Blind Determination

For most of his lifetime, the architect of America’s cold war policy of containment toward the Soviet Union was known as a realist. But if the George Kennan who was the author of the "Long Telegram" of 1946, the advisor to Secretary of State George Marshall, and the U.S. ambassador to Moscow, remains a figure of historical importance, the Kennan who is the only major 20th century American political thinker who fundamentally distrusted optimism and was skeptical of the internationalism even of democratic states is still our contemporary. Even Niebuhr, who was hardly unmoved by pessimism, and, in some of his writing, seems to give in to it, finally rejected it as an abnegation of American responsibility. Kennan was unmoved by such democratic utopianism. In his book American Diplomacy, published in 1951, he wrote that:

Tweet

Email

Print

“… I sometimes wonder whether in this respect a democracy is not uncomfortably similar to one of those prehistoric monsters with a body as long as this room and a brain the size of a pin: he lies there in his comfortable primeval mud and pays little attention to his environment; he is slow to wrath—in fact, you practically have to whack his tail off to make him aware that his interests are being disturbed; but, once he grasps this, he lays about him with such blind determination that he not only destroys his adversary but largely wrecks his native habitat. You wonder whether it would not have been wiser for him to have taken a little more interest in what was going on at an earlier date and to have seen whether he could not have prevented some of these situations from arising instead of proceeding from an undiscriminating indifference to a holy wrath equally undiscriminating.”

We certainly had lavish helpings of holy wrath during the Bush administration. And while the rhetoric of the Obama White House and of Robert Gates’ Pentagon (of Mrs. Clinton’s State Department and General Jones’ National Security Council, the picture is far less clear) is far more sensible, the blind determination that Kennan warned against and that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld incarnated to the point of caricature, continues to determine American actions in Afghanistan. “The United States of America does not quit once it starts on something…We keep at it. We persevere,” President Obama told a cheering military audience at the Afghan base he visited after what can be safely assumed to have been a far less enthusiastic encounter with President Karzai. And just as President Bush had done before him, President Obama insisted that the campaign in which the troops were engaged was “what is going to be required in order to ensure that our families back home have the security they need.”

On one level, such rhetoric, whether it comes from the current president or his predecessor, is unexceptionable—an entirely appropriate morale-boosting gesture whose essence was President Obama’s presence rather than the speech he delivered. But on a deeper level, it is disheartening both as one more demonstration—though of course, none was needed—that the administration is absolutely committed to its escalation of the war in Afghanistan, and also as evidence of the traditional American belief that U.S. resolve trumps the lessons of history. To put it more starkly, the entire American project in Afghanistan rests on a version of the judgment Henry Ford delivered in an interview in the Chicago Tribune more than a century ago. “History is more or less bunk,” Ford said. “We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s dam is the history we made today.”

Many Americans are proud of their historical amnesia (another classic iteration is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s note in the manuscript of The Last Tycoon that “there are no second acts in American lives”). They shouldn’t be. It goes with the notion that America’s leadership in the world is based on its moral qualities, whether actual or in the form of what the blogger Dan Kervick once called a “spiritualized or Platonized nationalism…” that makes the country “an object of idolatrous worship” for some Americans. A powerful nation that understands its leadership as being based on a cool calculation of its interests and of its power and resources relative to those of its adversaries and rivals, is far less likely to over-reach than a nation that confuses its own interests with those of a higher morality. The latter self-understanding is one that whether it knows it or not holds history in contempt. Who is Clio to get in the way of the American project? In the grand, inspiring, and utterly hubristic words of "The Battle Hymn of the Repubic", the anthem of Lincoln’s army— Lincoln is the good and humble American exceptionalist, at least in the eyes of liberal defenders of the creed from Niebuhr forward. “As He died to make men holy/Let us die to make men free.”

George Kennan had a different view. It was once said of him that he never believed in America’s moral leadership of the planet—the phrase is Robert Kennedy’s—because he never believed she had any moral leadership to offer. Writing of Kennan, James Traub once said that his intellect was like “an acid bath to received wisdom.” In contrast, President Obama seems to be taking a bubble bath in received wisdom. We will persevere in Afghanistan because? Well, because we’re there, and we’re stuck, and, well, because we’re us. This is not analysis, this is self-infatuation masquerading as resolve. Tolkien wrote that “Despair is only for those who see the end as being beyond all doubt.” It was a quote that resonated with Kennan and that he used in his epilogue to Around the Cragged Hill. But it is awfully hard not to despair.