Kennan and the Pitfalls of Containment

Courting new great power conflict in the twenty-first century involves the same dangers that it involved four decades ago when Kennan issued his warning.

Fredrik Logevall reviews Frank Costigliola’s forthcoming biography of George Kennan:

Costigliola’s unmatched familiarity with the diaries is on full display, and although he does not shy away from quoting from some of their more unsavory parts, his overall assessment is sympathetic, especially vis-à-vis the “second” Kennan, the one who decried the militarization of containment and pushed for U.S.-Soviet negotiations. Kennan, he writes, was a “largely unsung hero” for his diligent efforts to ease the Cold War.

Intriguingly, as Costigliola shows but could have developed more fully, these efforts were already underway in the late 1940s, while the superpower conflict was still in its infancy. This transformation in Kennan’s thinking is especially resonant today, in an era that many analysts are calling the early stages of yet another cold war, with U.S.-Russian relations in a deep freeze and China playing the role of an assertive Soviet Union. If the analogy is correct, then it bears asking: How did Kennan’s thinking change? And does his evolution hold lessons for his successors as they forge policy for a new era of conflict?

One of the problems with containment doctrine from the start was that it could be interpreted in so many different ways, some of which flatly contradicted each other. It could be interpreted narrowly, as Kennan would have preferred, and limited primarily to Europe, or it could be interpreted as broadly as possible to apply to every corner of the globe and to serve as a warrant for massive military buildups and arms races. As Ali Wyne has written in America’s Great Power Opportunity, “A framework that is at once widely accepted and highly elastic is vulnerable to misappropriation.”¹ Containment was both widely accepted and highly elastic, and so it was misappropriated in record time. Kennan is often called the author of containment, but as subsequent events showed he lacked the authority to define and enforce his version of what containment should be.

Logevall’s discussion of the dispute between Walter Lippmann and Kennan caught my attention because I had just been listening to John Delury and Van Jackson talk about this very thing in a recent podcast about Delury’s new book, Agents of Subversion. Delury and Jackson were talking about Kennan in the context of the early Cold War and how Kennan believed Lippmann misunderstood his views on containment (discussion starts around the 25:00 mark). Jackson said:

[Kennan] understood what he was advocating as a form of restraint….This is the limit, this is the outer bound of what our foreign policy should be trying to push. In that sense, it was an alternative to global domination, it was an alternative to preventive nuclear war, which was on the table with the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the ‘50s. Even though that’s the case, containment did not get implemented the way that he imagined it at all. The way Kennan saw containment was not how Lippmann interpreted Kennan.

The reality was that Kennan largely agreed with Lippmann’s objections to a more expansive and ambitious form of containment, but Lippmann didn’t recognize this. Logevall concurs:

More than that, he found himself agreeing with much of Lipp­mann’s interpretation, including with respect to Moscow’s defensive orientation and the need for U.S. strategists to distinguish between core and peripheral areas.

Lippmann saw how easily containment could become a license for overreach and constant meddling, and that is indeed what it became. On one level, it isn’t Kennan’s fault that others abused the concept he defined and turned it to ends he wouldn’t have supported, but he did fail to anticipate and guard against that.

The trouble is not just that anti-Soviet containment became much more militarized and ambitious than Kennan would have wished, but that any policy premised on intense rivalry with another major power is likely to end up this way. The Cold War shows how such a rivalry becomes entrenched and self-justifying as both rivals commit themselves to ever more extravagant military preparations to avoid “falling behind” the other. Kennan was acutely aware of the stupidity of such competition and condemned it. In The Fateful Alliance, he issued this warning:

For us of the late twentieth century these background realities no longer prevail. The nuclear weapon has changed all that. If, today, governments are still unable to recognize that modern nationalism and modern militarism are, in combination, self-destructive forces, and totally so; if they are incapable of looking clearly at those forces, discerning their true nature, and bringing them under some sort of control; if they continue, whether for reasons of fear or of ambition, to cultivate those forces and to try to use them as instruments for self-serving competitive purposes—if they do these things, they will be preparing, this time, a catastrophe from which there can be no recovery and no return.²

The generation that experienced the horrors of the last world war is almost all gone. Stephen Wertheim observed in a recent essay, “During the original Cold War, American leaders and citizens knew that survival was not inevitable. World-rending violence remained an all-too-possible destination of the superpower contest, right up to its astonishing end in 1989.” Unfortunately, instead of reflecting on the Cold War as a costly and dangerous near-catastrophe, a lot of U.S. policymakers chose to view the end as a triumphalist story about how the U.S. “won” the conflict. Kennan made no secret that he held this triumphalism in contempt:

That the conflict should now be formally ended is a fit occasion for satisfaction but also for sober re-examination of the part we took in its origin and long continuation. It is not a fit occasion for pretending that the end of it was a great triumph for anyone, and particularly not one for which any American political party could properly claim principal credit.

Now that same triumphalism still influences how our policymakers talk and think about potential conflicts with Russia and China, and it encourages them to take increasingly reckless and hardline positions when the U.S. is dealing with these other states.

We can’t know for sure what Kennan would make of the current courting of great power rivalries with nuclear-armed states, but we can assume based on his writings that he would be horrified by it and he would warn us about the repetition of so many of the same errors from the early years of the Cold War. Whether we fully appreciate it or not, the U.S. and the world were exceptionally fortunate to survive the Cold War without experiencing another great power war, and that outcome should not be taken for granted. Deterrence holds until it doesn’t, and we should not assume that direct conflict with nuclear-armed states can be kept “limited.” Courting new great power conflict in the twenty-first century involves the same dangers that it involved four decades ago when Kennan issued his warning, but today there is much less understanding of what such a conflict would be like and therefore much less caution about fighting one.

1. Wyne, America’s Great Power Opportunity: p. 47.

2. Kennan, The Fateful Alliance: p. 258.