III.
When he began designing a course on grand strategy in the summer of 1946, Kennan had to start from scratch: “This was the first time I had personally ever had occasion to address myself seriously, either as a student or as a teacher, to this subject.” But it was also the first time the U.S. government had ever prescribed its study. Apart from Alfred Thayer Mahan, whose work at the Naval War College half a century earlier had focused exclusively on that form of power, no American had written anything worth reading on the relationship of war to politics. There were, to be sure, the great European strategists, conveniently analyzed in Edward Mead Earle’s recently published collection of commissioned essays, Makers of Modern Strategy. But “in no instance was the thinking of these earlier figures… adequate to the needs of a great American democracy in the atomic age. All of this, clearly, was going to have to be rethought.”19
The rethinking, for Kennan, began with the bomb. His initial reactions to Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been a jumble—relief that the war was over, regret at the destruction employed to bring this about, alarm at the possibility that the Soviet Union might obtain its own weapon, whether through espionage or the Truman administration’s naïveté in prematurely embracing the principle of international control.20 None of these thoughts cohered, however, until Kennan read another book of essays, edited by Bernard Brodie, just off the press in June 1946. Entitled The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order, this volume, together with Earle’s Makers, gave Kennan a crash course in the field he was about to teach. The notes he took suggest what he learned.
Kennan began with Brodie’s book, grasping at once the paradox it posed: “Best way to avoid atomic war is to avoid war; best way to avoid war is to be prepared to resort to atomic warfare.” He recorded detailed information on the destructive capabilities of the new weapon, on the resources necessary to build it, and on the possibility that the Baruch Plan, then being proposed by the Truman administration, might provide a way for the United Nations to manage it. He was, however, skepticaclass="underline" “Soviets would not hesitate to promise to forego production & proceed nevertheless to produce.” One essay claiming that only the world organization could handle the bomb caused Kennan to stop taking notes: “Remainder just rot.”21
The real significance of atomic weapons, he concluded, lay not in the need to bolster international institutions but in the realization that “if we are to avoid mutual destruction, we must revert to strategic political thinking of XVIII Century.” The complete annihilation of enemies no longer made sense, because:
(a) in the best of circumstances (i.e., that the Russians lack atomic weapons or facilities for employing them against us) it implies on our part a war against the Russian people and the eventual occupation of Russian territory; and
(b) in the worst of circumstances, the virtual ruin of our country as well as theirs.
It followed, then, that American objectives should be limited to:
(a) preventing the power of the Sov. Gov’t from extending to point vital or important to US or British Empire; and
(b) without forfeiting the confidence & friendship of the Russian people, to bring [ab]out the discrediting of those forces in Russia who insist that Russia regard itself as at war with the western world.22
And how might the eighteenth century help? Here Kennan drew on Earle’s volume, which contained essays on two post-Napoleonic grand strategists who had also rethought their subject in the aftermath of a total war.
The first, by the historians Crane Brinton, Gordon Craig, and Felix Gilbert, discussed the Swiss strategist Antoine-Henri Jomini, whose writings, the authors conceded, were outdated and little read. But Jomini had considered the central problem in warfare to be determining “correct lines of operation, leaving to enemy choice of withdrawing or accepting combat under unfavorable conditions.” Kennan saw a lesson for the United States:
Our task is to plan and execute our strategic dispositions in such a way as to compel Sov. Govt. either to accept combat under unfavorable conditions (which it will never do), or withdraw. In this way we can contain Soviet power until Russians tire of the game.
The note is undated, but it appears to be Kennan’s first use—in a geopolitical context—of the verb that became associated with his name.23
By far the greater impression, however, came from Hans Rothfels’s article on Carl von Clausewitz—the best study available in English at the time on the much-misunderstood Prussian strategist. Kennan was struck by Clausewitz’s emphasis on psychologically disarming an adversary: finding the point at which “the enemy realizes that victory is either too unlikely or too costly.” Hence the need to pinpoint the “center of gravity”—an army, a capital city, an alliance, even public opinion—against which minimum pressure might produce maximum results. The defense would, thus, lure the offense into overextension: “Assailant weakens himself as he advances.” (Kennan thought it significant that both Jomini and Clausewitz had fought on the Russian side when Napoleon invaded in 1812.) Once the “culminating point” of the offensive had been reached, the enemy could only shift to defense without its advantages: “The best he can do is to demonstrate that, if there is no longer any chance of his winning, his opponent cannot reach this aim either.”24
Most important, for Kennan, was Clausewitz’s claim that war is a continuation of policy by other means. Kennan correctly understood this to imply not that politics are suspended during war, but just the opposite: “For[eign] pol[icy] aims are the end and war is the means.” Violence therefore could never be an objective: “Even in case of Germany it is questionable whether a war of destruction was desirable.” It would certainly not be possible against the Soviet Union: the only possibility was “a political war, a war of attrition for limited objectives.”
We are in peculiar position of having to defend ourselves against mortal attack, but yet not wishing to inflict mortal defeat on our attacker. We cannot be carried too far away by attractive conception of “the flashing sword of vengeance.” We must be like the porcupine who only gradually convinces the carnivorous beast of prey that he is not a fit object of attack.
Not the least of Clausewitz’s attractions was that he provided ammunition for arguments with Bohlen: “Chip says that [a war of destruction] could not have been otherwise: that the U.S. cannot fight a political war.” Perhaps so, in World War II, but in the coming conflict Kennan—and Clausewitz’s ghost—were insisting that it would have no choice but to learn to do so.25
What Clausewitz taught him, Kennan recalled years later, was that the United States had no peacetime political-military doctrine, only a set of obsolete traditions—isolationism, neutrality, the Open Door. There was, thus, the need to clarify the uses of military power: “what we could expect to do with it, what we could not expect to do with it, and how it should fit in with diplomacy and political aims.” Kennan’s war college teaching, he hoped, would “build an intellectual structure which could act as a guide to policy makers, and which could find acceptance gradually through the academic world in the country at large.”26