George F. Kennan: An American Life (57 page)

The United States should not jump to Yugoslavia’s defense: that would be undignified, and Tito remained a dedicated communist. It should acknowledge, though, that “if Yugoslavia is not to be subservient to an outside power [then] its internal regime is basically its own business,” and ought not to prevent a normal diplomatic and economic relationship. In the meantime, “the international communist movement will never be able to make good entirely the damage done by this development.”
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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.
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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 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.”
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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

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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.

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?
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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.”
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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.

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.
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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.
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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.”
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