Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 2018. xiii, 299 pp. (Map, B&W photos.) US$37.95, cloth. ISBN 978-1-5017-1114-5.
George F. Kennan (1904–2005), Princeton graduate and diplomat, joined the inner circle of US foreign policymakers when Secretary of State George C. Marshall appointed him head of the new Policy Planning Staff in 1947. Kennan’s groundbreaking article, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” published that same year in Foreign Affairs under the byline Mr. X, introduced the concept of containment to the American public at a time when Washington policymakers were transfixed by the menace of Soviet-led international communism. Although known primarily as a Sovietologist, Kennan played a vital role in early Cold War US policy in East Asia, primarily with respect to the Chinese civil war and US policy in occupied Japan. Those several years are the primary focus of intelligence analyst-cum-scholar Paul Heer’s meticulous and well-balanced critical study of Kennan’s involvement in US East Asia policy. The book also examines Kennan’s views and policy recommendations regarding Asia throughout the rest of his long life while Kennan was ensconced as éminence grise in the Institute for Advanced Studies at his alma mater. Heer’s important study commands attention for its careful parsing of Kennan’s historical role as well as for inviting reflection on the possible relevance of Kennan’s views to contemporary US policy in Asia some seventy years later.
Kennan made two major contributions to US policy in the late 1940s. First was his successful urge that Washington disengage from the Chinese civil war in which Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces were losing to Mao Zedong’s communist armies. Second was his counsel and support regarding the so-called “reverse course” in Japan that would relieve the former foe from the burdens of a reform-minded US occupation policy. That New Deal-inspired policy was designed to change Japan into a model Western-style democracy, shorn of its militaristic heritage, and encouraged to resume its erstwhile position as the only Asian country occupying a position of strategic importance by virtue of its successful late nineteenth-century transformation into a world-class industrial and military power. Yet Kennan’s stern warning against US-led UN forces crossing the 38th parallel in pursuit of retreating North Korean forces was ignored in the euphoria that followed General Douglas MacArthur’s Inchon landing (September 15, 1950); his counsel against US support for France’s attempt to retain its Indochina colony was similarly rebuffed. By this time, the new secretary of state Dean Acheson, who was put off by Kennan’s intellectual acumen as well as his unconcern verging on contempt for the role of public opinion and domestic politics in foreign policymaking, sidelined Mr. X, who soon retreated from Washington to his Ivy League sanctuary where he remained except for short stints as ambassador to the Soviet Union and then Yugoslavia.
Kennan’s brief but deep imprint on US Asia policy was an anomaly. By education, temperament, and intellectual conviction, Kennan was anything but an old Asia hand. His had a solidly Euro-American outlook, tinctured by racial condescension toward non-white peoples, as Heer correctly reminds us. Whether in Washington or Princeton, Kennan apparently saw the world almost exclusively through American eyes, thought almost exclusively in strategic terms, had little interest in economics or culture as factors in international relations, thought that, with the singular exception of the Japanese, Asians lacked agency, and had little or no empathy with those Asian peoples who bore the brunt of American exercises in the application of military and political power. An elitist, Washington establishment figure even when sidelined from power, he viewed public opinion, in Heer’s words “as merely a tactical problem, and even as a nuisance” (31), and dismissed as sentimental claptrap human rights, living standards, and democratization as issues in US foreign policy. Tellingly, on his first trip to Asia in 1948, Kennan met with MacArthur and US occupation officials, but apparently ignored the Japanese government through which the occupation worked. He was contemptuous of Chiang Kai-shek, Syngman Rhee, Ngo Dinh Diem and other Asian leaders whom the United States supported. With respect to both Korea and Vietnam as well as the civil war in China, Kennan saw the hand of the Kremlin everywhere rather than recognizing communist-infused Asian nationalist movements at work. When Kennan got things right it was not because of his deep understanding of Asia which, apart from Japan, he believed would never play an important role on the stage of world power. That is why he dismissed China, Korea, Vietnam and all of Southeast Asia as strategic ciphers in the balance of world power to which the doctrine of containment need not apply. Washington could safely ignore and abandon to their fate all the countries of mainland Asia if not for the inconvenient fact that US credibility and prestige as a world power was partly dependent on US action and inaction in such places that were otherwise backwaters. Heer identifies this major contradiction in Kennan’s worldview and policy prescriptions as at the core of his thinking that often led him to modify his own, supposedly hard-headed, realism and intermittently support US intervention in peripheral places.
Heer strikes the right balance in drawing attention both to Kennan’s prescience with respect to some issues as well as to the limits of his understanding and empathies. If Kennan was a visionary of sorts, he was a rather myopic one, who was unable or unwilling to see much beyond the horizon of Washington policymakers, his natural peers even when they banished him from their midst. Heer concludes his study with the perspicacious observation that “Kennan’s strategic approach to East Asia implicitly recognized that the US role there after World War II was a historical anomaly, the rationale for which, and the sustainability of which, almost certainly could not be perpetual. He grappled throughout his professional career and thereafter with the question of how the United States should posture itself to deal with this reality. We are grappling with the same dilemma” (235). At present, when the United States oscillates between swelled-headed triumphalist globalism and nativist, isolationist impulses, we are indeed grappling with the same dilemma.
Steven I. Levine
University of Montana, Missoula, USA