George F. Kennan : an American life

by John Lewis Gaddis

  Kennan’s strategy would depend, therefore, on the extent to which he could embed it in the minds of others. His policy papers, like his lectures, were a starting point, for strategies require coherence. But they must also inspire confidence, overcome resistance, and adapt to the unexpected. If they fail to take root, they wither. Kennan’s task was now as much cultivation as conception: the farm had prepared him for it, arguably, about as well as the war college had.

  VI.

  The next set of issues the Policy Planning Staff faced, after getting the Marshall Plan under way, arose as aftershocks of the British withdrawal from the eastern Mediterranean. That unexpected development had left a new power vacuum in an area of strategic importance to the United States, not as the result of an enemy’s defeat in war but from an ally’s weakness in the first years of peace. The danger was the one Kennan had warned of in Western Europe: that the Soviet Union, working through the international communist movement, might fill the void, bringing southeastern Europe and potentially also the Near East within its orbit. The test for his strategy was whether minimalism would meet this threat. Could the Truman administration limit its response chiefly to economic assistance, while waiting for internal contradictions within the Soviet empire to halt its expansion? Or would something more be required?

  Lovett posed the question bluntly in the late summer of 1947: what would happen if communists took power in Italy or Greece? The staff papers Kennan produced acknowledged the seriousness of the situation. The Italian Communist Party, now the strongest force in Italian politics, would, if it came to power, menace the interests of the United States in Western Europe, the eastern Mediterranean, even in South America, where there was a large Italian emigrant population. A communist victory in the Greek civil war would produce similar results in Europe. In either instance, the Soviet Union would have extended its political and military control “beyond the high-water mark” it had reached at the end of the war. But constraints on American power limited what might be done: the United States could not, for example, send troops to fight the communists inside Greece or Italy, for that would require deploying forces it did not have to battlefields it would not have chosen. It could, however, secure air and naval bases in those countries while strengthening the Sixth Fleet, which already dominated the Mediterranean.

  The idea, Kennan explained, would be to make it clear “that extensions of Soviet military power, by means of concealed aggression, ... will be countered by corresponding advances of the bases of U.S. strategic power.” This is what he had in mind when he spoke to the National War College students of “counter-pressures.” These would not, as the “X” article had implied, correspond precisely to those undertaken by Moscow; rather, “concealed aggression” would produce “corresponding advances” in overall American military strength in the region, which could then be used to exploit Soviet weaknesses. Local communists might destabilize a country internally, but only at the cost of attracting greater U.S. air and naval power into the region, something Stalin could hardly favor. The strategy would require patience and steady nerves, for getting Kremlin leaders to see that their ambitions endangered their interests might take months or even years. It would, however, remain within the limits of American capabilities. It was, in this sense, still minimalist.24

  So too was another Kennan recommendation for containing national communist movements. The Central Intelligence Agency’s legal advisers were not sure that Congress, when it established that organization in the summer of 1947, had meant for it to engage in covert activities. “[W]e are handicapped,” Kennan told presidential aide Clark Clifford in August, “by the lack of ability to use the techniques of undercover political operation[s] which are being used against us.” Kennan admitted to Forrestal, now the first secretary of defense, that the American people would probably never approve of policies relying on such methods: “I do feel, however, that there are cases where it might be essential to our security that we fight fire with fire.” Italy and Greece were among them.25

  For the most part, the Truman administration followed Kennan’s advice. Italy was the first topic the National Security Council took up when it met for the first time on September 26, 1947, and PPS/9—Kennan’s paper—provided the basis for discussion. NSC 1/1, “The Position of the United States with Respect to Italy,” incorporated with only minor revisions the arguments he had made, and in December Truman approved it. When American troops were in fact withdrawn, Kennan suggested a presidential warning that the United States would not allow the overthrow of Italian democracy. Truman issued the statement on the thirteenth: if it became apparent that the freedom and independence of Italy were being threatened, directly or indirectly, the United States would be “obliged to consider what measures would be appropriate for the maintenance of peace and security.”26

  Five days later the president authorized the CIA, “within the limit of available funds,” to conduct “covert psychological operations designed to counteract Soviet and Soviet-inspired activities which ... are designed to discredit and defeat the United States in its endeavors to promote world peace and security.” Kennan had not been alone in favoring this—pressures to undertake disavowable or “black” measures were converging from within the new agency and from Forrestal as well. It was at Kennan’s insistence, however, that the NSC was given the authority to review all such operations: “We would want to examine the situation in all its aspects in case of any suggested operation, and to judge each case strictly on its merits.” And Kennan was the State Department representative on the NSC staff.27

  Meanwhile Kennan was battling his former superior Loy Henderson—now director of the Office of Near Eastern and African Affairs—over what to do about Greece, where the war against the communist guerrillas was going badly. Henderson wanted to send American troops to show “that we will, if necessary, resort to force to meet aggression.” Kennan objected strongly: “We might find ourselves in a difficult position from which it would be hard to withdraw and equally hard to keep other nations from withdrawing the contingents they had contributed.” The argument extended into January 1948, with Marshall in the end settling it in Kennan’s favor by ruling that before any commitment of troops could be made,

  we would have to have a definition of the purpose of any action involving armed forces, an assessment of what would be required in the way of forces, and of what logistical support would be needed, an estimate of the probable effects on [the] domestic economy and on public opinion in this country, and a judgment as to whether we would be prepared to accept these implications.

  The language was tough enough to have been Kennan’s, as indeed it was: he took the notes in the NSC meeting at which Lovett presented Marshall’s views.28

  On the future of the British mandate in Palestine, however, Kennan agreed with Henderson. Awarded by the League of Nations after World War I, it had placed Great Britain in the position of mediating between the Arab and Jewish inhabitants of the region—never an easy task, but an especially difficult one in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust because the international Zionist movement was determined at last to establish a Jewish state. Frustrated and overstretched, the British turned the issue over to the United Nations in February 1947, at the same time that they announced their decision to withdraw from Greece and Turkey. The General Assembly, the following November, voted with American support to partition Palestine between the Arabs and the Jews, but the Arabs immediately rejected this two-state solution. The question confronting the United States, then, was whether to help the United Nations impose partition against the will of the Arabs—a decision that might well require the use of military force—or to seek some other outcome.

  Kennan and Henderson adamantly favored the latter approach. “Any assistance the U.S. might give to the enforcement of partition,” the Policy Planning Staff concluded on January 20, 1948, would produce “deep-seated antagonism” throughout the Muslim world over many years. That could endanger military base rights an
d access to oil, which might in turn threaten the success of the Marshall Plan. The Soviet Union, whether it supported the Arabs, the Jews, or both at once, could only gain as a result. Unless this policy was reversed, Kennan added in his diary a week later, there would be no alternative to taking over major military and police responsibility for maintaining a state of affairs in Palestine “violently resented by the whole Arab world.” Americans could not be “the keepers and moral guardians of all the peoples in this world.”29

  Here, too, Kennan prevailed, although not easily. Dean Rusk, director of the State Department’s Office of United Nations Affairs, thought him too pessimistic about partition. Marshall and Lovett advised caution, aware of the objections supporters of Zionism would make to any change in policy. Kennan persisted, however, and on February 11 he produced a revised staff paper that boiled the options down to three: full support for partition, whatever the international consequences; a shift to neutrality, which would make it hard to justify existing commitments in Greece and Italy; or some form of international trusteeship for an undivided Palestine, a decision that would preclude the formation of a Jewish state but “would regain in large measure our strategically important position in the area.” Boxed in by unpalatable alternatives, Marshall took the third recommendation to Truman, who approved it early in March—or, at least, appeared to have done so.30

  With respect to Italy, Greece, and Palestine, then, Kennan maneuvered skillfully. He fought off pressures to send troops to these regions, while showing how the careful expansion of American naval and air capabilities might cause the Soviet Union to restrain the activities of local communists. He encouraged the CIA to develop its own covert means of countering those activities, while arranging to supervise how this would be done. And he retained throughout the Marshall Plan’s focus on economic recovery as the principal instrument of containment. It was—or, at least, it seemed to be at the time—an impressive performance.

  VII.

  There was, nevertheless, an improvisational character to most of the Policy Planning Staff’s work in 1947. Because it had inherited existing crises in Western Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Near East, there had not been time, Kennan acknowledged, to “come up for air, look around us, and attempt to take stock of America’s world position as a whole.”31 He tried to do that hastily in the global survey he prepared for Marshall in November, but the first region for which the staff was able to initiate its own planning was East Asia, a part of the world not yet fully caught up in the emerging Soviet-American rivalry. Once again Kennan dominated the planning process, but the process refined his own thinking as it progressed.

  When Kennan wrote of the need to develop independent power on the Eurasian landmass as quickly as possible, he was echoing an anxiety felt by British and American strategists since the completion of the Trans-Siberian Railway in the early twentieth century: the possibility that a single hostile state—whether German or Russian—might someday control all the territory from the English Channel to the Pacific Ocean. That would neutralize the advantages maritime strength had long given Great Britain and the United States. It was one of the reasons Kennan worried so much about the war having left power vacuums along the periphery of the Soviet Union.32 But as he thought more about this, he began to see that not all such vacuums were dangerous. The critical issue was how territory might be used, not how much an enemy might rule.

  Kennan came to this view by way of China, which he regarded as more likely to suck in power than to be a base from which to project it. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had called, in June 1947, for a major effort to rescue Chiang Kai-shek: Mao Zedong’s forces were “tools of Soviet policy,” the chiefs insisted, and if the Truman Doctrine was to be effective, the administration must apply it consistently wherever Soviet expansionism was occurring. Skeptical but still sensitive about his mediation mission in China having failed, Marshall took no position on the proposal, suggesting instead that Truman send General Albert C. Wedemeyer, who had served as an aide to Chiang during the war, to assess his current prospects. Upon his return, Wedemeyer endorsed the chiefs’ views, so Kennan volunteered to have the Policy Planning Staff do its own study. Marshall, with relief, accepted the offer.33

  On November 3, Kennan advised him that while a Chinese Communist victory would be a serious setback, it would “not be a catastrophe.” Mao could hardly rule all of China while deferring to Moscow; and only massive American assistance—more than was contemplated for all of Western Europe—could save the Nationalists. China was not the place, then, to confront the Soviet Union, despite the fact that Chiang’s highly vocal supporters in the United States would demand doing so. The Truman administration should extend only the aid necessary to appease these domestic critics and, if possible, to prevent any immediate collapse of the Nationalist regime. It should not go beyond that point.34

  Marshall presented this recommendation to Truman, who quietly accepted it. Early in 1948 the president asked Congress for $570 million in nonmilitary assistance for China, only slightly more than what he had requested a year earlier for Greece and Turkey, and much less than the $17 billion he was seeking for the Marshall Plan. After reducing the appropriation still further, Congress approved the China Aid Act in April. Kennan’s role in cutting off aid to the Chinese Nationalists—for that was what these decisions amounted to—had been pivotal. He seized the initiative after Marshall passed it to him, he stood up to the Joint Chiefs and to Wedemeyer, and in doing so he carried his opposition to the Truman Doctrine from the realm of theory into that of policy. Most important, he did it with Truman’s approval.35

  Kennan’s rationale for what he admitted was a “plague on both your houses” strategy reflected a new calculation: that hostility, divorced from capability, posed no danger. The United States must never again be threatened from Asia, he told a Pentagon audience in January. But only the industrial regions of Siberia, Manchuria, northern China, and northern Korea could provide bases from which to mount an attack. All were already under actual or probable Soviet control. Politically immature, economically desperate, no other mainland peoples—including the rest of the Chinese—could, by themselves, pose any danger. The Truman administration could, therefore, safely abandon Chiang Kai-shek. It could even remove American occupation forces from southern Korea unless that territory was deemed “of sufficient strategic importance to retain.” Kennan doubted that it would be.

  Japan, however, was different. It had shown itself to have dangerous capabilities, but these were now under American control. Disarming this former enemy was of course necessary, but it was just as vital to see that a demilitarized Japan did not fall within a Soviet sphere of influence: that would require “a stable, internally strong Japanese government.” Current occupation policies had focused too much on punishment and not enough on what was to follow. Adjustments were therefore necessary: the United States should commit itself to defending the country while strengthening its economy. It should “dispense with bromides about democratization” in Japan and in “the island world generally.”36

  Herein lay the origins of what later became known as the “defensive perimeter” strategy: that the United States would use its air and naval strength to hold islands, while liquidating positions on the Asian mainland. “[W]e are greatly over-extended . . . in that area,” Kennan explained in PPS/23, a comprehensive review of commitments he completed for Marshall in February 1948. Americans had clung too long to the idea of remaking China, an end far beyond their means. The Policy Planning Staff should determine what parts of East Asia are “absolutely vital to our security,” and the United States should then ensure that these remain “in hands which we can control or rely on.”

  Kennan framed this recommendation within the need to choose between universal and particularist approaches in foreign policy. Universalism sought to apply the same principles everywhere. It favored procedures embodied in the United Nations and in other international organizations. It smoothed over the national peculiarit
ies and conflicting ideologies that confused and irritated so many Americans. Its appeal lay in its promise to “relieve us of the necessity of dealing with the world as it is.” Particularism, in contrast, questioned “legalistic concepts.” It assumed appetites for power that only “counter-force” could control. It valued alliances, but only if based on communities of interest, not on the “abstract formalism” of obligations that might preclude pursuing national defense and global stability. Universalism entangled interests in cumbersome parliamen-tarianism. Particularism encouraged purposefulness, coordination, and economy of effort—qualities the nation would need “if we are to be sure of accomplishing our purposes.”37

  Kennan had not set out to become a philosopher, but his job was turning him into one. He was making the point, in PPS/23, that while ideals existed in people’s minds, capabilities determined what states could do. Ends for this reason were infinitely expandable; means could never be. Calculating relationships between ends and means required calibration: there was no place here for the untethered aspirations Americans had traditionally floated above the world, before they took over the responsibility for running the world. Now they would have to learn to operate like everyone else. The argument paralleled Hans Morgenthau’s in his classic text, Politics Among Nations, the first edition of which appeared in the fall of 1948. Within the government, Kennan was ahead of him.38

  VIII.

  He was still enough of a Foreign Service officer, though, to distrust desk-bound perspectives. “The Director and members of the Staff must do more travelling and get about more,” Kennan advised Marshall late in 1947. There was real danger that their isolation might separate them from reality in their work and cause them to “cease to have their feet on the ground.”39