider to know how or where to insert a modest word of comment. Nor did the assurance given to the public that the decision, however preliminary, was irrevocable encourage outside opinion.
But something of the highest importance is at stake here. And perhaps it is not too late to advance a view that, I believe, is not only mine alone but is shared by a number of others with extensive and in most instances more recent experience in Russian matters. The view, bluntly stated, is that expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era.
Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking. And, last but not least, it might make it much more difficult, if not impossible, to secure the Russian Duma's ratification of the Start II agreement and to achieve further reductions of nuclear weaponry....
....MUCH MORE