The students attended the same lectures and worked on the same problems, regardless of the positions they held or the uniforms they wore. They would graduate not only with “mutual respect and understanding,” Kennan explained, “but also a common approach to the major problems of our country in the field of foreign affairs.” Future leaders rubbed elbows with current leaders, who frequently visited. Navy Secretary Forrestal, who had helped to establish the college, came most often, but “[o]ther officers of Cabinet rank, generals, and Senators sat at our feet as we lectured.” The college became an “academic seminar for the higher echelons of governmental Washington generally.”32
“Gentlemen; Admiral Hill. The question we have to consider this morning is a question of the relations between sovereign governments, and it pertains to the measures that they employ when they deal with each other for the main purposes for which states have to deal with each other.” That is how Kennan began his first lecture on September 16, 1946, prosaically titled “Measures Short of War (Diplomatic).” On stage alongside him was a chart listing “Diplomatic Measures of Adjustment for the Redress of Grievances or for the Pacific Settlement of Disputes.” There is no way to know how many inadequately caffeinated students—or policy makers—came close to dozing off at that point, but they soon woke up. For within five minutes Kennan had tossed traditional methods of conflict resolution onto a historical ash-heap.
Great-power clashes in the contemporary world, he insisted, did not take place within any agreed-upon framework of international law: rather, they pitted democracies against totalitarians prepared to employ “varieties of skullduggery… as unlimited as human ingenuity itself, and just about as unpleasant.” These included “persuasion, intimidation, deceit, corruption, penetration, subversion, horse-trading, bluffing, psychological pressure, economic pressure, seduction, blackmail, theft, fraud, rape, battle, murder, and sudden death. Don’t mistake that for a complete list.” Restrained “by no moral inhibitions, by no domestic public opinion to speak of and not even by any serious considerations of consistency and intellectual dignity,” states like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were limited only by “their own estimate of the consequences to themselves of the adoption of a given measure.”
That left the question, then, of whether democracies could deal with such states by any means other than all-out war. Kennan had no definitive answer: the course they were taking, he reminded the students, was meant to develop one. But he did have suggestions, the first of which echoed Clausewitz. It was that psychology could itself become a strategy. The past decade had made it clear that everything the United States did produced psychological effects internationally. There had been no sustained effort, though, to tie these together in such a way as to serve a purpose.
Another suggestion had to do with economics, because democracies for the foreseeable future—he meant chiefly the United States—would possess a disproportionate share of the world’s productive capacity. Given the Soviet Union’s reliance on autarchy, that advantage might not produce immediate benefits, but the students should consider its cumulative effect “when exercised over a long period of time and in a wise way.” It could be especially useful among satellites with little to gain from Soviet domination: economic pressure might well provoke “discontent, trouble, and dissension within the totalitarian world.”
Finally the students should not neglect an important political weapon, which was “the cultivation of solidarity with other like minded nations.” In this respect, Kennan acknowledged, the United Nations had been more helpful than he had expected, because it provided a way to connect power with morality. Without that link, competition over spheres of influence in Eastern Europe and the Near East might have come across simply as power politics. With it, the United States had been able “to build up a record for good faith which it is hard for anyone to challenge.”
Each of these “measures short of war” fell within the realm of international affairs, which must now embrace all forms of power, even military capabilities: “You have no idea how much it contributes to the general politeness and pleasantness of diplomacy when you have a little quiet armed force in the background.” Power, in turn, reflected the nation wielding it: “We are no stronger than the country we represent.” Hence no one could afford indifference “to internal disharmony, dissension, intolerance and the things that break up the real moral and political structure of our society at home.” Integrating force with foreign policy did not mean “blustering, threatening, waving clubs at people and telling them if they don’t do this or that we are going to drop a bomb on them.” But it did mean maintaining “a preponderance of strength” among the democracies: this was “the most peaceful of all the measures we can take short of war because the greater your strength, the less likelihood that you are ever going to use it.”
What was required, therefore, was coordination across each of the categories of available power: “We must work out a general plan of what the United States wants in this world and we must go after that with all the measures at our disposal, depending on what is indicated by the circumstances.” The nation needed in peacetime a “grand strategy no less concrete and no less consistent than that which governs our actions in war.” If applied wisely, then “these measures short of war will be all the ones that we will ever have to use to secure the prosperous and safe future of the people in this country.”
Kennan finished with that but got a tough first question: was it possible for the United States to have a grand strategy? “[W]e don’t aspire to anything particularly except what we have; [so] what, mainly can our grand strategy consist of ?” The point was well taken, Kennan acknowledged. “What has the United States got really to offer to other people?” Thinking quickly, he improvised an answer that raised a larger question:
[W]e have freedom of elections, freedom of speech, freedom to live out your life politically; but a great many people in this world would say that is not enough; we are tired; we are hungry; we are bewildered; to hell with freedom to elect somebody; to hell with freedom of speech; what we want is to be shown the way; we want to be guided. [You] don’t believe in abstract freedom but only in freedom from something or freedom to something; and what is it you are showing us the freedom to?
Kennan would not attempt a reply. “I am going to let you try to think it out for yourself. I am still trying to think it out.” But he did offer a place to start: “Perhaps it is better that we don’t come to people with pat answers but say, instead, ‘You will have to solve your own problems, we are only trying to give you the breaks.’”33
It’s unlikely that anyone dozed, therefore, through Kennan’s opening National War College lecture. It redefined international relations in an ideological age, it assessed totalitarian strengths and weaknesses, it sketched out democratic responses, it stressed the multiple forms that power can assume, it called for diplomacy to become grand strategy, and it concluded with Kennan’s imaginative leap into the minds of those for whose allegiance the United States and the Soviet Union would be competing. It was a satisfactory start, not least because of the work it left for his students—and for Kennan himself—still to do.