LET HISTORY JUDGE THE FATHER OF CONTAINMENT [ Updated]

The passing of George F. Kennan has not gone unremarked in the blogosphere and the MSM but it was a curiously underwhelming reaction to the death of the author of the most important grand strategy in American history since Winfield Scott’s Anaconda Plan. Perhaps, had Kennan died in 1992, the posthumous commemoration would have matched his achievement. By dying at the venerable age of 101 in 2005, Kennan lived to the point where the end of the Cold War had become, to the iPod generation, ancient history. Lumped vaguely together with Vietnam, Fireside Chats and perhaps the Gettysburg Address.

The most intellectually suitable response to Kennan’s death that I read anywhere can be found at The Glittering Eye. Dave Schuyler undertook a serious examination of Kennan’s ideas and contrasted them with those of Walter Lippman, Containment’s most reasoned critic and the godfather of modern punditry. It was a superb post. From a historigraphic standpoint, I must strongly recommend the efforts of independent scholar Russil Wvong and Marc Schulman of The American Future, both of whom offered an extensive set of links and bibliographical resources for those who wish to experience George Kennan’s view firsthand.

A noticeable and negative ” revisionist” tendency appeared in many of the Kennan articles and posts as writers felt compelled to qualify Kennan’s ideas with his pessemistic outlook and misanthropic, reactionary views on democracy. Daniel Drezner commented:

“Even when his writing was clear, Kennan’s foreign policy vision was not always 20/20. He opposed NATO expansion in the nineties, convinced it would have disastrous consequences. When he was in power, he bitterly railed against congressional influence over foreign affairs, and then changed his tune later in life. Kennan never gave a flying fig about the developing world, believing that it never would develop. Kennan’s narrow world vision consisted only of the five centers of industrial activity — the US, USSR, Germany, Great Britain, and Japan. By the early nineties, when he wrote Around the Cragged Hill, he clearly believed the U.S. to be doomed to decline and devoid of “intelligent and discriminating administration.” And the less said about Kennan’s view of non-WASPs, the better. “

From the Chicago Tribune, historian David Engerman wrote:

“But Kennan’s most curious writing in the 1930s–and the most infamous among the large circle of academic Kennanists–was an essay called “The Prerequisites.” It argued that providing the vote to women, immigrants, African-Americans had degraded American politics (and perhaps American women). Better, he thought, to have a group of statesmen care for these “dependents” than allow them to control their own destiny, let alone their nation’s. He seemed surprised when the essay came in for criticism in a dissertation in the early 1970s; only then did he remove “The Prerequisites” from Princeton’s archive.

But by the late 1970s, Kennan proposed that a Council of State, selected by the U.S. president from a slate of worthies, look after America’s interests.Kennan’s anti-Democratic impulse underlay his foreign-policy positions. His call for “realism” in foreign relations–acting solely on the basis of national interest–was a plea for the fickle American public to leave diplomacy to diplomats like himself better able to discern the country’s interests.”

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