Kennan Attacks Asian Containment As a 'National Inadvertance' Urges Rational, Deliberate Policy

(Following are excerpts, from a speech given by University Fellow George F. Kennan Wednesday in Sanders Theater. -- ed.)

...What I am talking about is the guiding motivation of foreign policy at any given time: what people think they are doing when they create it; what purposes they think they are serving; to what principles they believe themselves to be conforming.

Backward Glance

When one glances back at the past, one occasionally sees clear and coherent elements of concept in the thinking of the Federalist statesmen, and some fairly clear ones in the thinking of some of their successors down through the middle of the XIX century.

Obscurity--obscurantism, if you will--began to creep in, it seems to me, towards the end of the last century: as the task of rounding out our territory on this continent was completed, as the frontier disappeared, as those dangers of new European activity in the New World that had attended the Napoleonic wars and their aftermath receded into the past.

With that great transition, there crept into the ideas of Americans about foreign policy something that had not been there in the earlier days: a histrionic note, a note of self-consciousness, of pretention; a desire not just to be something but to appear as something, to appear as something greater perhaps than one actually was; the desire to play a role for the sake of playing a role, and to be seen by others as playing it; a desire to compel others to associate themselves with the ritual of self-esteem and self-glorification that was now becoming a regular feature of the rhetoric of American public life.

Imperialism

This manifested itself in various ways. It manifested itself on the one hand in the imperialism of the turn of the century: in the wave of expansionist fervor that carried us into possession of Hawaii and the Philippines, Puerto Rico and the Canala Zone: all places not contiguous to our national territory. It manifested itself also, strangely enough, in the growth among many Americans of a peculiar emotional and sentimental preoccupation with China and the Asian mainland--a preoccupation quite divorced from considerations of real national interest. And it manifested itself also in a curious enthusiasm for the establishment of legalistic criteria for the solution of international problems.

Statesmanship

To what extent this outlook came to dominate the mind of American statesmanship will become evident if we recall that just in the thirty-five years from 1898 to 1933 the United States government negotiated, signed and ratified a total of 97 international agreements, most of them bilateral ones, providing for the settlement of international disputes by arbitration and conciliation. This enormous diplomatic effort occupied much of the time of such eminent Secretaries of State as John Hay, Elihu Root, William Jennings Bryan, and Henry Stimson. The measure of realism behind it may be judged from the fact that the number of disputes actually arbitrated in subsequent years in connection with these treaties was exactly two, and for these acts of arbitration, the treaties themselves were in no way necessary.

Now all this, too, was concept, if you will--but concept founded on a rather childish view of world realities--founded also, I suspect, on a certain gratification of our self-esteem, insofar as it was so nice to see ourselves, high-mindedly devoted to the enthronement in international affairs of the principles of a law and orderly behavior, in contrast to the wicked powers of Europe, bent on intrigue, aggrandizement, and various other sorts of wickedness.

This outlook had, as an ideal for the future, its attractive, its appealing, sides; but intervening events have demonstrated, if they have demonstrated anything at all, that it is wholly inadequate as an approach to the great problems of twentieth-century international life.

Momentous

It was inconceivable that the issues of any war in which we>were involved could be less than momentous and decisive for the entire future of humanity. And out of this grew, then, the characteristic emotionalism of militancy--an emotionalism to which the democratic society, with its incorrigible tendency to self-love, is particularly prone: a state of collective hysteria in which you see your own side as the repository of all virtue, the adversary--on the other hand--as the embodiment of all that is evil and inhuman.

From this there logically flows, in turn, a conviction that victory, precisely because it will be triumph of all that is good over all that is good over all that is bad, will make all things possible--will open the gates to a new Utopia, whereas anything less than total victory would be a shameful compromise with the devil--a betrayal of all that is worth while. In his euphoria visions and concepts of the future peace become corrupted both by illusions of virtue and omnipotence addressed to oneself and equally unrealistic punitive aspirations unfortunately the conduct of the war effort, but interferes in the most serious way with any rational approach to the problems of devising a new and durable status quo to take the place of the one that is bound to be destroyed by the great upheaval of the war itself.

After the First World War, we were able to retire into the dreary isolationism of the 1920's. After World War II, however, this was not possible. The Russian Communists now suddenly were recognized as a hostile and expansionist force.

Policy Planning

It was in these circumstances that the Policy Planning Staff of the Department of State, of which I was the first director, was established exactly twenty years ago this month; and it was to the filling of this need for a new rationale of foreign policy that the Staff directed its efforts over the three years that I held the position. What came out of it was something that came to be popularly talked about as the "doctrine of containment"; but that was the inclination to look at things carefully. What we really tried to do in the Policy Planning Staff was to evolve a workable concept of American foreign policy in the given conditions.

Let me emphasize that in opposing this sort of communist expansionism we did not take appeal to moral or legal norms. What interested us was not whether these communist political efforts in western Europe were moral or immoral, not whether they were legal or illegal. It was enough for us that they existed, and that they were dangerous to American interests.

Legal, Moral

Precisely because we did not attempt to judge these things on the basis of legal or moral principle, we were in a position to discriminate geographically in assessing the degree of danger these communist efforts presented for us. We were at liberty to regard the possibility of a communist take-over in one of the world's great industrial countries as more dangerous to us than a similar take-over in a small weak country whose resources could scarcely play an important part in the power balance, regardless of whose grounds they were. We were at liberty to concentrate on the Communist threat in areas that seemed to us important, to ignore it, or react less decisively, in areas that did not.

And just as we did not see the danger of the spread of communism as a military attack across borders, so we did not see the answer to it in military intervention on our part. What seemed to us desirable was to stimulate and encourage the rise of indigenous political resistance to communist pressures in the threatened countries.

I believed that the United States could stimulate effective resistance to communist pressures elsewhere only to the extent that it observed a certain prudent detachement, endeavoring to release useful energies and impulses in others, not trying to create them or to insert our own in their place.

It seemed, furthermore, to us in the Planning Staff, that if our efforts of assistance to others, particularly economic assistance, were to be effective, they must not be directed, or appear to be directed--only or even primarily to the negative objective of resisting communism. This would merely give the recipient peoples the impression that they were being made pawns in a great-power rivalry, and it would undermine their sense of self-interest.

Never Understood

Needless to say, this concept was never fully understood by those who had the power of decision in matters of American policy. One by one, its essential elements were abanonded over the coming years. Some remain casualties to a more military concept of the cold war; some--to a degree on the part of leading political figures for more pretentious and impressive formulas of American objectives; some to a sentimental belief in the great destiny of American on the mainland of Asia; some to the domestic-political interests of favored allies.

The Vietnam involvement, as you know, marches under the same semantic banner as that under which our Planning Staff marched just twenty years ago this spring, when it faced the problems I have been discussing: namely, the banner of the containment of communism. So similar is the stated purpose that I sometimes a find myself being asked the puzzled question: "But you are the author of the doctrine of containment; why are you not enthusiastic about Vietnam?"

Our action in Vietnam today is justified precisely on the grounds of legal and moral principles for which a universal validity is bespoken. What we are fighting in Vietnam is, we are told, a reprehensible mode of behavior known as "aggression," contrasting with something else, which we are defending, known as "freedom." We would presumably be morally obliged to oppose "aggression" by force of arms wherever it raised its ugly head. The specifics of the situation, geographic, political or otherwise, are irrelevant. This commits us to action on the Asiastic mainland as much as in any other part of the globe.

Administration's View

Now there might be those among you who would argue that the...Administration's view might be the right one, and our view of 1947 a wrong one. Theoretically this is quite possible. Actually, I think it is not the case. In the first place, everyone knows that our entry into the Vietnam involvement did not come as a result of rational reflection -- that it was rather the result of a long exercise in national inadvertence--of a long series of partial decisions, none of them taken with any clear comprehension of the depths of involvement to which they were bringing us.

End

Gentlemen: I do not know--none of us can know--whether our involvement in Vietnam is going to end in such a way as to permit us to have another chance to construct foreign policy on the basis of concept. It is difficult to conceive, personally, of any outcome of our present efforts and approaches that would be less than disastrous.

But I have seen too much of international affairs to suppose that just because no favorable solution to a problem is visible or conceivable at a given moment, none will ever be found; and I am too well aware of my own tendency to pessimism to place full trust in my poor powers of analysis.

It remains my hope that if the Vietnam situation takes a turn that permits us once again to conduct our affairs on the basis of deliberate intention, rather than just yielding ourselves to be ship-sawed by the dynamics of a situation beyond our control, we will take up once more the quest for concept as a basis for national policy.

And I hope that when we do, what we will try to evolve is concept based on a modest unsparing view of ourselves; on a careful examination of our national interest, devoid of all utopian and universalistic pretentions; and on a sober, discriminating view of the world beyond our borders--a view that takes account of the element of relativity in all antagonisms and friendships, that sees in others neither angels nor devils--neither heroes nor blackguards; a concept, finally, which accepts it as our purpose not to abolish all violence and injustice from the workings of international society but to confine those inevitable concommitants of the human predicament to levels of intensity that do not threaten the very existence of civilization.

Resources

If concept could be based on these principles, if we could apply to its creation that enormous resources of intelligence and sincerity that do exist in this country, and if we could refine it and popularize it through the processes of rational discussion and debate on the efficacy of which, in reality, our whole political tradition is predicated, then I could see this country some day making, as it has never made to date, a contribution to world stability and to human progress commensurate with its commanding physical power. To one who has given a good part of his life to the problems of American foreign policy that, my friends, would be a wonderful day