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David Mayers holds a joint appointment in the History and Political Science departments of Boston University

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To Hold and Defend: George Kennan and the Containment Doctrine
David Mayers’ “George Kennan and the Dilemmas of US Foreign Policy” is but one of a series of histories that examine the life of one of the Western hemisphere’s most prominent career diplomats. Published in 1988, this study does not constitute a full biography of Kennan, but traces the development of Kennan’s thoughts on nearly every significant US foreign policy issue from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan. Despite the great burden of factual material thrust upon Mayers, the author rarely falters in delivering a highly readable analysis of the ideas of the putative architect of the Cold War doctrine of containment and a noteworthy diagnostician of US and international problems. In this study, Mayers establishes Kennan to be a firm believer in discipline at the home front, a near-unyielding skeptic about the merits of democratic rule, an advocate of a return to pre-Wilsonian diplomacy, and a proponent of rule by the best.

Mayers’ narrative of how Kennan rose from his relatively humble origins to become one of the most powerful and influential civil servants of his time provides a fascinating study of upward mobility amongst the twentieth-century American middle class. Despite his intellectual curiosity and propensity to introspection, Kennan proved to be an undistinguished student at Princeton, but his entry into the Foreign Service upon his graduation marked the beginning of Kennan’s ascent.

His stint in the Soviet Union during the 1930s allowed him to observe first hand that the US and the USSR had divergent political values, and thus infer that history and geography would conspire to ensure the fragility of Soviet-US relations. When Kennan entered into his second Russian tour of duty, his grasp of the “Soviet problem” was such that he felt sufficiently confident to influence the course of US policy towards the USSR by lobbying his superiors and colleagues towards the proper recognition of Soviet aims in Europe during the immediate post-war period. His “Long Telegram” was the answer to Washington’s search for a coherent policy response to Russia’s increasingly antagonistic stance towards the West. Personally championed by the secretary of defense, the Long Telegram’s message solidified Kennan’s reputation as an expert on Soviet affairs.

As Kennan entered the orbit of political attention, his views gradually dislodged ossified official thinking about eastern Europe. Coming in the wake of the Long Telegram, Kennan’s article in the Foreign Affairs journal, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct”, which underscored the need to maintain “a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies”, served to notify the entire world that, henceforth, the US would be formulating policy responses to the Soviet problem on the basis of the strategic framework outlined in the article. Although Kennan’s containment principle as delineated in the article was subsequently interpreted as containment of Soviet expansionist tendencies by military means, the so-called “X” article was nevertheless highly instructive in revealing Kennan’s views about maintaining Western superiority in the face of the Soviet “threat”. He believed instead in the containment of political threats via political and especially diplomatic means, and lamented that his words had been grotesquely twisted to fit the Manichaean perceptions of policymakers at the time.

Kennan’s tendency towards dissidence, combined with his deep skepticism about democratic rule in general, ensured that he would remain an outsider despite being in the center of the Washington policy-making establishment. When Kennan left the US Foreign Service in 1953, US domestic politics was undergoing a period of near-cataclysmic paroxysms. In an atmosphere arguably not entirely unlike that which prevailed in Germany prior to the Great War, when the supposed threat of ‘encirclement’ by the Entente powers brought about an economically destabilizing naval arms rivalry, the US government began turning to instruments such as loyalty review boards to ensure ideological purity amongst the ranks. Kennan was thus concerned that the nation might increasingly turn to authoritarianism in order to be able to deal with the perceived threat of a monolithic, ‘globalizing’ communist movement, and opined that the government “will have to learn that even [the US] is not so rich in talent that it can afford to proceed thus brutally and recklessly with that which it has”.

Mayers’ chronology of Kennan’s life ends with an analysis of the diplomat’s body of thought. Kennan’s belief that the world before 1789 offered the best environment for international diplomacy apparently led him “to exaggerate the defects of the modern world and to trivialize some of the past’s more unpleasant aspects”. This tendency of his, Mayers contends, has misled Kennan to such an extent that he found “almost nothing of value in modern summitry and…multilateral negotiations”. Ostensibly counterbalancing this was Kennan’s propensity to equate a strong, coherent foreign policy with a healthy domestic body politic; in both the Long Telegram and the Foreign Affairs article, he drew attention to the association between domestic health and international effectiveness. Balanced, sensitive, deeply insightful, Mayers’ study of Kennan is easily one of the most important books on American diplomacy to appear under the shadow of the Cold War.
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melvinsico | Mar 4, 2007 |

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Verk
6
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83
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#218,811
Betyg
5.0
Recensioner
1
ISBN
31

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