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Wednesday, February 25, 2004

Mr X turns 100. The NY Times has a piece on the celebrations for George F. Kennan's one hundreth birthday at Princeton this week. Kennan, of course, is the diplomat and historian who is credited with the formulation of the policy of containment that shaped the Cold War period. Kennan career is one that many diplomats and foreign policy intellectual surely covet.

In his remarks at the event, Secretary of State Colin Powell, had this to say of Kennan:
Some men achieve fame as witnesses to great events. Some men are renowned because they have participated in seminal events. And some men are venerated for their talent to interpret such events. But George Kennan has been all three: witness to history, shaper of history, and interpreter of history.

As the charge d'affaire at the U.S. embassy in Moscow (under Ambassador Averill Harriman), Kennan wrote in February 1946 what is probably the most significant diplomatic cable of the twentieth century. The Long Telegram, as it has come to be known, was a eight thousand word essay that described the Soviet style of rule and how the U.S. should respond to Soviet foreign policy. A few years later, Kennan penned the famous "Mr X" article -- probably, along with Huntington's "The Clash of Civilizations" and Fukuyama's "The End of History", one of the most important essays ever published by Foreign Affairs. "The Sources of Soviet Conduct", as the article is actually titled, caused quite a stir when it was discoved that the author was the new head of the Policy Planning Board, which to some minds gave it the air of official government policy. The history of the article is worth repeating. The following is from the introductory essay to the special of Foreign Affairs titled Containment: 40 Years Later, published in Spring 1987:

It was only a series of chance circumstances that led to publication of the article under a pseudonym. A career diplomat, George Kennan had been writing and speaking for over a decade on broad questions of the Soviet Union, its foreign policy and the American response. Within the government he was famous for his "Long Telegram" written from his embassy post in Moscow in early 1946, which set forth his analysis of the prospects for postwar Russia. He spent an academic sabbatical at the National War College in 1946-47, continuing with his lectures. At the request of Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal in December 1946, Kennan prepared for him an informal paper entitled "Psychological Background of Soviet Foreign Policy"; this was the original title of what would become the X article. In early January Kennan spoke at a small study group of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York; the topic was "The Soviet Way of Thought and Its Effect on Soviet Foreign Policy." Although Kennan spoke only from notes, the confidential record of the meeting contains the following passage:
"Turning to the connotation of those features of the Soviet way of thought, Mr. Kennan found no cause for despair. He thought that other Russian traits of character made it perfectly possible for the U.S. and other countries to contain Russian power, if it were done courteously and in a non-provocative way, long enough so that there might come about internal changes in Russia."

Hamilton Fish Armstrong, the editor of Foreign Affairs, was a participant in the study group. A few days later Armstrong wrote to Kennan soliciting an article along the lines of his presentation to the Council. Kennan replied that the paper he had just written for Forrestal might be suitable, but in light of his new State Department position he could not be identified as the author. Armstrong expressed some hesitation about publishing an anonymous article but wrote a memo to his assistant editor, Byron Dexter, that Kennan's view was "exceptionally interesting and though painful to the Soviets is not crude or unfair in spirit." Dexter replied: "I think that Kennan's ideas on Russia are so good that our readers should be given a chance to share them and this overbalances the undesirable factor" of the author's anonymity. In a letter to Kennan, Dexter suggested that the byline simply be "X." Over the course of the next weeks the manuscript was cleared in the State Department, received by Foreign Affairs, lightly edited and published in the issue of July 1947.


It should be remembered, therefore, that Kennan's article was originally intended as a response to a specific question posed to him by the Secretary of the Navy. It is perhaps because what was intended to be read narrowly was interpreted by the public as a broad restatement of the Truman Doctrine's application with respect to the Soviet Union, that Kennan's original idea of containment has been distorted. Kennan's concept of containment was quite limited, and required the United States to identify its primary security interests. Kennan saw these as the Western Hemisphere, non-communist Europe, Japan and the Middle East, and thus the U.S. needed to contain any Soviet encroachment or threat upon those interests, preferably through economic coercion and the use of local anti-communist movements. That the doctrine was broadened to include active military measures upset Kennan. He has said, "If, then, I was the author in 1947 of a 'doctrine' of containment, it was a doctrine that lost much of its rationale with teh death of Stalin and with the development of the Soviet-Chinese conflict. I emphatically deny the paternity of any efforts to invoke that doctrine today in situations to which it has, and can have, no proper relevance."

The vagueness of the X article is a flaw that John Lewis Gaddis returns to repeatedly in his discussions of the policy of containment. Gaddis is a professor of history at Yale University, and the authorised biographer of Kennan, although the volume will not appear until after Kennan's death. Gaddis will come out with a book about United States foreign policy in March, Surprise, Security and the American Experience, in which he describes what he sees as the three biggest shifts in foreign policy thinking in US history. In interviews with the Council on Foreign Relations and the Boston Globe, Kennan describes how he believes that President Bush has brought about the most recent shift, following the shifts that occurred under the presidencies of Monroe and FDR. The guys over at OxBlog over a good discussion of where Gaddis fits in in the neoconservative circle.

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