George F. Kennan : an American life

vanishingly small, given the extent to which Stalin’s blockade had angered most Germans. And Kennan’s plan would remove the need to keep a large American military establishment in the middle of Europe, thereby placating Congress while alleviating Forrestal’s concerns.

What if a unified Germany, even if anti-Soviet, again threatened the peace of Europe? The four occupying powers could prevent unauthorized rearmament, Kennan maintained, by each retaining a military base on German territory, even as they relinquished responsibility for civil affairs to the new German government. The American, British, and Soviet bases would be supplied by sea, leaving the U.S.S.R. with no justification for continuing to occupy Poland. Disengagement from Germany, hence, would also advance the liberation of Eastern Europe.

And what of the plans, now well under way, for a North Atlantic Treaty? Kennan said nothing about this in PPS/37, but his logic was clear enough. If the Europeans’ military insecurity had led them to seek such a guarantee in the first place, would their anxieties not diminish as Soviet forces withdrew from Germany and even from Eastern Europe? The Americans would not go home: their bases on German soil, along with those of the British and the French, would allow watching the Germans, but also the Russians. So what would be left to fear?

Boldness, Kennan acknowledged, was more difficult than timidity: “The course of action and change is harder than the course of inaction.” But disengagement would become no easier as time passed.

[I]f the division of Europe cannot be overcome peacefully at this juncture, when the lines of cleavage have not yet hardened completely across the continent, when the Soviet Union (as I believe) is not yet ready for another war, when the anticommunist sentiment in Germany is momentarily stronger than usual, and when the Soviet satellite area is troubled with serious dissension, uncertainty, and disaffection, then it is not likely that prospects for a peaceful resolution of Europe’s problems will be better after a further period of waiting.

The ultimate answer to the German question was a federated Europe into which all parts of the country could be absorbed. A divided Germany would prevent that. It followed, then, that “Germany must be given back to the Germans,” for the reconstitution of Europe could not await the resolution of east-west differences. At a minimum, by putting forward such a proposal, “we shall at least have made the gesture, which is important.”⁴⁰

PPS/37 demonstrated, better than anything else Kennan ever wrote, his ability to look beyond processes to the structures they were creating, and to propose alternatives. Clausewitz, borrowing from the French, would have described this as a coup d’oeil: an integration of experience, observation, and imagination that constructs the whole out of the fragments the eye can see. The method, he suggested, was that of a poet or a painter, involving “the quick recognition of a truth that the mind would ordinarily miss or would perceive only after long study and reflection.”⁴¹

The truth Kennan recognized in this instance was one his own mind had missed until this point: that the division of Germany, which he had been advocating since 1945 as a way of restoring a balance of power in Europe, was in fact removing power from Europe, concentrating it instead in the hands of the United States and the Soviet Union. The Cold War would go on indefinitely unless this trend was reversed. PPS/37 began Kennan’s effort to do that: it was a Clausewitzian coup d’oeil, aimed at rescuing the Germans, the Europeans, the Americans, and ultimately even the Russians from the consequences of a course he had previously recommended. It was Kennan reversing himself.

VII.

The difficulty with coups d’oeil, however, is that they are more likely to be regarded as art than policy. PPS/37 was indeed “bold and imaginative,” Hickerson wrote Kennan on August 31, 1948, but it would be dangerous to try to unite Germany until Western Europe was economically and militarily stronger. That was the first of many objections. Too many people, Kennan recalled—not just Hickerson and his State Department colleagues, but also Clay, the British, and even the French—had locked themselves into creating a West German government. They feared that any dealing with the Russians would cause confusion in Germany, leading to the suspicion “that we were about to sell some of these people out.” From their point of view, though, Kennan was too inclined to negotiate. “The problem with that approach,” Dean Rusk recalled—he was then running the Office of United Nations Affairs—“is that it allows you to be nibbled to death, like ducks. Kennan couldn’t see that.” All responses received opposed his conclusions, Kennan reported to Marshall and Lovett on September 8. “I think them worthy of careful attention.... I disagree with them all.”⁴²

Marshall nonetheless supported Kennan’s effort to think broadly about a German settlement. He authorized the Policy Planning Staff to convene a group of consultants to discuss the issue—among them were Hamilton Fish Armstrong, still the editor of Foreign Affairs, and Dean Acheson, soon to replace Marshall as secretary of state. They endorsed Kennan’s position as a long-term objective but doubted that Moscow would accept such a plan anytime soon: the United States should, therefore, proceed with the formation of a West German state. Kennan accepted their advice philosophically. “We will continue to work on this program,” he assured Marshall on September 17. The consultants had at least agreed that “time is on our side, that we must not yield in Berlin, and that we must continue to sweat it out there as best we can.”⁴³

As it happened, Kennan was lecturing that morning at the National War College. There were, he told the newly arrived students, “only five centers of industrial and military power in the world which are important to us from the standpoint of national security.” One, obviously, was the United States. The other four—Great Britain, Germany, the Soviet Union, and Japan—lay on or alongside the Eurasian landmass. Nowhere else did climate, population, tradition, and industrial strength allow developing the kind of military power that could endanger American interests. Only the Soviet Union was completely hostile. Japan could fall under Moscow’s influence if the United States mismanaged its transition to full sovereignty, but that was now unlikely. Germany, however, was contested territory, the only point upon which the global power balance could now pivot. That was why its future was so important.

The ideal would have been to make a united Germany the centerpiece of a united Europe, but the allies were far from ready for such an arrangement: “Oh, it is very easy for you to talk,” they would say to any American who proposed this. “You are strong and sleek and fat and you are three thousand miles away, and you can do this backseat driving perfectly safely, but it is a different thing for us up here.” They were more interested in the guarantees they could extract from Washington, therefore, than in reuniting the Germans. A divided Europe, whatever its implications for the international system as a whole, would not much bother them.

Americans faced, then, a tough choice. Was it better to do alone what was right, or to do in company of allies what was wrong? The State Department had concluded that “come what may, we simply must hold with the French and the British, . . . because if we let disunity creep in we may have lost the whole battle anyway.” For if the United States ever abandoned its allies, then it would have become cynical, a change that was bound to affect the nation’s character: if “we cease having ideals in the field of foreign policy, something very valuable will have gone out of our internal political life.” There was no alternative, then, but “to bind our friends to us with the proverbial Shakespeare’s hoop of steel.” This was “our worst problem of foreign policy today,” because “what appears to be the sensible thing to do about Germany is the thing our own Allies are most reluctant to do.”⁴⁴

The Policy Planning Staff continued to work on “Program A,” as Kennan’s plan came to be called, and by mid- November he had a revised version ready for use if the United States should wish to specify terms for a comprehensive German settlement. It would be put forward, however, only with assurance of “a wide enough degree of British and French acquiescence to maintain basic three-power unity.” Even then, the Russians probably