George F. Kennan : an American life

economic relationship. In the meantime, “the international communist movement will never be able to make good entirely the damage done by this development.”²⁹

PPS/35 set forth several propositions that, in varying ways at various times, would guide American foreign policy through the rest of the Cold War. One was that communism need not be monolithic: the Soviet Union was likely to have as much trouble controlling its ideological allies as it would resisting its geopolitical adversaries. A second was that the United States should therefore cooperate with some communists to contain others: dividing enemies by driving wedges might now be feasible. A third was that the domestic character of a government was less important than its international behavior. The idea had long been implicit in Washington’s support for authoritarian regimes in Latin America, in its wartime alliance with the U.S.S.R., and more recently in the extension of Marshall Plan aid to socialist regimes in Western Europe. Kennan made it explicit.

The paper was also unusual in that it instantly became official policy. Lovett sent its conclusions to all diplomatic missions and consular offices on June 30, the day he received it. Marshall approved it the next day, after which he forwarded it to Truman for his information: the president’s endorsement was not thought necessary. PPS/35 eventually gained the status of an NSC document, but only for reasons of bureaucratic tidiness. Kennan’s Yugoslavia planning had made policy in record time, leaving him with every reason to be pleased.³⁰

Kennan then used Tito’s defection to defend the China policy he and Davies had been advocating. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had never reconciled themselves to abandoning the Nationalists, and with the prospect of a communist victory looming, they called once more, in the summer of 1948, for a major effort to save Chiang Kai- shek. Mao Zedong, they still claimed, was as much a puppet of the Soviet Union as the Eastern European satellite leaders had been, but now Tito had proven not to be a puppet. With Davies’s help, Kennan exploited that opening with PPS/39, “United States Policy Toward China,” completed early in September.

It acknowledged that the U.S.S.R. would appear to benefit from a triumph of communism in China. But “the edifying truancy of comrade Tito” must already have raised doubts in the minds of Kremlin leaders about their ability to dominate Mao, who had been running the Chinese Communist Party far longer than Tito had controlled its Yugoslav counterpart. “[A]n exceedingly shrewd judge of his fellow Chinese,” Mao knew that subservience to the Soviet Union would provoke resentment among them.

It is a nice piece of irony that at precisely the time the Chinese Communist leadership is most likely to wish to conceal its ties with Moscow, the Kremlin is most likely to be exerting utmost pressure to bring the Chinese Communists under complete control. The possibilities which such a situation would present us, provided we have regained freedom of action, need scarcely be spelled out.

It followed, then, that “we must not become irrevocably committed to any one course of action or any one faction in China,” for there were operating in that country “tremendous, deep-flowing indigenous forces which are beyond our power to control.”³¹

When his mentor and patron Forrestal protested that this was not a policy, Kennan responded firmly. Noninterference in the internal affairs of another country was, after all, a long-standing principle of American diplomacy, “deeply sanctioned in practice and in public opinion.” Whoever proposed abandoning it now would have to show

(a) That there is sufficiently powerful national interest to justify our departure in the given instance from a rule of international conduct which has been proven sound by centuries of experience and which we would wish others to observe with respect to ourselves, and

(b) that we have the means to conduct such intervention successfully and can afford the cost in terms of the national effort it involves.

Neither of these claims held with respect to China, where “powerful ‘Tito’ tendencies” were likely to develop. It would, therefore, be “frivolous and irresponsible” to waste any more economic or military assistance on the Chinese Nationalists. They regarded the United States as a dairy cow, one end of which “can do you a lot of good” while the other “is incapable of conferring any damage.”³²

Kennan went so far as to draft a presidential statement, at the end of November 1948, warning that what was happening in China would not now be affected “by any measure of aid which the United States could feasibly make available.” Not wanting to appear to be administering a final blow to Chiang Kai-shek, Truman decided against using it. But he reserved the right to do so in the future, thereby departing from Kennan’s advice only on the question of when he should announce publicly that he was following it.³³

In planning policy for Yugoslavia and China, Kennan combined fast footwork with modest objectives. He was arguing, in these two instances, for letting existing trends run their course, while taking advantage of whatever opportunities they might present. His China policy, he admitted, was one of acting “on a day by day basis in accordance with the changes of the moment. It cannot be explicitly defined on paper in a form which can serve as a guide for months or years ahead.”³⁴ Curiously, this was the kind of improvisation Kennan had criticized in the past. It echoed Roosevelt’s resistance to planning in World War II. It sounded like Byrnes making it up as he went along in Moscow at the end of 1945. It was how, in Kennan’s view, the United States had drifted into a commitment to the military defense of Western Europe, regardless of the consequences for a European-wide settlement. Kennan was succeeding in shaping policy—or so it was beginning to seem in the last half of 1948—only where he could allow himself not to plan. Forrestal, who sensed this, was onto something.

V.

With good reason, for Kennan had failed to provide him with policy guidance on a more important issue when he desperately needed it. As secretary of defense, Forrestal faced the daunting task of ensuring that military capabilities were adequate to secure national interests, whether in peace or war. Worried that commitments were exceeding these, under pressure from Truman to stay within tight budget limits, beset by rivalries over scarce resources among the armed services, denied any assurance about the possible use of the atomic bomb, Forrestal was hoping for answers from his preferred Soviet expert to a big question: should the United States be preparing for a “peak period of danger” from the U.S.S.R., or for an extended but static threat? In either case, what proportion of American resources should be devoted to military purposes?³⁵

Kennan doubted the Policy Planning Staff’s ability to produce this information. It was not possible to predict when war might come, he explained to Marshall and Lovett, or which objectives might be achieved by military or nonmilitary means: “These things are hopelessly intertwined.” The Soviet Union’s capabilities, even when known accurately, would not necessarily shape its intentions: “We cannot calculate with precision the political imponderables.”³⁶ The skeletal NSC staff was unable to answer Forrestal’s question either, though, so Kennan reluctantly took it on. By the middle of August, he had finished a thirty-nine-page analysis that sought to reconcile the American tradition of distinguishing sharply between war and peace with Clausewitz’s warnings about the impossibility of doing so. It was not quite what Forrestal had in mind.

PPS/38, “United States Objectives With Respect to Russia,” pointed out that Soviet objectives had remained much the same, in both war and peace, from Lenin through Stalin. Planning for peak danger, therefore, made little sense. But a democracy would never find sustained planning easy, because its aversion to war would always tempt it to shift objectives in peacetime. The task, therefore, was to define present peacetime objectives and hypothetical wartime objectives in such a way as to diminish the gap between them.