Lessons from George Frost Kenan

In mid-March 2025, it will be 20 years since the death of what many consider the greatest American strategist of the 20th century and the creator of the containment strategy (containment), by George Frost Kenan. Although his personality and his views have recently come under fire from the American public due to the misogynistic, chauvinistic and racist views he often expressed in his diaries, Kennan's strategic legacy in the field of international relations is more relevant than ever. Despite the fact that it was sometime during the war in Syria and while the crisis in Ukraine was still "just" a crisis, then US President Barack Obama, in an interview with his biographer David Remnick, said that he did not need any grand strategy, "and even nor George Kennan, but real strategic partners". Real-life events quickly disproved him. The drastic deterioration of relations with Russia and China, as well as Trump's revolution in American foreign and security policy, which entailed a high degree of strategic unpredictability, made a desperate search for people like Kenan, people who saw more widely, understood more deeply and worked more subtly.

FROM DIPLOMAT AND STRATEGIST TO SCIENTIST AND REBEL

George Frost Kenan was born in 1904 in Milwaukee, in the US state of Wisconsin. In his extended family, there was already one George Kenan, coincidentally the famous adventurer and explorer of Russia who crossed this country of colossal size several times. That first George Kennan was the author of several notable books about Russia at a time when America was just getting to know the world around it, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The latter, the much better-known Kenan, grew up in a - in today's vocabulary - dysfunctional family - with a father he never got along with, and he lost his mother when he was only two months old. Very quickly he developed some personality traits that will follow him for the rest of his life, such as melancholy, a sense of inferiority, self-imposed outsiderness, extreme perfectionism, intolerance towards authorities and superiors. On the other hand, he was an above-average intelligent, tall, handsome and striking man, talented in languages ​​(he spoke German and Russian perfectly, and given that his wife Annelise was Norwegian, Norwegian too) and a workaholic who literally fainted from work. because he surrendered to him completely, often to the detriment of his closest family.

In fear of people, crowds and the size of cities and the overall process of modernization, like Konstantin Levin, Tolstoy's hero from Anna Karenina, Kenan returned to nature by buying a hundred-acre farm in rural Pennsylvania in 1942, in a place called, coincidentally, East Berlin. There he wrote, engaged in rural affairs and recovered from the consequences of bad interpersonal relations, which he was never used to. In short, he was, as Balasevic said, "a strange variety".

After graduating from Princeton University in 1925, a year later he became an officer of the US Foreign Service (Foreign Service), and in 1927 he went to the first diplomatic service in Geneva, and then to Hamburg and Berlin. Already in 1928, he was transferred to Estonia, to Tallinn and the capital of Latvia, Riga. After a two-year stay in Berlin, where he would learn German and improve his Russian, in 1931 he returned to Riga, where he would read Russian writers together with people who would later become leading American experts on the Soviet Union, such as Charles "Chip" Bohlen. - especially Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Chekhov, whose works he claimed to have taught him more about Russia than from any history or political science book.

Thanks to all this, and immediately after the official establishment of relations between the USA and the USSR in 1933, after Franklin Delano Roosevelt came to power, he went to Moscow, where he worked in the newly opened embassy for four years, witnessing the worst period of Stalin's purges and crackdowns on dissidents. After a short stay in Washington, in 1938 he served in Prague, from 1939 to 1941 in Berlin (where he was interned in Bad Nauheim from December 1941 to May 1942), Lisbon (1942–1943), London (1944) and Moscow (1944–1946), from where on February 22, 1946 he sent his "Long telegram".

After returning to the USA in the early spring of 1946, already a celebrity since the "Long Telegram", his interpretation of Stalin's refusal to enter the USSR into international financial institutions, was a widely read document at all levels of the American government, he became a professor and deputy commander at the newly founded National war college, where he teaches strategy. At the same time, the Truman administration hired him to give lectures across the US (17 in total) on the world situation and American foreign policy.

In those lectures, as well as in the "Long Telegram", he warned Americans that if they want to understand international relations, they must look at things as they are, not as they should be. In other words, they must be realists and not idealists, that is, legalists in foreign policy. On the example of the policy towards the Soviet Union, this meant that there should be no illusion that this country is in any way different in its behavior from the empire it inherited.

As Kenan expressly states in the "Long Telegram": "The Soviet Union will make efforts to expand the official boundaries of its power whenever a timely and favorable opportunity presents itself." And there will not help any, as he calls them, "rosy" observations about the USSR and its intentions. Unlike them, Kenan recommends to look at things "realistically". According to him, "the Kremlin's neurotic view of international relations stems from the traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity", and in order to reduce this insecurity, "they have learned to seek security only in a patient but fierce struggle aimed at the complete destruction of a rival power, and not in agreements and compromises."

So, nothing personal, it's simply a matter of reality and structural differences that need to be accepted, and America must come to its senses as soon as possible and prepare for a long competition.

As the first director of the political planning department of the State Department, in 1947 he published his most famous text, "The Sources of Soviet Behavior", in the July issue of the magazine "Foreign Affairs", under the pseudonym "X", since as a diplomat he could not publish under his real name. by name. In this article, what was implicit in the "Long Telegram" becomes very explicit, in other words, from the level of recommendation comes a strategy, more precisely a grand strategy of restraint. Kenan claims that "the main element of any policy of the United States of America towards the Soviet Union should be long-term, patient but decisive and vigilant restraint of Russian expansionist tendencies."

It was, as his official biographer John Lewis Geddis claims, an intermediate solution between the appeasement policy, which experienced a fiasco at the end of the thirties, and the possible outbreak of the Third World War, bearing in mind that nuclear weapons led to tectonic changes in the nature of international relations.

Despite the great success of this text, he, as he later admitted in the first volume of his memoirs, "felt like a man who recklessly pushed a large stone from the top of a cliff and now helplessly watches as it rolls destructively down into the valley." Because it's one thing how people like Kenan, who pay attention to every detail and every nuance in their writing, relate to the strategy of containment, and it's completely different how politicians, for whom the most important thing is re-election and staying in power, position themselves towards it.

Words, once spoken or written, get, as is often said, other masters, and in this case many other masters. The biggest problem is that American political decision-makers put containment - which is essentially a defensive strategy - into practice as an offensive, sometimes even very aggressive strategy. In Kenan's view of things, restraint takes time, a lot of it is transferred to the "backyard" of the opponent, who needs to decide for himself whether his aggressive behavior is worth it or not.

Unfortunately for him, the containment began to be carried out as a military one, and in his original idea it was to be carried out by political means. Also, the nuances that distinguished only certain areas of the world from others, marking them as areas of vital American national interest, disappeared on the "black and white Cold War chessboard", making every part of the world important to American interests, although in reality was quite different. In this way, containment turned from a defensive strategy into true crusades in some situations. However, in the end the Soviet empire largely collapsed in on itself, confirming some of Kennan's key arguments, made more than forty years before the collapse of the USSR.

During his time as head of the political planning department, there were great successes of American foreign policy, such as America's entry into alliances, the founding of NATO, recognition of the importance of the "Tito-Stalin" conflict for the global Cold War context, but also huge failures, such as the Soviet atomic bomb or victory of communism in China.

Unsettled in large systems and already in trouble with his new immediate boss, Dean Acheson, Kenan found an alternative to the State Department at "his" Princeton - at the Institute for Advanced Studies, which will be a kind of counterpart to the Yugoslav Center for Philosophy and Social Theory, the refuge of our dissidents during the second Yugoslavia. At that time, the Institute for Advanced Studies was managed by another "exile" from high government circles, the "father" of the atomic bomb, Robert DŽ. Oppenheimer. Kenan will return to Princeton after only two "excursions" into the world of practical politics: after an unsuccessful five-month ambassadorship in the Soviet Union, from May to September 1952, and an equally unfinished, twenty-six-month one in Yugoslavia, from May 1961 to July 1963.

At Princeton, Kenan could walk, think, write and have his own world. Of course, this does not mean that he did not actively participate in social life, all hoping for some new position, especially during the Nixon administration. However, his return to the world of practical politics never came.

He published 20 books, and for two of them, Russia leaves the War and the first volume Memoirs he won the Pulitzer Prize. After the end of the Cold War, he opposed the expansion of NATO to the east. He will keep his diary, which Frank Costiglia will edit and publish in 2014, for almost ninety years, from the eleventh to the hundredth year of his life. He died in 2005, at the age of 101.

KENAN, NATIONAL INTERESTS AND AMERICAN-RUSSIAN RELATIONS TODAY

Kenan was not a theorist of international relations (he even, according to some, despised theories), but he can rightly be called one of the "founding fathers" of the realist theory of this scientific discipline. At the heart of this theory lies the assumption that power is the most important thing in the relationship between people and states and that states strive for power - if you do not have power, you cannot survive in a world where survival is not guaranteed. Disappointed with the way America approached international affairs, too engrossed in the legal aspects of the problem as a "nation of lawyers and legalistic approaches", he believed that things should be viewed more rationally and realistically, because if there are conflicting interests between different parties (in this case the USA and the USSR ), it is logical to expect that there will be conflicts.

Kennan's understanding of national interests is - to put it simply - twofold: they have their immutable part, which is usually called national security, and another, changeable part that rests on values. Although values ​​are important in foreign policy, states in Kenan's opinion should first of all stick to the unchanging part of their interests, the one related to the preservation of their national security. That is why it should not be surprising that he opposed the establishment of NATO, since he believed that the "legalistic obligations" that the USA enters into will reduce the degree of independent action in the protection and promotion of its own interests.

During the Clinton administration, despite the president's wish that Kenan, at least conceptually, help design some new grand strategy for the United States of America for the post-Cold Age, a strategy that could be named in one word, like containment, it did not happen. Kennan, in fact, opposed it, telling the then US Secretary of State Warren Christopher and his deputy Strobe Talbot, whose responsibility, among other things, was the policy towards Russia, that such a thing should be avoided because it will "encourage great and wrong simplifications in analysis and politics".

Moreover, despite his closeness with Talbot, Kennan in public appearances, as well as in the famous article from February 1997, which he published in the "Fatal Mistake" in the "New York Times", warned American policymakers that the expansion of NATO to the east would have a very negative consequences for American-Russian relations, calling it a "strategic mistake of epic proportions". The reasons for his attitude were multiple and, according to Costigliola, he believed that it would inflame "nationalist, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies within Russia, cripple the fragile democracy and set back negotiations on the reduction of nuclear weapons." In short, the Cold War would return to the big door in the relations of the two most powerful nuclear powers of the world.

Photo: Russian Defense Ministry Press service via AP

Unfortunately, the war in Ukraine has resulted in their relations being at a post-Cold War low. The New START agreement, whose validity was extended when the Biden administration came to power, expires at the beginning of 2026, and if it is not renewed, the nuclear race will intensify as in the worst periods of the Cold War. Also, the strong ideology of foreign and security policy on both sides makes it difficult to reach, and especially to implement, any agreement which, despite the announcements of the incoming Trump administration about a quick end to the war, may remain in the shadow of personal intolerance and internal policies.

In this sense, we are of the opinion that it would be worthwhile to try to base American policy towards the Russian Federation on Canaanite principles. We believe that this would be important for at least three reasons. First, Kenan did not demonize Russia and did not try to change it in a way that would be some kind of Jacobin revolutionism. He understood Russia, and precisely because he was able to "penetrate her soul", he had the right to be angry at her aggressive behavior and to devise barriers to her power. Those obstacles and restraints shifted the responsibility to Russia itself, because the price of not giving up aggressive behavior will be too high for it in the end.

Second, Kenan loved and sympathized with Russia and considered the Russians a great nation, especially considering all the sacrifices the population of this country endured over the centuries. If nothing else, those sacrifices demanded the respect and appreciation of the Western powers when it comes to Russian interests and the acceptance of Russia as a great power of at least approximately equal status. This desire for acceptance and respect has been and remains a pillar of Russian foreign policy ever since Peter the Great.

And thirdly, Kenan understood very well that Russia's often paranoid hypersensitivity to events on its western borders can best be resolved only by direct discussion and involvement, and never by the absence of communication and exclusion of any of the parties to the conflict. Because, as Mikhail Gorbachev told Kenan during his visit to Washington in December 1987: "In our country, we believe that a person can be a friend of a country and at the same time remain a loyal and dedicated citizen of his own country; and that is the way we view you.” It seems to be one of the missing links in today's relations between Moscow and Washington. Kenan would say perhaps one of the most important.

The authors are from the Faculty of Political Sciences, UB

The text is the result of the project "National(S) National Interests of the Republic of Serbia: from Contestation to Legitimation - National(S)", financed by the Science Fund of the Republic of Serbia