An obscure diplomat in 1940s Moscow, George Frost Kennan (1904-2005) found fame as the architect of “containment” – America’s global struggle to defend the “free world” from Soviet expansionism and communist subversion. Kennan’s policy prescriptions went public when he was outed as the anonymous author of a 1947 article on “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” in which he argued that power was the only language the Soviets understood.
Kennan’s ideas gelled because he offered a viable alternative to either appeasing the Soviets or going to war with them. The problem was that Kennan’s strategy spawned a dangerous cold war between two nuclear-armed super powers.
That was not Kennan’s intention. For him, containment was primarily political. Having curtailed communism, the United States should then seek a compromise to end the cold war.
Kennan spent the rest of his life striving to repudiate the policy that had made him world famous. No one was more indefatigable in urging negotiations with Moscow. After the collapse of communism, he warned against western cold war triumphalism, predicting that Nato expansion would evoke Russian nationalism and militarism. The West’s post-cold war task was not more containment, he argued, but the integration of post-Soviet Russia into an all-embracing European security system.
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While Kennan hated Soviet communism, he loved Russia. The Russians, said Kennan, had the “moral earnestness, courage and endurance” to make them “emotionally, intellectually and aesthetically one the world’s potentially greatest peoples”. Visiting Leningrad in 1945, he fantasised that he had lived a previous life in that war-torn city.
Kennan loved America, too, and wanted its democratic values to spread to other countries – but by example, not force.
An intellectual as well as diplomat, Kennan wrote several fine books about Russian history, published his memoirs and kept an intimate diary. Among the many books about Kennan is an officially anointed biography by John Lewis Gaddis.
Gaddis, whose book won the Pulitzer Prize, admired Kennan the cold warrior but had little or no regard for his subject’s peacemaking.
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Frank Costigliola’s emphatic and sympathetic biography would have been much more to Kennan’s taste. Costigliola’s Kennan is an outsider, a dissident who is honoured but wilfully misunderstood by an American establishment that continues to favour militarised diplomacy. For Costigliola, “it is Kennan’s oddity, his penchant for thinking otherwise, that renders his voice important” in our own times.
Psychological as well as political, this compelling biography reveals a tortured, tragic individual who struggled to keep his own emotions under control while at the same time urging a dispassionate approach to relations with Russia.
