Recalling Kennan—Again

I recall reading or hearing someone who said that people only have a few favorite records and they play them over and over again. That must have been a long time ago because the word “record” was used, instead of CD. I smiled wryly then because I found it true of me. There are only a handful of genuinely memorable figures that make a deep impression—on this or that aspect of life. Meanwhile life repeats the same patterns, and the same names therefore surface.

I’ve written five other posts here in which I recall the American diplomat, George Kennan (1904-2005). Kennan was a realist in international relations; he advocated that such relations should narrowly reflect national interest. This view does not suit the American political classes; they operate under the delusions of exceptionalism and would have us believe that our national interest does not diminish with distance from our shores. Hence, despite his influence, Kennan was marginalized.

Some of us, however, think that rational approaches, which favor humility, are sound when dealing with crises elsewhere. Instead we go into paroxysms of outrage when the advance of the Four Horsemen of our times (I’d called them Enlightenment, Secularism, Democracy, and Capitalism here) are opposed somewhere in  the world, i.e., by Putin in Russia. Let’s just calm down. The Crimea is a matter of Russian national interest. A simple way of putting it might be: “What Khrushchev gave Putin can take away.”

In Praise of Principles

Surprising although it may appear, even a quite pragmatic and seemingly self-centered idea, like national interest, can underpin a rational foreign policy. Surprise diminishes when I go on and see that national interest, at the level of the individual, translates into the protection of life, limb, and living space. Therefore George F. Kennan (1904-2005), the diplomat and thinker, who advocated an abstemious foreign policy based on national interest alone—resistant to humanitarian or moralistic temptations—was really urging a policy easily defended using Natural Law.

I once saw a mouse raise itself up on its hind legs as one of our cats was playing a terminal game with it. The mouse was trying to fend off the cat with its front legs. It was an astonishing if brief spectacle.

Policy based on principle must, of course, never be permitted to become legalistic or sophisticated. National interest does not include protecting the properties overseas of our commercial sector—never mind even more vaguely described interests like access to oil or other resources. Preemptive strikes and the euphemistically called “regime change” cannot be justified by national interest. And interventions on humanitarian grounds? Now that’s the tough one. Fact is, we must say no to that. Such interventions effectively translate into denial of sovereignty to others—also denial of the rights of people to govern themselves. In a very real sense Syria is undergoing an internal process of change. Call it democracy by other means. Now if we had a genuinely effective world government and a world army, then, of course, such mayhem as we see in Syria would be put down. But before such a condition actually arises, the End of Time may have to dawn.

Progressive Delusions

Nearly a year has passed since I last mentioned George F. Kennan on Ghulf Genes, so it is time again. We have no scientific evidence for this, but as Wikipedia informs me, “Native Americans in the United States have historically had extreme difficulty with the use of alcohol.” Similarly I have no scientific evidence for asserting that “The late Western Civilization has had an extreme tendency to succumb to progressive delusions.” Both may be true. The late but long-lived George Kennan (1904-2005) had discovered an inoculant to prevent the onset of that disease: realism. Hence I hope that he will be remembered.

This came to mind as we settled down to read The American Conservative yesterday. We always read it together, meaning that Brigitte reads, I listen, and then we both talk. The article in question was a review by Leon Hadar of a book by Charles A. Kupchan of Oxford University titled: “No One’s World: The West, the Rising Rest, and the Coming Global Turn” (October 2012 issue). We were delighted. The spirit of rationalism, realism remains alive.

The other day I offered the opinion that technology progresses but humanity cycles. The progressive delusions syndrome (PDS) is the mistaken belief that humanity also progresses and that, in the West, the two-beat events of the American and of the French Revolutions inaugurated the new age with a ta-Dah! The theme, of course, had been sounded earlier in the 1215 Magna Carta and smaller echoes of the same. But it took the eighteenth century to offer us the quartet of Enlightenment, Secularism, Democracy, and Capitalism. The syndrome consists in believing that these Four Horsemen will inevitably conquer the world.

Outbreaks of PDS marked our invasion of Iraq. At last, we thought, we would establish a beachhead of democracy where all of the oil is. The impossible conquest of Afghanistan (has been done before but never successfully) arose from pure faith, an ardent desire to bring light to mountainous darkness—although, of course, the ghost of a great pipeline glimmers in that darkness as well.

The most recent outbreak accompanied the Arab Spring. I hastened to register a cautious disagreement then. Somehow I do not believe that Twitter will conquer the world or that “the Spirit of Progress moved upon the Facebook of the waters” then. That drama is still “under construction,” as it were, but the forms emerging, most recently in Egypt and in Libya, are not easily recognized as marketable offspring of Progress.

So let us by all means reread George Kennan and, fortified, prepare to battle the horsemen we’ve created. Nor should we fantasize that China, which looks back to 2100 BC to see its first dynasty, the Xia, will gladly embrace what we produced circa 1800 AD. In that spirit I note that it might be time to do some raking—as soon as the rain stops to fall.

The 38th Parallel

The passing of Kim Jong Il, the ascension of Kim Jong Un (the young’un, we might say), has been accompanied by news stories, not surprisingly, about our own presence is South Korea and the fact that the only power likely to have any influence on North Korea is China. This got me thinking—about spheres of influence. That subject, in turn, always reminds me of Geroge F. Kennan, the diplomat and thinker, to whom I owe my basic understanding of international affairs. Kennan was a rational thinker and, for me, the best guide in assessing what the media invariably confuse and distort. (An earlier post on Kennan is here). We look to China because that difficult-to-grasp country, invariably labeled a “failed state,” is in China’s sphere of interest—whereas South Korea marks, as it were, a point beyond which we have real trouble reaching. And that line of thought then produced another. The 38th Parallel North is the only formal geographical boundary that also sharply marks two spheres of touching influence.

Not until today, attempting to find a map with that latitude marked, did I realize how close we’ve lived to it—here in the United States. We were just north of it in Kansas City, MO, our first home in the United States—which we reached just as the Korean War was winding down. When he was still in Evansville, IN my brother Baldy lived about as close to it as is possible in the United States. Other cities within shouting—and certainly within easy driving—distance are Sacramento, CA, Richfield, UT, Hutchinson, KS, St. Louis, MO, Louisville, KY, and Charleston, SC. We’ve driven right through that parallel and never even knew it…

Where Realism Trumps Idealism

I’ve mentioned George F. Kennan (1904-2005!) once before here. I learned to respect the man, and his approach to international relations, while I was in college. He was a realist and disdained any kind of initiatives in foreign affairs motivated by convictions of national superiority. He would have put thumbs down to nation building or regime change. In an interview in 1999, with the New York Review of Books, he said:

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. I would like to see our government gradually withdraw from its public advocacy of democracy and human rights. I submit that governments should deal with other governments as such, and should avoid unnecessary involvement, particularly personal involvement, with their leaders.

“Free markets” might be added to that list. The problem is that treating huge human collectives as if they were inferior or moved by evil motives, while appealing to our own public, also suggest that we are somehow superior in every conceivable way. Realism in international relations seems very rough, but it hides within itself the virtue of humility. Yes. We must look out for our own interest and defend ourselves when we’re attacked. Beyond that? Full stop. Beyond that nothing.

Our policies are productive not of spreading enlightenment but of Quislings. The next step is to accuse our Quislings of corruption, which will inevitably happen if the charade goes on too long. Eventually we’ll see the Quislings toppled by local forces that stuck to the hardest but only rule people can obey when attacked from the outside. Never serve the enemy. Better to starve. This comes to mind, needless to say, as I read today that Sunni forces bought with our money in Iraq are now changing coats again, and in Afghanistan we’re watching the Taliban engaged in reclaiming power by infiltration.

Kennan was the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1952 and to Yugoslavia in the period 1961-1963. He came from Milwaukee, WI, and his long life provided him a very long view of history.

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I found the quote above as part of Wikipedia’s article of Kennan here.

That Peculiar Relationship

As I reached maturity, my thinking about international relations was much influenced by George F. Kennan, a one-time ambassador to Moscow, a sober and rational diplomat, later a marginalized factor in government but an influential academic. He advocated a kind of self-evident doctrine of the spheres of influence. Nations have interests, and they defend these the more important they are to their survival. Defense of territories, their own or adjacent, and defense of resources (access to oil, grain, or the freedom of the seas) being primary interests. Kennan therefore frowned on the pursuit of so-called idealistic ventures like the promotion of freedom and democracy abroad. President Wilson was not one of his heroes. This view pleased me. It was realistic, rational, and marked by a kind of sane humility. Such a doctrine was at the core of George Washington’s foreign policies as well.

Later, over the years, I realized that this straight-forward doctrine based on national interest is deformed not only by idealistic crusades and dangerous temptations of empire (e.g., globalism); no; it is also deformed by a powerful cultural tendency present in international affairs based on collective memory, heritage, and so-called values. This element is what produces irrational, “special,” and “peculiar” relationships—like the relationship between the United States and Israel.

Its roots ultimately go back to the clash between Christianity and Islam, the Crusades. I don’t for a minute blame the Muslims for harking back to it. That peculiar relationship with Israel is a secularized modern version of a clash of cultures that continues still—but disguised by new phrases like…well, like freedom and democracy.

Israel began by waves of Jewish immigration to Palestine; the earlier waves took place under the still prevailing Ottoman empire. Pogroms and persecution in Europe drove Jews to Palestine—and under an umbrella that was at least mildly accepting of all “People of the Book.” The Ottomans were still in charge when Theodor Herzl published his book, The State of the Jews, in 1896. The British occupied Palestine aided by battalions of Zionist volunteers during World War I. In 1917 came the Balfour declaration—projecting, without calling it a state, what Herzl had imagined:

His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

In such a declaration, I would suggest, the Muslim majority residing in Palestine was viewed roughly in the same way by the British as the American Indians were viewed by the immigrants who had “discovered” America. Under the British Mandate (1920), officially a grant of power by the League of Nations, violent clashes developed between the Arabs and the Jews in Palestine. A minority (the Jews had 11% of the population in 1922) of largely European background—but, itself marginalized in Europe—was aiming to consolidate its power over a population that seemed not to register on any international scale to have any weight at all. Later, after World War II, and another rather massive upheaval of antisemitism in Europe, Truman’s support of Israeli statehood, crucial in the U.N., imposed a state on a region the people of which had not been consulted to vote in any plebiscite. So much for freedom and democracy.

The “special” relationship—thus between England and America—helped produce the “peculiar” relationship between America and Israel. I detect nothing resembling “national interest” here. Israel is neither strategically nor tactically important; and most of it, alas, is desert. But what there is, and plenty of it, is a cultural feeling and centuries of lingering enmity. Israel therefore is a modern, secular footprint inside the borders of the Muslim world, a beachhead, as it were, reminiscent of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem in crusader days, which lasted from 1099 to 1291. Our being there lacks rhyme and reason, at least as George Kennan might have seen the matter. But then we aren’t rational, are we? So the chaos will keep churning on, the strange dance will continue. We are the big and successful boy of Britain, grown up and mighty. And we have this nasty but willful problem child we tolerate and fund, to the tune of $3 billion a year—much as Saddam Hussein once tolerated and forgave his nasty son Uday.