By Joseph Gayeski

For all his brilliance as an eminent Cold War strategist, George F. Kennan held some disconcerting views. He was skeptical of popular democracy, and once set out to write a book calling for a benevolent dictatorship in the United States.[1] During the anti-war movement of the 1960s, he agreed that students were right to oppose the Vietnam War, but felt they were wrong to depart from American political culture as he understood it.[2] He was dismissive toward Black activism and, later in life, lamented Hispanic influence in the American southwest.[3] Living to the age of 101 after a decades-spanning career, it should not be surprising that Kennan carried opinions that did not age well. But it is hard to examine his comments today without identifying the elitism and racism behind them.

Kennan’s prejudices, of course, were not uniquely his. His biographer, the historian John Lewis Gaddis, once suggested that Kennan’s views were not uncommon among the day’s “enlightened” people.[4] This may be fair enough, as it is all too easy to criticize thinkers that can no longer defend themselves. Yet Kennan was himself willing to criticize the statesmen of generations past for their own blind spots. In his 1979 book, The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order: Franco-Russian Relations, 1875-1890, the diplomat-turned-scholar does not hesitate to charge nineteenth century diplomats with complacency toward the outmoded ideas of their time. The cost of their complacency, Kennan warns, was tragedy.

The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order is the first volume in Kennan’s series on the origins of the First World War, but the book covers none of the events of the early twentieth century. Kennan instead examines a period starting forty years earlier, insisting that the reader understand how the fateful structure of European alliances in 1914 was built upon the fractures of the previous arrangement, masterminded by German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. The result is an exhaustive tour of a short fifteen-year period, starting with the 1875 Franco-German war scare and ending with Bismarck’s retirement. The intricacy of this history is excessive for most readers, but those who persevere are shown a distinct approach to diplomatic history, informed by the author’s experience in government. Kennan’s attention to administrative errors and nationalist influences is a reminder that diplomacy is not practiced by inhuman nation-states, but between individual leaders—fallible, even if talented.

Kennan’s analysis suggests that the leaders of Bismarck’s era failed in three particular ways that future strategists must understand if they are to avoid the same mistakes. The first failure was of strategic empathy; if Germany had been able to predict the direction France would take under pressure, the fateful Franco-Russian Alliance might have been avoided. The second was of strategic coherence; if Russian and French leaders were able to deflect the demands of their respective nationalists, their priorities may not have been distorted. Both of these failures contributed to the onset of World War I, but to Kennan’s mind, the third failure was more consequential.

The First World War, in Kennan’s view, was the result of a gross failure to understand a changing world. Throughout Europe, Kennan argues, the outmoded idea of warfare as a natural and dignified instrument of policy remained in the minds of statesmen for far too long. They held to militaristic conceptions of honor rendered wholly obsolete by industrial warfare, ignoring the warnings from the American Civil War and the Crimean War. Kennan laments that the era’s statesmen believed war was inevitable, making the purpose of diplomacy not to prevent conflict but to position for it. The isolation of France was not the only feature of their status quo that needed revisiting. Their very ethos of valor was a dangerous antique.

The final lesson is the most interesting coming from Kennan, given his conservative views of American democracy and race relations. Historians are correct to examine the nuances of Kennan’s views. Gaddis, for example, notes that the older Kennan was embarrassed by the American dictatorship he theorized as a young foreign service officer.[5] Gaddis is right to suggest that Kennan’s opinions were not the result of any individual bigotry, but rather may have been products of his time. This reading of Kennan, however, sits uncomfortably with the historian’s own warning from The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order. What, after all, was the ideal of military heroism in the nineteenth century—the ideal to which the era’s statesmen negligently subscribed—but a product of its time?

That Kennan might criticize diplomats of past centuries without considering the meaning of his conclusions for his own worldview only demonstrates the difficulty of the self-reflection prompted by his work. The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order demands that those who work in foreign policy ask several uncomfortable questions of themselves. What features of today’s status quo are unsustainable? What predictable consequences are we failing to heed? Do we hold notions or values that leave us naïve to the risks of our rapidly changing technology?

If we are to learn from Kennan, avoiding catastrophe may depend on the truth of our answers.

About the author

Joe Gayeski is a master’s student at the Yale Jackson Institute and a Managing Editor for YJIA. He studies U.S. foreign policy, diplomatic history, and the politics of East and Southeast Asia.

Endnotes

1. John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (New York: Penguin Press, 2012), 114-116.

2. Kennan debated with students and academics on this topic in George F. Kennan, Democracy and the Student Left (New York: Bantam Books, 1968).

3. For a more incisive look at Kennan’s problematic views on race and ethnicity, see Clayton R. Koppes, "Solving for X: Kennan, Containment, and the Color Line," Pacific Historical Review 82, no. 1 (February 2013): 95-118.

4. John Lewis Gaddis, interview by Susan Glasser, After Words, C-SPAN, February 15, 2012. 36:31- 40:51.

5. Gaddis, George F. Kennan, 116-119.