George F. Kennan : an American life

weeks later, who would see how little of the American national income was going to military spending compared with themselves. The United States would not go bankrupt “even if we were forced to shell out three times as much for defense.”⁴⁸

Kennan did not give up on his strategy of seeking to strain Sino-Soviet ties, but the Korean conflict made it much harder to sell that idea in Washington. He was wondering as early as June 29 whether it might be the Russians’ intention “to keep out of this business themselves . . . but to embroil us to the maximum with their Korean and Chinese satellites.” If so, why not offer the Chinese Communists an inducement not to cooperate? Would it not appeal to them and embarrass Moscow, he asked on July 11, “if we were suddenly to favor and achieve the admission of the Chinese Communists to the U.N. and to the Security Council?” Kennan’s proposal reflected no greater sympathy for Mao Zedong than he had for Chiang Kai-shek: like the decision to deploy the Navy in the Taiwan Strait, this would be a strategic maneuver, not a conciliatory gesture. China, he told the British ambassador Oliver Franks, “would never, in my opinion, be dependable from the standpoint of western interests.”⁴⁹

But when Kennan mentioned this plan to John Foster Dulles—who would have become secretary of state had the Republicans won in 1948 and was now the principal Japanese peace treaty negotiator—“I was shouted down.” It would look to the American public, Dulles insisted, “as though we had been tricked into giving up something for nothing.” Kennan saw the problem and abandoned the idea, but he hoped that history would someday record this as an example of the damage done “by the irresponsible and bigoted interference of the China lobby and its friends in Congress.” A few days later he learned what Dulles was telling newspapermen: “that while he used to think highly of George Kennan, he had now concluded that he was a very dangerous man: that he was advocating the admission of the Chinese Communists to the United Nations, and a cessation of U.S. military action at the 38th parallel.”⁵⁰

The latter charge oversimplified Kennan’s position. He had argued from the first days of the fighting that MacArthur should be free to conduct military operations anywhere on the Korean peninsula, as long as these advanced the political objective of liberating South Korea. What he did oppose, on both military and political grounds, was occupying all of North Korea. Kennan was sure that MacArthur would soon take the offensive, despite defeats that were pushing U.N. forces into a tight perimeter around Pusan. When he did,

the further we were to advance up the peninsula the more unsound it would become from a military standpoint. If we were actually to advance beyond the neck of the peninsula, we would be getting into an area where mass could be used against us and where we would be distinctly at a disadvantage. This, I thought, increased the importance of a clear concept of our being able to terminate our action at the proper point, ... [to] make sure that we did not frighten the Russians into action which would interfere with this.

Kennan knew how hard it had been to control MacArthur in Japan. Any insensitivity now to instructions from Washington could lead the Soviet Union to commit its forces. Nitze and Bohlen also worried about this, as did Davies, who stressed the additional danger of Chinese intervention. Even if these worst cases did not materialize, Kennan asked on July 31, what chance would there be of getting Soviet help to end the war if MacArthur was approaching “the gates of Vladivostok”? ⁵¹

Restraint had few other advocates in Washington, however, as the planning for MacArthur’s offensive advanced. The Joint Chiefs of Staff disliked having diplomacy constrain military operations, and even within the State Department there were vigorous objections to Kennan’s argument, notably from John Allison, director of the Office of Northeast Asian Affairs, who attacked it as “a timid, half-hearted policy designed not to provoke the Soviets to war.” Meanwhile the administration’s critics had become no less vehement. “This noisy and violent Republican minority in Congress [is] paralyzing . . . an intelligent and courageous approach,” Kennan wrote on August 14. Never before had there been such confusion with respect to foreign policy.

The President doesn’t understand it; Congress doesn’t understand it; nor does the public, nor does the press.... Only the diplomatic historian, it seems to me, working from the leisure and detachment of a later day, will be able to unravel this incredible tangle and reveal the true aspect of the various factors and issues involved.

Kennan could not resist, however, making one last effort to sort it all out. On the twenty-third, he sent Acheson some parting recommendations before leaving for Princeton: “I am afraid that, like so many of my thoughts, they will be too remote from general thinking in the Government to be of much practical use to you.”⁵²

This proved to be true. For as Kennan detached himself from the clacking cable machines and began to contemplate what had happened over the past two months, the euphoria he had felt during the early days of the Korean conflict gave way to a more characteristic pessimism—some of it merited, much of it not—about what the United States could hope to accomplish in East Asia. The immediate problem was MacArthur: “We are tolerating a state of affairs in which we do not really have full control over the statements that are being made—and the actions taken—in our name.” But there were larger long-term issues as well.

One had to do with Korea’s future once the fighting had stopped. It had been necessary to resist the invasion, since the “psychological radiations” from a failure to do so would have been so devastating. But did the United States really wish to commit itself, indefinitely, to keeping the Korean peninsula outside of the Russian and Japanese spheres of influence within which it had historically been included? The latter would obviously be the better option, but defeat in war and occupation by the Americans had so weakened Japan that it could no longer play that role. Was there any alternative, then, to tolerating Soviet control, as long as it was not manifested “in ways calculated to throw panic and terror into other Asian peoples and thus to achieve for the Kremlin important successes going far beyond the Korean area”?

The war in Korea had led the Truman administration, in addition to ordering naval patrols in the Taiwan Strait, to increase economic and military assistance to the French in Indochina: this amounted to “guaranteeing the French in an undertaking which neither they nor we, nor both of us together, can win.” Would it not be preferable “to permit the turbulent political currents of that country to find their own level, unimpeded by foreign troops or pressures, even at the probable cost of an eventual deal between Viet-Nam and the Viet-Minh, and the spreading over the whole country of Viet-Minh authority”?

Finally, and most controversially, Kennan insisted that the United States could not indefinitely, using its own strength, keep Japan resistant to Soviet influence. Only the Japanese, through their own choices, could do that; yet how could they exercise that freedom if the Americans kept troops there? Any peace treaty anchored to a continued military presence would never have legitimacy in the eyes of the Japanese. The implied duress would divert their attention to the problem of “how to get United States troops out” rather than “how to meet Soviet pressures against Japan.”

The best solution, then, would be to seek a comprehensive settlement with the Soviet Union—partly explicit, partly tacit—that would terminate hostilities in Korea, admit Communist China to the United Nations, allow a plebiscite to determine Taiwan’s future, bring about the neutralization and demilitarization of Japan, and reduce American military capabilities to a “mixed combat force, commanded and operated as a unit, capable of dealing a sharp blow on a limited front almost anywhere in the world on short notice.” None of this could be left to MacArthur: “It would take a real diplomatic envoy, backed by Presidential authority but instructed to operate quietly, patiently and inconspicuously.”

Kennan admitted that such a project would provoke “violent and outraged opposition.” It would pour oil on fires