A second principle derived from the first: that containment meant contracting American aspirations, not expanding them. The resources available to the United States—material and intellectual—were more limited than anyone had understood them to be at the end of the war. As a result, a serious gap had developed between intentions and capabilities.
Perhaps we should never have tried to organize all the world into one association for peace.... Perhaps the whole idea of world peace has been a premature, unworkable grandiose form of daydreaming; perhaps we should have held up as a goal: “Peace if possible, and insofar as it effects our interests.”
That interest lay in balancing power within the existing international system. If the United States was to avoid the overextension that was already afflicting the Soviet Union, then it should bolster the strength of allies in such a way as not to deplete its own.
The Marshall Plan’s purpose, therefore, was not to create American satellites. Rather, it sought to encourage the Europeans to make maximum use of their resources, before drawing upon those of the United States. This approach would promote self-reliance, distinguish Washington’s policy from Moscow ’s, and respect the interests of American taxpayers, who would be footing the bill for whatever assistance the Europeans did receive. Independence, not dependence, was to be the goal, and the effort expended in seeking it should be as little as possible.
That meant rethinking relationships with defeated enemies. The American occupation of part of Germany and all of Japan, Kennan reminded his students, was still focusing on prosecuting war criminals, dismantling industrial facilities, extracting reparations, restricting trade, and reeducating formerly authoritarian societies. There had been little coordination with the strategy of containment: the United States would need German and Japanese allies in resisting the Soviet Union. Even if that were not the case, to impose one’s will on a conquered people “means eventually that you fall heir, unless you are very careful, to all the problems and responsibilities of that people.” Americans were not equipped “to handle successfully for any length of time [those] other than our own.”
Beyond Western Europe and Japan, there was little the United States could or should do. Marshall had spent all of 1946 trying to mediate the civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists in China, Kennan pointed out, but the country was probably still going to fall under Mao Zedong’s control. “If I thought for a moment that the precedent of Greece and Turkey obliged us to try to do the same thing in China, I would throw up my hands and say we had better have a whole new approach to the affairs of the world.” A communist China would not necessarily be a Soviet satellite. The more likely prospect—here Kennan reflected the views of John Paton Davies, his mentor on all things Chinese—was that “if you let the Russians alone in China, they will come a cropper on that problem just as everybody else has for hundreds of years.”
A third principle, consistent with Kennan’s emphasis on self-restraint and the contraction of responsibilities, was that expectations themselves could be a form of power. Stalin’s self-confidence, which had so alarmed Marshall, rested on the belief that capitalism faced a new crisis. The task for the United States, then, was to rebuild self-confidence in those parts of the world most vital to it, while shaking that of the Soviet Union. Truth and reason, combined with economic assistance, were the only weapons available with which to do this. Employed effectively, they would “strengthen the resistance of other people to the lure of unreality, so powerful in its effect on those who are confused and frustrated and who see no escape from their difficulties in the formidable mass of reality itself.” Their use, however, would require planning, and it was not at all clear that the American political system was up to that task: “Great modern democracies are apparently incapable of dealing with the subtleties and contradictions of power relationships.”
A fourth Kennan principle, therefore, was that—given the gravity of the situation—“there can be far greater concentration of authority within the operating branches of our Government without detriment to the essentials of democracy.” This would be federalism, not fascism: had not Hamilton pointed out that “the vigour of government is essential to the security of liberty”? Containment required “a more courageous acceptance of the fact that power must be delegated and delegated power must be respected.” As a consequence, “many of our ideas about democracy may have to be modified.”
Kennan concluded his June 18 lecture by thanking the students for the confidence they had shown him: “This experience has given me much more than many of you suspect.”3 The National War College had been—and with less frequency would continue to be—a place that allowed floating ideas before bright people on a confidential basis without worrying about Lippmann-like public critiques. But there was a greater distance than maps might indicate between neat geometric weekdays at Fort McNair and crisis-ridden weekends at the Pennsylvania farm: now, for Kennan, all the weekdays were weekends.
II.
The distance between theory and reality revealed itself almost at once as Kennan’s insistence that the Europeans design the Marshall Plan began to run into difficulties. representatives from the sixteen states expecting American assistance—minus the Soviet Union and the Eastern European satellites whose participation Stalin had forbidden—convened in Paris on July 12, 1947, to work out the amounts required and how the program would be administered. Washington’s plan, Kennan reminded Marshall, was to “have no plan.” But the United States did have certain requirements.
It should consider only proposals that would enable the Europeans to exist without charity so that “they can buy from us” and “will have enough self-confidence to withstand outside pressures.” More fundamental, however, was the traditional concept of American security, which had assumed a Europe of free states subservient to no single great power. “If this premise were to be invalidated, there would have to be a basic revision of the whole concept of our international position,” which might demand sacrifices far beyond those required by a program for European reconstruction. “But in addition, the United States, in common with most of the rest of the world, would suffer a cultural and spiritual loss incalculable in its long-term effects.” It was of course important to respect European autonomy. The American people, however, were “bound to be influenced by whether the European nations are doing a good job of helping themselves.”4
By the middle of August, it was becoming clear that they were not. The Paris conferees estimated that their countries would need $29.2 billion over the next four years—a figure well above what the Americans thought reasonable—and probably more after that. Even worse, there was no common plan for spending the money: the Europeans had simply added up each state’s projected recovery costs without considering the efficiencies to be gained, or the political benefits to be achieved, by integrating their economies. These deficiencies led Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Will Clayton to conclude that “there is no other way to deal with this situation than to impose certain necessary conditions.”5
But Robert M. Lovett, Acheson’s replacement as under secretary of state, still hoped to salvage something of the idea that the Europeans should take the lead, so he sent Kennan on a quick trip to Paris to see what might be done. “I was very interested to meet him,” Sir Oliver Franks, who headed the British delegation, recalled. “What struck me was the combination of rational, lucid exposition with controlled passion.” Having “agonized within himself,” Kennan came to a view “which I regarded as essentially intuitive, and then proceeded to argue with great elegance from the premises he had intuited.”6
Geopolitical and economic interests precluded abandoning the Europeans altogether, Kennan believed, while limited resources and domestic political constraints ruled out giving them everything they wanted. Within those boundaries, there was room to maneuver. The State Department could work behind the scenes to reshape the Europeans’ report. It could then treat that document as a basis for discussion, whi
le deciding for itself what recommendations to make to the president and Congress. And it could include among these a program of interim aid without conditions, even as the conditions for a larger four-year plan were being worked out. In short, “we would listen to all that the Europeans had to say, but in the end we would not ask them, we would just tell them what they would get.”7
Self-restraint, then, had turned out to be neither “fitting nor efficacious.” In recommending its temporary abandonment, Kennan was acknowledging a paradox of planning: that short-term actions can proceed in opposite directions from long-term objectives and still be consistent with them. Only telling the Europeans what they would get would allow them to know what they should request. Only unconditional emergency aid would make extended conditional aid possible. Only by respecting European viewpoints could the Americans hope to change them.
The Paris trip had been an eye-opener: a collision of theory with reality. But it was also, in a way, exhilarating. Kennan composed a poem on the long flight home that suggested why:
From out this world of stars and mists and motion
The dawn—impatient of the time allowed—
Probes sharply down the canyons of the cloud
To find the fragments of an empty ocean.
Let not this growing hemisphere of light
Seduce the home-bound pilgrim to elation:
He may not hope—against the dawn’s inflation—
To see his darkness passing like the night.
The endless flight on which his plane is sent
Will know no final landing field. Content
Be he whose peace of mind from this may stem:
That he, as Fortune’s mild and patient claimant,
Has heard the rustling of the Time-God’s raiment,
And has contrived to touch the gleaming hem.
The usual pessimism and self-pity were there, but so too, at the end of the poem, was a new theme, echoing something Bismarck had once said: “By himself the individual can create nothing; he can only wait until he hears God’s footsteps resounding through events and then spring forward to grasp the hem of his mantle—that is all.”8
Franks had it right: Kennan’s performance in Paris was intuitive as well as passionate, but it fit, nonetheless, within a set of grand strategic priorities. The most important one, as Kennan described it a few weeks after his return, was to ensure that “elements of independent power are developed on the Eurasian land mass as rapidly as possible, in order to take off our shoulders some of the burden of ‘bi-polarity.’ To my mind, the chief beauty of the Marshall Plan is that it had outstandingly this effect.”9
III.
The Europeans presented their report—scaled down now to $22 billion—on September 22. “We have as yet no cause to triumph,” Kennan cautioned an audience at the Commerce Department two days later. But there was reason to believe that the tide of postwar extremism had peaked and was beginning to recede. The basis for Kennan’s optimism lay less in the Europeans than in the confusion the Marshall Plan had caused among Soviet leaders.
Marshall’s speech had “laid bare, as if with a scalpel,” their inability to contribute to economic recovery. Stalin and his advisers had “tossed about on the horns of this dilemma, hoping that they could avoid a final impalement”—that was why Molotov had appeared briefly in Paris with his bevy of economic experts. Soon enough, though, the “iron logic” of the situation became clear, and the Soviet delegation fled “in the middle of the night.” In ordering them to do so, Stalin divided Europe, an outcome he had hoped to avoid: it was, however, the lesser of the evils he now confronted. The Marshall Plan had forced him to choose between cooperating with a program whose success would discredit communism, or openly seeking that program’s failure—a course that could, by a different route, produce the same result. It was a no-win situation: “The repercussions of it are still reverberating through the Kremlin.”10
One became apparent in late September, when the Soviets convened a conference of East European, French, and Italian communists in Poland. In his opening address, Leningrad party boss Andrey Zhdanov acknowledged Europe’s division into “socialist” and “capitalist” camps: all communists everywhere must now work for the triumph of the former over the latter. To facilitate that task, the old Communist International or Comintern—abolished during the war—would be revived as the Communist Information Bureau, or Cominform.11
What this meant, Kennan advised Lovett, was a tightening up of discipline within the Soviet bloc, regardless of its effects in “the left-wing liberal world.” To do otherwise was to run the risk that communist parties in Western Europe, as well as in the Eastern European satellites, might evolve into a series of nationalist movements with which Moscow would eventually come into conflict. As a result, it now saw greater dangers than opportunities in European communism: “We should be able to capitalize effectively on this situation.”12
But how? Kennan went back to the war college to work out an answer. He spoke there three times in five weeks after returning from Paris, using his lectures—still mostly extemporaneous—to clarify in his own mind what policy toward the Soviet Union should now be. He also took the opportunity to reply, off the record, to a conspicuous critic. “Our speaker this morning is Mr. X,” the students were told on the first of these occasions, “the man who made Walter Lippmann famous.”
Containment, Kennan insisted, did not mean preparation for war, because “it is not Russian military power which is threatening us; it is Russian political power.... Since it is more than a military threat, I doubt that it can effectively be met entirely by military means.” But containment was not diplomacy either, because the United States and the Soviet Union shared no common interests: no Soviet diplomat was likely to return to Moscow and say, “I have just talked to these fellows and I think they have a case.” Nor did containment require the “application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and manœuvres of Soviet policy”—the language Kennan had used in the “X” article that had so aroused Lippmann.
Instead, Kennan now spoke of selectively applied “counter pressure”—of deploying strengths against weaknesses with a view to producing a psychological change in the mind of the adversary. It would be like playing chess, disposing of pawns, queens, and kings “in such a way that the Russian sees it is going to be in his interests to do what you want him to do.” The game would require patience as well as perseverance, but “[i]f they see that you are sufficiently determined, that you are sufficiently collected, and that you know exactly where you are going, you can sometimes put the fear of God in their hearts; and they will move.”
Soviet leaders were less confident than they looked. They knew that their empire in Eastern Europe was unstable: why otherwise would they tighten their control over it? They would do so next, Kennan predicted, in Czechoslovakia, still a relatively free country from which Western influences could spread if allowed to take root. But was it really plausible to believe that 140 million Russians, who already had a third that number of minorities within their own country, would be able to take over and handle indefinitely an additional 90 million in Eastern and Central Europe?
Another reason for unease in the Kremlin went back to the differences Kennan had long perceived between Stalin’s regime and the people it ruled. Three decades after the Bolshevik Revolution, the country remained what it had been for centuries, “a sea of mud and poverty and cruelty.” The Russians didn’t talk about this because it was dangerous to do so. They didn’t do much about it, because that was even more dangerous. “But they know it in their hearts; and they are not happy about it. That I can assure you.”
What, then, should the United States expect? Not that Russia would become a democracy: Americans who hoped for that were “quixotic fools,” because it would never happen. But a change in the Soviet Union’s international behavior could very well take place if it “gets its knuckles sha
rply rapped.” That could stabilize the international system until—in a more distant future—Russians overthrew communism for failing to keep its promises. They were “still potentially our friends.... I believe we still have a possibility of bringing [them] over to our side.”13
By the end of October, Kennan could see some correspondence between his planning and the results American policy had begun to produce. Whatever difficulties the Paris conferees were having in drafting an aid request that would satisfy Washington, the very fact that the effort was under way and that Moscow could make no competitive offer had shifted the gravitational field in Europe. The center of attraction now lay in the West, a contingency for which Stalin’s planners had made no provision: in time, Kennan suggested, it could pull not only European communists and satellite states from the Soviet Union’s orbit, but ultimately the Russian people themselves. By persuading Marshall that he should invite all Europeans, east and west, to decide how Americans should spend their money, Kennan had pulled off a classic Clausewitzian maneuver: a minimal effort—the making of a single short speech—had reversed expectations in what Lippmann was calling the “Cold War,” with consequences that, if managed wisely, might well determine its outcome.
George F. Kennan : an American life Page 38