No one should expect such a state
Kennan’s reasoning reflected his thinking on the origins of World War I. For then, as now, great-power rivalries had existed. So too had diplomacy as a means of managing them. Nixon and Kissinger were following Bismarck’s example by balancing power, a considerable improvement over Johnson’s practice of expending it where no vital interests were at stake. But like the Europeans who came after Bismarck, the United States and the Soviet Union were simultaneously accumulating arms of such strength that any use of them would destroy what they were meant to defend. It had taken the belligerents of 1914–18 four years to accomplish this. In the nuclear age, it would take about forty minutes.
III.
“I could not be more pleased than I am by this appointment,” Kennan wrote Kissinger on September 19, 1973, shortly after the beleaguered Nixon, now deeply enmeshed in the Watergate scandal, had nominated his national security adviser also to become secretary of state. Kennan’s congratulations came, however, only in the last two lines of a long letter criticizing the novelist-historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet Union’s closest contemporary equivalent to Tolstoy himself, and the nuclear physicist Andrey Sakharov, whose anguish over the bombs he had built paralleled Oppenheimer’s. Both were “behaving very unwisely” by provoking a showdown over their alleged official mistreatment. Even worse, they were trying to enlist Americans in support of their cause. The United States could not sacrifice its entire relationship with the U.S.S.R. to satisfy “the grievances of these people.”14
It was a surprisingly harsh tone for the self-regarded heir of the other Kennan, the most prominent nineteenth-century defender of Russian dissidents, and for George F. Kennan as well. He had made his reputation in 1946–47, after all, by
One reason was that he was becoming more sympathetic to the conduct of American foreign policy. By the time Nixon relinquished the presidency to Gerald Ford in August 1974, his administration had reached agreements with the Soviet Union to limit strategic arms, brought China out of its long diplomatic isolation, negotiated an end to the war in Vietnam, contained an unexpected Arab-Israeli war, and endorsed the concept of a multipolar world that resembled in principle, if not in all its details, Kennan’s thinking while on the Policy Planning Staff a quarter-century earlier. Kissinger “understands my views better than anyone at State ever has,” Kennan acknowledged. It was a relief to know that he would stay on: “Henry’s a fine person, and I think very highly of him,” but at the same time “he scares me.” For “with opportunists like Scoop Jackson around, he could go at any moment.”16
“Scoop” was Senator Henry M. Jackson, a long-serving Washington State Democrat who, in the aftermath of the 1972 Nixon-Brezhnev summit, had taken it upon himself to dismantle detente. He wanted to return the Democratic Party—whose presidential nominee that year was the haplessly dovish George McGovern—to the tough foreign policy traditions of Truman and Acheson. Nixon and Kissinger, Jackson claimed, had ceded superiority in strategic weaponry to the Soviet Union through ill-conceived arms control agreements, while failing to condemn that country’s growing harassment of dissidents and potential emigrants, chiefly Jews. Jackson would use his considerable influence in the Senate to demand numerical parity in any new strategic arms treaties. He would also withhold “most-favored nation” status and Export-Import Bank credits—both promised by Nixon in Moscow—until the U.S.S.R. relaxed its restrictions on emigration. Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov, as Kennan saw it, were cheering him on.
The intricacies of arms control mattered little to Kennan. With both sides possessing the capacity for “fantastic overkills,” he had told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee several years earlier, all calculations of advantage and disadvantage were meaningless. Human rights, though, were a trickier issue. Like John Quincy Adams, Kennan doubted the feasibility of trying to right wrongs committed by foreign governments against their own citizens. He still hoped for change within the Soviet Union but had lost faith in the ability of American leaders to bring this about. He had long deplored the ease with which domestic politics could derail foreign policy—Scoop Jackson was hardly the first example—but now the stakes were higher: with weapons of mass destruction available in such numbers, even a slight miscalculation could produce universal destruction. What gave Soviet dissidents the right, then, even if they were the figurative descendants of the Russians the elder Kennan had tried to help, to place detente at risk? 17
They would have replied, with good reason, that the Soviet leaders were using detente to suppress dissent. Following the crushing of the “Prague spring” in 1968, Brezhnev had proposed an international conference to confirm post–World War II boundaries throughout Europe, with a view to regaining, through diplomacy, the legitimacy his own and other Eastern European regimes had lost. For if the United States and its allies formally recognized the status quo, what basis would domestic dissidents have for challenging communist party rule? The persistence with which Moscow pressed this plan gave the Western Europeans and the Canadians—Washington, in this instance, paid little attention—the opportunity to attach a Jackson-like condition of their own: that all parties to any such agreement acknowledge “the universal significance of human rights and fundamental freedoms.” Brezhnev, equally inattentively, accepted the compromise. So on July 31, 1975, thirty-five heads of government from the United States, Canada, the Soviet Union, and all European states except Albania gathered in Helsinki to sign, on the next day, the “Final Act” of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe.18
It was “a lot of nonsense,” Kennan wrote privately, “two years of wrangling over language, most of it of a general nature, none of it committing anyone specifically to anything.” The Americans and their allies had lost nothing, since none intended to reunify Europe—particularly Germany—in the first place. The Soviets had made some significant verbal concessions, subscribing to language that appeared to proscribe, in the future, what they had done to Czechoslovakia, but hardly anyone in the United States understood this. Nixon, Ford, and even Kissinger had promised too much, and now—with allegations from hard-line Democrats and right-wing Republicans that the United States had again, as at Yalta, sold out Eastern Europe—the reaction was setting in. As far as Kennan could see, Americans were “right back where we were in Mr. Dulles’s time.” If anyone should devise “really sound and brilliant diplomacy vis-a-vis the Soviet Union, the country at large would not recognize it and would call with great acclaim for its abandonment.”19
Despite the Helsinki agreements, Kennan wrote in a bicentennial history of Soviet-American relations published in the July 1976 issue of
