Dangerous dove
John Grigg
The Cloud of Danger George F. Kennan (Hutchinson £5.95)
George Kennan is one of the great American mandarins of our time. Though he retired from active diplomacy a quarter of a century ago, and has since returned to it for only one brief interlude (as ambassador to Yugoslavia in 1961-3), he has continued to exercise a lot of influence by his teaching and writing. Among other things, he was a conspicuous opponent of the Vietnam war.
Russia has long been his best subject —the one on which his authority has been most widely acknowledged. In this he has been following a family tradition, because in the 1880s a namesake of his, who was a cousin of his grandfather, wrote a book on the Tsarist tyranny which created a sensation and was translated into many languages. Mr Kennan himself is certainly no friend to the Soviet tyranny, but at the same time he is so intensely aware of the need for his country and the Soviet Union to rub along together, if unimaginable horrors are to be avoided, that he has become an outstanding 'dove' in the debate on East-West relations.
His new book is an attempt to collate his views on American foreign policy and `to distill out of them something resembling a grand design'. In the opening chapter he discusses the conditions which, in his view, are making it increasingly difficult for his country to have a wise or even consistent foreign policy. One of these conditions is the 'military-industrial complex' which has become part of the American way of life.
He vividly illustrates the scale and prof ligacy of American defence spending when he describes watching target practice from a naval vessel and realising that 'each one of a certain class of missiles that were being fired off with great abandon (and not recovered) had cost more than my entire Pennsylvania farm, itself the product of generations of backbreaking work'.
After a chapter on 'the global scene', containing some tart comments on summit diplomacy, Mr Kennan takes us on a quick world tour in which he sketches his thoughts about American policy towards Latin America, Africa, the Near East, the Far East, NATO, Western Europe and Eastern Europe apart from the Soviet Union. A recurrent theme in this section is that the United States must abandon its moralising, crusading role and start treating foreigners as the complicated, incurably alien people they are. He wants his country to look after its own vital interests and, in principle, to leave other countries to look after theirs, suppressing any mauvaise honte about relative wealth and power.
It seems to me that he goes a bit too far in his quietism. Without for a moment suggest ing that the United States should withdraw from Europe or attenuate any commitment on which its security depends, he takes too limited a view of the scope for democracy in the world and appears to be under the impression that if people are poor and backward it is largely their own fault. In one curious passage he evokes the pioneering achievement of his ancestors in Wisconsin, implying that it was due to the 'work ethic' and nothing else. But in fact, surely, the American pioneers had the advantage of a virgin continent, having given short shrift to the indigenous population.
The last and most important section of the book deals with the Soviet Union and the problem.of Soviet-American relations. He challenges the prevailing view that the balance of power has shifted dangerously in Russia's favour, and he also dismisses as fantasy the fairly widespread assumption that the Soviet leaders have an interest in dominating the world. Some might say that he is overcompensating for his reputation (well-or-ill-founded) as the man who, so far as America was concerned, had more than anyone else to do with starting the Cold War, when he was head of the State Department Policy Planning Staff during the Stalin era. But his arguments cannot be ignored and should be judged on their merits.
His scepticism regarding the figures supplied by intelligence of the growth of Russian military and naval strength may or may not be justified. It is impossible to tell. No doubt there is a tendency for such figures to be exaggerated, but there has also been a tendency in democratic countries to turn a blind eye to foreign preparations for war. On the whole, excessive alarm seems preferable to complacency in what may well be a matter of life or death.
The intentions of the Soviet leadership are equally hard to probe, but Mr Kennan is convinced that they are not fundamentally aggressive. His reasons are that the present men in the Kremlin are at least an improvement on Stalin (though many, incidentally, would argue that Stalin —whatever his other faults — was not fundamentally aggressive); that they are markedly long in the tooth, and that elderly men are not given to adventure; that they are all too conscious of Russia's weakness, for instance in technology and agriculture; and that they have enough on their hands already, with satellites not reconciled to Russian overlordship and their own people not reconciled to communism.
These reasons provide, surely, a rather flimsy basis for optimism. Elderly men are bound, in the course of 'nature, to give way to younger men, who may not be so cautious and conservative as Mr Kennan believes the present Soviet leaders to be. As for the argument that the weaknesses and 'contradictions' (to use a Marxist jargon term) of the Soviet set-up would prevent any expansionist move, it seems that the oppo site might just as well be true. Wars have often been started by insecure or unpopular regimes, seeking in external conquest an escape from their domestic problems.
It is hard, therefore, to be totally persuaded or reassured by Mr Kennan's general thesis. But much that he says about American mishandling of the Soviet Union rings true, and in particular his condemnation of selling arms on a vast scale to Iran seems very much to the point.
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