George F. Kennan : an American life

Peacetime objectives were to reduce the Soviet Union’s external power, while bringing about change in the theories that drove its use. Both tasks were well under way. The Marshall Plan had reversed the Soviet Union’s appeal in Western Europe, while Tito’s defection had shown that Eastern Europeans could challenge Soviet domination. Stalin’s regime remained committed to the idea that conflict with the capitalist world was inevitable, but it was also capable of acting pragmatically, as when it cooperated with the United States and Great Britain to defeat Nazi Germany. It was prepared “to recognize situations, if not arguments.” If such situations could be re-created and sustained long enough to allow changes to take place within the Soviet Union, then these might modify the way it dealt with the rest of the world. Wartime objectives would not be needed, because there would be no war.

None of this would be likely, though, in a permanently divided Europe. On the contrary, the danger of war would be greater if the continent remained split than “if Russian power is peacefully withdrawn in good time and a normal balance restored to the European community.” With this call for a peaceful rollback, several aspects of Kennan’s thinking fell into alignment: his pride in the Marshall Plan’s accomplishments, his insistence on the need for covert operations to complement them, his quick exploitation of Tito’s defection, his abortive effort to keep open the possibility of negotiations with Moscow, and his attempts to derail the North Atlantic Treaty, which he was sure would solidify Europe’s disunity for decades to come. The dots, for Kennan at least, all connected.

Not for Forrestal, though. His peacetime objective was to be sure that the United States could win a war, and on this issue Kennan had nothing to offer. The last third of PPS/38 simply assumed victory, without saying how it would come about. Kennan made no effort to connect his political analysis with Pentagon war planning or with White House budgeting. Instead he focused on the terms a triumphant West should impose upon a defeated Soviet Union. These would not include unconditional surrender—the country was too big to occupy—but they might well require the detachment of certain non-Russian republics: Kennan specified which ones in some detail. All of this brought PPS/38 to over ten thousand words, twice the length of the “long telegram.” Forrestal had found in that earlier document just what he needed to understand Moscow’s behavior. This one, in contrast, turned out to be useless. His problem was that inadequate military resources might lose a war—not what to do after winning one.³⁷

Drastically cut, PPS/38 became NSC 20/4, which Truman approved on November 24, 1948. Despite the effort Kennan put into it, the paper had little impact on actual policy. The reasons reveal Kennan’s shortcomings as a planner, one of which was prolixity. Without the discipline imposed by time constraints, as in his Yugoslav paper, or by mode of transmission, as in the “long telegram,” or by tough-minded subordinates, which he did not have, Kennan tended to ramble. He had done so in “Russia—Seven Years Later,” the 1944 essay of which he had been so proud which no one else read. PPS/38 repeated that pattern. Another problem was shallowness in economics: neither Kennan nor his staff knew enough about that subject to answer Forrestal’s question about sustainable levels of peacetime military spending. Finally Kennan, as always, was self-absorbed. He was finding it easier to connect dots in his head than within the U.S. government. He was writing increasingly, once again, for himself.³⁸

VI.

In Kennan’s defense, he had a lot on his mind while preparing PPS/38. For on June 24, 1948, Stalin cut off land access to the British, French, and American sectors of West Berlin, which lay over a hundred miles inside the Soviet occupation zone. He had been slowly restricting access to the city since March, presumably in response to talks the Western allies had been holding in London looking toward the establishment of a separate West German state. But by finally completing the process—ostensibly to stop circulation of the Deutschmark, the new West German currency, in the Soviet sector of the city—he created the gravest threat of a new war since the last one had ended.

Kennan had given relatively little attention to Germany since calling for its partition just prior to the Yalta conference in February 1945. He still lamented the Anglo-American insistence on unconditional surrender that had left the Red Army controlling almost half the country. He doubted the victors’ ability to reform it, or even to agree on a plan for doing so. He saw in General Clay the same obliviousness to geopolitics—and to instructions from Washington—that MacArthur had shown in Japan. Kennan had argued strongly for including the western zones of Germany in the Marshall Plan; nor had he opposed their political consolidation when that idea was first broached. Now, though, the blockade forced him to focus on the German question, and within weeks he had repudiated most of his own thinking about that country since the end of the war.

His first response was to call for firmness. “[W]e are in Berlin by right,” he wrote a friend, “and we do not propose to be ridden out by any blackmail or other forms of coercion.” When the Joint Chiefs of Staff, concerned about the exposed position of American troops in the city, suggested withdrawing them out of “humanitarian consideration” for the West Berliners, Kennan reacted angrily: “The world would know well enough that we were turning 2,400,000 people over to all the rigors and terrors of totalitarian rule.” The United States should risk war if necessary, he advised Lovett, to retain its position in Berlin. Still Kennan could not conceal from Smith, in Moscow, a growing concern “that our Soviet adversaries may be now too over-extended—at once too weak and too terrified of their own weakness—to behave rationally.” If that was the case, “then I am afraid no one can save them, even for the sake of the peace of Europe, and that their regime will have to go down in violence, no matter how strongly the rest of us work to prevent this issue.”³⁹

It was with a view to avoiding that grim prospect that Kennan asked the Policy Planning Staff to take a fresh look at the German question in late July. Any peaceful end to the Berlin blockade, he assumed, would have to be arranged through the Council of Foreign Ministers, which still represented the four occupying powers in Germany; but what should the Americans seek in such negotiations? By August 12, working under intense pressure, Kennan had completed PPS/37, “Policy Questions Concerning a Possible German Settlement.” Unlike his Yugoslavia and China papers, it argued for not allowing existing trends to continue but rather for making a bold effort to reverse them.

Continuity would mean carrying on with a divided Germany while strengthening Western Europe. That, though, would ensure a divided continent, which could hardly be the long-term goal of the United States. Stalin had blockaded Berlin because he feared the formation of a West German government. If that process proceeded, he would set up a rival regime in East Germany, and “the fight would be on for fair.” Half of Europe would form a military alliance with Washington, precluding any rollback of Moscow’s influence over the other half. Germans would resent the breakup of their country, the collapse of east-west trade would cripple European recovery, and the Truman administration would face the costs of an indefinite military occupation at a time when Congress could at any point cut the necessary appropriations: “From such a trend of developments, it would be hard—harder than it is now—to find ‘the road back’ to a united and free Europe.”

The alternative was “to press at this time for a sweeping settlement of the German problem which would involve the withdrawal of Allied forces from at least the major portion of Germany, the termination of military government and the establishment of a German Government with real power and independence.” This was, after all, what the United States supposedly had wanted since the end of the war. By showing how much Stalin feared a divided Germany, his blockade had advanced the prospects for reunification further and faster than anyone had expected. If handled imaginatively, the Berlin crisis could be an opportunity to mitigate—if not to end altogether—the European standoff.

Stalin would find it hard to resist an offer to substitute, for an independent West German state aligned militarily with the United States, a unified demilitarized Germany linked to no alliance—or so Kennan insisted. This would solve the Berlin problem, for if occupation forces were to leave the country, there could be no humiliation in withdrawing them from the city. The possibility that a reconstituted Germany might tilt toward Moscow was now