Containing Containment, RIP George Kennan...

George Kennan, proposer-creator of our postwar policy of containment died last week at the age of 101.

Containment was of course, a policy to confine marxism-leninism to the Eurasian land mass via proxy warfare, economic development, and military alliances. It was designed to “wait out” Soviet expansionist policy until frustrated by the limitations imposed from without, cooler heads more willing to negotiate in good faith prevailed in the Kremlin.

Containment was hammered together and subsequently sold to an electorate still thought to be given to isolationism. It kept a weather eye on domestic politics from the git-go - few commentators recall that in these days of deficit triumphalism. As such, the beauty of such a policy being that it allowed for a degree of cultural economic normalcy at home whilst pursuing an activist program abroad. In some respects containment was hoped to deter Soviet aggression without imposing irksome wartime restrictions on the U.S. citizenry.

All this depended on a consensus between the major parties here at home. This would be a consensus that would have to function & perpetuate itself over time because containment would have no definite expiration date. In the 1960’s this vague promise of fruitful future negotiations bought at the price of present intransigence would prove the crux of both rightist and leftist critiques of containment.

All this was consequence Kennan’s famous 1947 “Mr. X” article in which he presciently described the inherent structural weaknesses of Soviet Society and accurately predicted a time when want and economic stagnation at home would compel the USSR to negotiate with the West.

And what the hell, all this became our foreign policy practically down to the present day. Still and all that Kennan couldn’t keep up with his own formulation, especially as it passed into the hands of less adept policy makers. By 1955 he’d be calling for a renewed approach to the Warsaw Pact on the basis of little else than the death of Josef Stalin. This contradicted his own elegant notions of “no war and no concessions” circa 1947...but hey the man was a thinker first and foremost,and a democrat, practically a dying breed in modern America.

Truman sent him to Moscow as Ambassador, Kennedy would send him to Yugoslavia seeking a few cracks in the socialist bloc and in the meantime he piled up two Pulitzer Prizes for varied books and memoirs. Still and all that events ran away from him, as they do from all of us. By 1984 he’d be exclaiming in essays that it was a “sin” to construct a nuclear weapon and wallowing in mea culpas.

Still and all that, he was a serious man in all respects a last living link to the quaint drowsy law office style at the Department of State, now swept away by mass politics and ever more massive communications.