Legacy of American Cold War Containment Strategy
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2011-12-08/legacy-american-cold-war-containment-strategy
After the Second World War, America and its allies needed a new plan to deal with the Soviet Union. They saw two choices ahead – another world war or appeasement. A third option came from an obscure U.S. diplomat named George Kennan. His strategy to confine Russian expansion would define America’s relationship with the Soviet Union for nearly half a century. But Kennan would come to regret the policy that made him the most influential diplomat of the Cold War. It led to conflicts in Korea and Vietnam and even to U.S. entanglements in Iraq and Afghanistan. The legacy of America’s Cold War containment strategy.
Guests
Todd Purdum
national editor, "Vanity Fair"
John Lewis Gaddis
Professor of History, Yale University and author of "George F. Kennan: An American Life"
Susan Glasser
editor-in-chief, Foreign Policy.
Comments
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Congratulations to Dr. Gaddis for his long term deep examination of one gifted diplomat's life. The thing that amazes me is the failure of US foreign policy makers to take full advantage of hindsight. George F. Kennan continued to learn and comment during his entire long life but remained an unquestioning advocate of capitalism and an unwavering patriot to the business Establishment. In this sentimental way he was more an expert on Russia and the Soviet Union than his own United States. He sometimes lamented that public opinion handicapped American foreign policy. By demanding a short-sighted realism he missed the waste involved in US militarism and the costs to healthy democracy at home. If the USSR could collapse from expenditures on weaponry and pointless conflict then why not the United States? Kennan realized containment and adventurism have their limits. I admire him for his opposition to our wars in Vietnam and Iraq. His platform for mild dissent was the Institute for Advanced Studies which is a foster home for dangerous Establishment mavericks. Realism in foreign relations means that moral and human rights are subjugated to strategic prize contests.
Even Henry Kissinger celebrated Kennan for his emotionally cold approach. The kind of strategic gamesmanship practiced in Kennan's time has eroded the very values that made the USA exceptional, has enabled Oligarchy, and now threatens civilization and the survival of humanity. The tragedy of Kennan was that his gifts found no full and critical hearing, that they were selectively applied with some of the best recommendations ignored, and that he struggled within a milieu of selfish and parochial interests. The game is played out now, and we have won nothing. The lesson of Kennan is that our politics is insane and acts out the same neuroses and psychoses repeatedly in an obsessive way. If the People do not awaken and contain these suicidal tendencies we are all doomed. Even our best councilor George Kennan failed to learn from archaeology and history readily available in plain sight.
Can't imagine why you would have someone from Vanity Fair on such a serious discussion They specialize in superficial glitz.
Listening to this discussion of statesman George Kennan's life and work, several things strike me: the critically important role of his journal-keeping as a therapeutic tool to manage his depression, the depression itself as a symptom of early mother loss and of a heart broken by the superficial use of his work to justify U.S. empire-building and militarism, the fact that he was a poet and a student of Russian literature and culture....... in short a deep thinker, as opposed to an "expert" in a narrow field, god forbid a "brand manager."
The value of time, thoughtfulness, and the capacity to grieve and feel----- a liberal arts education----cannot be over-estimated.
Thank you for this show.
What we inherited from the perversion of the containment strategy to this day:
When our right wing politicians want to short thought processes of ignorant people, they use label "communist" against their opponents.
Saddam killed innocent people in Iraq. But millions of Iraqi people have been killed through sanctions and the immoral and illegal invasion of Iraq.
Is there anyway to figure out how many lives are saved via containment and not wars. Is there any way to know?
I'll tell you this now, no eternal reward will forgive us fore manipulating disaster from the traditional [milwaukee for me, Yet california for left-D!!!] beginning of one man. "normAlcy" is the only plan, the ALgebraic discernment of truth that we really DON'T need to understand, but when we "want" we are derailing the span, we must justly segment geography from the scam. from "there to here" they'll hear where golden is the man the plan and the Policy!! to amend, the social fabric and the rare thread is a needle in god's hand. make them dance and the singers will be glad, they'll tell the truth with pragmatic humanity quite grand.
I'm tired... but conseritoligy is the science wide awake in a dream to send, then sociology beats! poli-sci with grace nand
I would commend Frank Costigliola's great review of Professor Gaddis's book in the NYRB:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/dec/08/is-this-george-kennan/
He makes the point that Kennan became extremely alarmed and depressed at the way that containment led not only to increasing military competition and potential (nuclear) conflict with the Soviets during the Cold War but, in its wake, the kind of ideological and cultural triumphalism that led to a new adventurism in U.S. foreign policy, justified and promulgated in the name of spreading our own political values and economic model (those same forms of hubris that, as he pointed out, had already got us involved int the quagmire of Vietnam.) It is noteworthy that Gaddis, for all his knowledge and familiarity with Kennan, very much underplays this aspect and consequence of Kennan's alarm not only with the vitiation of his orginal conception of containment, but also about the increasingly adventurist and ideological tenor of American foreign policy at the end of the Cold War and then in its aftermath. In Kennan's own words, written in 1999 but arguably even more pertinent in the wake of the Iraq and now Afghan debacles.
"This whole tendency to see ourselves as the center of political enlightenment and as teachers to a great part of the rest of the world strikes me as unthought-through, vainglorious, and undesirable. If you think that our life here at home has meritorious aspects worthy of emulation by peoples elsewhere, the best way to recommend them is, as John Quincy Adams maintained, not by preaching at others but by the force of example. I could not agree more."
What a great observation. Pity your panel didn't grasp this admittedly discomfiting nettle presented by Kennan's thought on the U.S.'s current status and role in the world, in their otherwise very interesting presentation.
If a geography is in the bible [like Iraq] then invasions... are illegal, but if it's not in the bible then occupations are immoral. and perhaps vice-versa, but only "normalcy-ecology" will balance the beam, and energy addiction is a foot in the barrell, while navigation is Jonha in the whale.