“Realism” as a Critique of American Diplomacy

IN THE EARLY 1950’S ANYONE SEEKING TO UNDERSTAND AMERICAN diplomacy, to understand his own mounting uneasiness about the course of events since World War II, turned with relief and gratitude to the writings of the new “realists.” He turned, that is, to the writings of George F. Kennan; only later did he begin to understand that there were others like Kennan, that he was the founder of a school. Later still came the realization that others had anticipated Kennan in some of his criticisms of American foreign policy, and that his underlying premises themselves were not perhaps so new as they had appeared at the time. But the question of Kennan’s intellectual antecedents was beside the point. What mattered was that at a time when the serious discussion of foreign affairs had almost ceased, when isolationism was dead and internationalism tainted on the one hand by the Wallace crusade and on the other by the excesses of those who were already talking about “winning” the cold war, Kennan revived the discussion and invested it with a new interest.
      Kennan demonstrated that it was possible to criticize people like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt without falling into the heresy of isolationism. For a generation of disturbed and somewhat disillusioned liberals, that was a revelation of inestimable importance. By the 1950’s, a good many liberals had begun to suspect that something had gone wrong with American foreign policy. They had begun to suspect, moreover, that whatever it was that had gone wrong could no longer be blamed on Henry Cabot Lodge or Senator Borah or Senator Nye or Charles Lindbergh or any of the other traditional villains of American liberalism. That there was something wrong with liberalism itself, however, was a proposition which it seemed impossible to entertain without at the same time putting oneself in the camp of the enemies of liberalism. In these circumstances the bafflement of the conscientious liberal was extreme; it threatened to immobilize him completely.
      American Diplomacy, Kennan’s first and still his most valuable book, pointed a way out of the difficulty. From the perspective he established in those lectures, the whole dispute between isolationists and internationalists faded into the background. What was historically wrong with American foreign policy was its rigidity, its misguided idealism, its rather simple-minded belief in the efficacy of legal and moral principles—habits of mind that were characteristic of isolationists and internationalists alike.
      The “legalistic-moralistic” tradition, as Kennan called it, ran “like a red skein” through American foreign policy. The belief in the universal applicability of our own standards of international justice and in the desirability of getting other nations to subscribe to them had blinded us again and again to the realities of world politics. Our naïve notion of “aggression” as an outright abridgment of the right of self-determination had blinded us to subtler forms of aggression. It blinded us, also, to the difficulties of punishing aggression by collective action—the law-abiding nations against the outlaws. Worst of all, it confused pragmatic questions with ethical questions, questions of right with questions of power. “Whoever says there is a law must of course be indignant against the lawbreaker and feel a moral superiority to him. And when such indignation spills over into military contest, it knows no bounds short of the reduction of the lawbreaker to the point of complete submissiveness—namely, unconditional surrender.” Thus the legalistic approach to world affairs, beginning with a desire to do away with violence, ended by making violence “more enduring, more terrible, and more destructive to political stability than did the older motives of national interest.”
      For Kennan, the alternative to legalism and moralism lay in a return to “the forgotten art of diplomacy.” That meant a revival of balance-of-power politics and what seemed to Kennan the “modest” recognition that “our own national interest is all that we are really capable of knowing and understanding.” Provided that our purposes were pure, “unsullied by arrogance or hostility,” he did not see how the pursuit of our national interest could fail “to be conducive to a better world.”
      The impact of American Diplomacy was immediate. Overnight, liberals embraced the concept of the “national interest” and found themselves speaking in the accents of Realpolitik. Nobody seemed disturbed by this ideological incongruity. American liberals had always been noted for their pragmatism—a word which on innumerable occasions in the past had served to excuse taking opposed positions at the same time. The liberals’ adoption of the tenets of the new realism was pragmatic in this sense.

Kennan’s own ideological affinity was not very clear. The language of realism was undeniably conservative, although American “conservatives” in the 1950’s disowned Kennan at once. But many of Kennan’s observations—his rejection of total war, for instance—seemed radical; at least they put him in the company of radicals. Much of what he said about World War I echoed the complaints of radicals at the time. He would certainly have agreed that the war, as one editor of The Nation wrote to another in 1922, had been continued “beyond its natural economic limit” and that the character of the world was thereby decisively altered.
      On the other hand, there was Kennan’s call for a return to “old-fashioned diplomacy.” Traditionally it was conservatives who defended balance-of-power politics and derided the dream of an international order run according to legal principles. It was conservatives who were skeptical about causes and crusades, distrustful of “enthusiasm” in any form. Kennan shared this distrust. Not only that, he expressed certain reservations about democracy itself, reminiscent of Tocqueville. “People are not always more reasonable than governments.… Public opinion … is not invariably a moderating force in the jungle of politics.” Just the reverse, in fact; in the case of World War I, public opinion had exerted a decidedly bad effect. It was the mutual hatreds of peoples, inflamed by ideology, that had made it so difficult for governments to make peace. Walter Lippmann, another spokesman for a realistic view of foreign policy, went even further along these lines. It was when the existing governments had to turn to the people for help in carrying on the war, Lippmann wrote in The Public Philosophy, that they lost the last opportunity to make peace and to save what was left of the old order. The consequences of this surrender to public opinion had been “disastrous.”
      All this was clear enough; yet one still puzzled over the general bent of the new realism. Did it imply a radical critique of present as well as past policy? And if it did, how useful would it prove to be as an instrument of such criticism, when it reflected a point of view which seemed in so many respects to blend in with the prevailing conservatism?
      The passage of time did not immediately clear up the mystery. In politics, Kennan seemed to be moving steadily toward the position advocated by the left—by the Labour Party in Britain, by socialists and radicals in America. He abandoned containment, which he had helped to formulate, and advocated “disengagement” in Europe. After his Reith Lectures in 1957, Dean Acheson attacked him as an isolationist. That in itself would have endeared him to the left.
      Yet the two volumes of his Soviet-American Relations, which he published in the late fifties, pleaded more openly than ever for a revival of the techniques of traditional diplomacy. The second volume was dedicated, in fact, to the memory of DeWitt Clinton Poole and Maddin Summers (consuls at Moscow during World War I), “of whose faithful and distinguished efforts in Russia on their country’s behalf this volume gives only an incomplete account.” That Wilson would have fared better if he had relied on the judgment of professional diplomats was the burden of Kennan’s narrative. The professionals understood power; the amateurs could not see beyond their own principles. Unfortunately it was the amateurs in whom Wilson, himself an amateur, in the last analysis rested his confidence: the senile Ambassador Francis, a political appointee of the most incompetent sort; the addle-headed Edgar Sisson, a Hearst reporter in search of sensational copy; above all the brilliant, impetuous and utterly unreliable Raymond Robins, with his unjustified optimism about Russia and his unwarranted confidence in the eternal verity of his liberal clichés. American Diplomacy condemned moralism and legalism in general terms; Soviet-American Relations tried to show, by a detailed examination of the day-by-day evolution of policy, that moralism and legalism were inevitable attributes of policy when policy was made by people not trained for the job.
      These volumes brought to the surface in Kennan’s thought what had not at first been apparent, the professional diplomat’s pride of profession. The shift in focus, from the broad perspective of the earlier book to the narrower one of the latter, may have encouraged this tendency, for it led the scholar to immerse himself in the techniques by which diplomatic decisions were arrived at, as opposed to the content of the decisions themselves. An article published in the American Scholar, which presumably foreshadowed the third volume of Soviet-American Relations, work on which was interrupted by Kennan’s return to the foreign service in 1961, carried the tendency further still. Here Kennan abandoned content almost entirely in favor of an examination of technique: “… this question of ‘how’ as distinct from the ‘what’ of diplomacy is … of tremendous importance.” Still aware (as most scholars have yet to become aware) that the outcome of the peace conference was largely predetermined by the Allies’ crushing defeat of Germany—that is, by the decision made in 1917 to prosecute the war to “victory”—and that the peace conference itself, therefore, was an episode of secondary importance, Kennan nevertheless made the history of the conference the text for what had become a favorite sermon: the futility of coalition diplomacy and of summit conferences in particular. He tried to show that Wilson’s failure to come to grips with the Russian problem could be attributed in part to the simple fact that there were too many other demands on his time, too many other problems waiting to be solved. Not even the best of statesmanship, in other words, could have succeeded in the atmosphere of Versailles, or of any other meetings of heads of state.

Kennan’s opposition to summitry was a thing of long standing. But the extent to which he had become preoccupied with the subject—to the exclusion, it seemed at times, of everything else—had only recently become clear. It was with the U-2 crisis of May 1960 that one finally began to understand the general direction of Kennan’s thinking and of the new realism in general. And what the occasion revealed about the new realism was enough to call into serious question its ability to offer a perspective from which to criticize American policy, past or present.
      The U-2 affair abounded in revelations. It not only demonstrated once and for all the incompetence of the Eisenhower administration; it also provided a touchstone by which to gauge the motives of the administration’s critics. For while the critics agreed that the administration had blundered, they by no means agreed just wherein its worst blunder lay—whether in admitting to espionage or in engaging in it in the first place. Those who objected merely to our having allowed ourselves to be caught, and to our having compounded the damage by admitting what we had been doing, revealed themselves—for the first time in some cases—as committed, at heart, to the policies of the cold war. It was deeply significant, for instance, that this was the line taken by Walter Lippmann. “My criticism is that we have made these overflights an avowed policy.” The avowal, not the flights themselves, was the administration’s mistake. “As long as the world is as warlike as it has been in all recorded history, there is no way of doing without spying,” Such realism as this was enough, for some of us, to call into question the whole realist critique of American diplomacy.
      For to some of us the point of the U-2 affair was a good deal simpler, and it concerned not the methods of American diplomacy but its objectives. That “overflights” (which, it should be noted, were quite different from conventional espionage) had been taking place for years, and that they should have continued to take place up to the very eve of the Paris conference, when the prospects of a Berlin settlement looked better than they had looked since the end of the war, seemed to mean only one thing: that the government of the United States preferred a showdown to a settlement, that it was essentially indifferent to the possibility of negotiations with the Soviet Union, that it had embraced the cold war as a way of life. The possibility that Khrushchev himself may have wanted a way out of the conference, at the last minute—a possibility resting on no very impressive evidence, but which enjoyed great popularity as an explanation for the collapse of the conference—was really irrelevant. What mattered was our own indifference. If the other side was indifferent too, so much the worse; but their indifference, even assuming it to have been a fact, hardly excused our own.
      At a time when even Adlai Stevenson was urging people to get behind the President, it was perhaps unreasonable to expect anything better from Mr. Kennan. All the same, Kennan’s behavior was disappointing. He drew from these events, so endlessly suggestive in their ramifications, only the familiar lesson about the futility of summit diplomacy. “We should look very, very carefully before we submit the prestige of the President of the United States again to what has just happened in Paris.” Called upon by a congressional committee to suggest what might be done to improve American diplomacy, he confined himself to a list of strictly procedural reforms: creation of an office of Secretary for Foreign Affairs who would represent the country at conferences, revival of the policy-planning staff, and so forth. Nothing could have seemed more irrelevant, at such a time, than this dry recital. Perhaps the newspapers misrepresented what Kennan said (his testimony was in secret session); yet what he was reported to have said seemed consistent with the drift of his thinking. He may have made other criticisms as well; but if he did he never saw fit to publish them. Perhaps the whole business had rendered him speechless—a perfectly understandable reaction. But speechlessness was not much help to a country which needed the kind of thoroughgoing criticism toward which Kennan had made a beginning in his Reith Lectures. Kennan had nothing to add to what he had already said. The crisis made it clear for the first time that what he had already said was not enough.

What accounted for the failure of the new realism, at this most critical moment, to offer anything but platitudes—or worse, Lippmann’s dissertations on the inevitability of espionage? In the re-examination of the realistic canon, to which these reflections led, a number of weaknesses in the argument now came to light. There was, for one thing, the overemphasis on technique, which merely touched the surface of the subject. For another thing there was the assumption that professional diplomats were free from the ideological illusions which afflicted amateurs. One trained as a historian willingly followed Kennan back to World War I in search of a guide to the present—with the help of Mr. Kennan himself, whose generosity to young scholars had already become proverbial. But what one found when one got there did not bear out the master’s faith in professional diplomacy. The diplomats, it turned out, had been as blind as everyone else to the dangers of prolonging the war. Like everyone else, they had allowed the delusion of victory to interfere with their understanding of the Russian Revolution—by which Kennan rightly set such store. If anything could have saved Russia in 1917, it was peace; Kennan himself made the point again and again. Yet when the Provisional Government appealed to the Allies, not for peace (which it did not have the temerity to mention by name), but for a reconsideration of war aims which might serve as the first step toward peace, the diplomatic corps was unanimous in advising the unconditional rejection of the appeal. Kennan’s own distinguished ancestor, George Kennan—not a professional diplomat, to be sure, but nevertheless a conservative who talked the language of power politics, hence presumably a realist—even this first George Kennan had bluntly advised the Secretary of State to “give no encouragement whatever … to the coalition ministry if it stands for ‘peace without annexations or indemnities.’ ” For such men, peace, in the summer of 1917, was a German plot. This was the view which prevailed in the State Department and, as far as one could see, throughout the foreign service.
      Finally, the history of World War I did not seem to sustain the distinction between “ideals” and “self-interest.” The whole realist thesis rested on the distinction; historians had tried to trace the conflict through all of recent American diplomacy. Read in the light of what one had come to know about World War I, the case seemed to fall to the ground; the distinction seemed arbitrary and unreal. If the history of the war taught any lessons at all, it Was that American policy had failed, not because Americans had made moral judgments, but because the moral judgments they made were so shallow. The trouble with Woodrow Wilson was that his ideals were so superficial, so crude, so circumscribed by his complacent assumption that his kind of democracy—the democracy of Walter Bagehot—represented the pinnacle of political virtue. The trouble with Wilson was not that he went off crusading for high ideals and ignored American self-interest. The trouble was that, like most statesmen, he found it so easy unconsciously to translate the self-interest of his own community into the language of high idealism. The most striking fact about the twentieth-century dream of world peace and order, of which Wilson was to become the prophet, was not that it was utopian but that it was a one-sided Utopia, a world made safe not for democracy but for ourselves.
      From the point of view of three-fourths of the worlds Wilson’s famous quarrel with Clemenceau, which appeared so momentous to the new realists (as to all Western scholars), was less important than their shared determination to keep that same three-fourths in its place. From this broader perspective, liberal internationalism was itself a kind of imperialism, almost indistinguishable from the old. And it was the liberal Lloyd George, joining Wilson in refusing to support the counterrevolution in Russia, who assured the French, at the same time, that he did not propose to negotiate with the Bolsheviks. What he proposed, he explained to the Council of Ten—and his words speak volumes about the real nature of the old liberalism—was to give each of the contending factions in Russia a hearing, “to summon these people to Paris to appear before those present, somewhat in the way the Roman Empire summoned chiefs of outlying tributary states to render an account of their actions.” The difference between the old imperialism and the new diplomacy was not, after all, so very great. The difference was simply that Wilson and Lloyd George substituted the semblance of international cooperation for the cruder instruments of coercion; bribery and manipulation for naked force. In a world in which the West’s power to impose its will by force was already dwindling, Wilson’s was bound to be the wave of the future.
      Did the Wilsonian policy run counter to American national interests? On the contrary, the national interest demanded it. Farsighted men could argue that his policy, since perpetuated by Roosevelt, by Truman, by Eisenhower, by Kennedy, was suicidal in the long run. But the people who are responsible for defining what the national interest means at a given moment do not think in terms of the long run. What the pursuit of the national interest means, if history is any indication, is the pursuit of a nation’s interests in their most immediate, crude, and palpable form. Thus the pursuit of the national interest implies the repression of other people’s equally crude and palpable national interests. Against the history of the twentieth century, the new realists’ vision of a world in which the mutual pursuit of national interests makes for peace and harmony begins to look like a reversion to the nineteenth-century theory of “harmony of interests,” which lay at the heart of the very Wilsonian liberalism against which the realists endlessly inveigh. One would have thought that the idea of an international harmony of interests would have been tenable only as long as the oppressed had no voice in world affairs and could not testify to the contrary. The illusion persists, however, because we persist in ignoring the testimony which they now give in such abundance.
      One comes back, finally, to that sentence in American Diplomacy: “If our own purposes and undertakings here at home are decent ones, unsullied by arrogance or hostility toward other people or delusions of superiority, then the pursuit of our national interest can never fail to be conducive to a better world.” The question is, can the national interest be disentangled from the arrogance and hostility and delusions of superiority that seem to have characterized the behavior of nations at all times? Perhaps it could be, if nations came truly to understand their long-range interests. But that possibility may not be the best premise on which to base a philosophy of international relations that aspires to realism.

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Pub: 07 Jul 2022 16:50 UTC

Edit: 07 Jul 2022 16:52 UTC

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