National Affairs: The Perils of Idealism

The main trouble with U.S. foreign policy in the last half century is that it has too seldom been guided by self-interest, too often by “impractical idealism.” So concludes the State Department’s George F. (“Mr. X”) Kennan, who left his job as State’s top policy-planner last year for a sabbatical at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Ever since the U.S. blundered into global responsibilities in the Spanish-American War, says Kennan, its tendency has been to live in a dreamy haze, preaching moral principles but neglecting to keep the military strength to make its voice important—until crisis was upon it.

In a series of lectures delivered at the University of Chicago last spring, and to be published in a book this month (American Diplomacy 1900-1950; University of Chicago, $2.75), Kennan suggests a more practical rule of thumb for U.S. foreign policy.

Balance of Power. What the U.S. needs, says Kennan, is “the courage to recognize that if our own purposes and undertakings here at home are decent ones, unsullied by arrogance or hostility . . . or delusions of superiority, then the pursuit of our national interest can never fail to be conducive to a better world.”

In a hardheaded, cold-blooded world, Kennan argues, U.S. leaders impressed nobody but themselves by such legalistic arrangements as the Kellogg Peace Pact, the various schemes for international disarmament, the League of Nations and even the United Nations. By & large, they ignored delicate power balances, and the “strategic, political and economic necessities.”

In World War I, for example, Woodrow Wilson let an argument with Germany over neutrality become the cause of war, when the U.S. should have faced much earlier the solid fact that destruction of Britain would jeopardize U.S. security. In the years just before World War II, the mistake was of another kind: had the West rearmed in time—and simultaneously encouraged the dictatorships to fight it out with each other—the losses of the democracies might have been cut. Instead, when war became inevitable, the West was so weak that it could do nothing but collaborate with Russia—and it paid the price.

Price of Failure. The conferences of Moscow, Teheran and Yalta were relatively unimportant in themselves, says Kennan. By the time they were held, “there was nothing the Western democracies could have done to prevent the Russians from entering [Eastern Europe and Manchuria] except to get there first, and this they were not in a position to do.” A far more realistic policy would have been to cut off Lend-Lease aid from Russia “subsequent to the midsummer of 1944.”

Can an idealistic democracy learn to operate its foreign policy on a cold, calculating, day-to-day basis? Can it break the cycle of military lethargy and emotional fist-shaking, learn to think in terms of “rational and restricted purposes” and withstand the shrill cries of press and politicians who demand extremes? Says Kennan: “History does not forgive us our national mistakes because they are explicable in terms of our domestic policies . . . A nation which excuses its own failures by the sacred untouchableness of its own habits can excuse itself into complete disaster.”