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His memoirs are well worth reading, as is Sketches From a Life.
IAS houses the Kennan collection, and no doubt there are hidden treasures, like Oppenheimer's file:
https://albert.ias.edu/handle/20.500.12111/2604
Kennan was pivotal I think in helping to "go" the Manhattan Project:
Oral History Interview of George F. Kennan, February 27, 1990
> The Cold War might not have taken the forms it did if we had known what the other people were really doing instead of acting on the basis of our own worst fears. And I've become convinced that our government is not a government in which things should be done in secret, for better or for worse. If that's a limitation, it's a limitation that comes from the nature of our society. — GFK
(Linebarger also has some sorrow concerning over-secrecy in his Psychological Warfare)
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also an interesting discussion of the role of money ("the golden rule") in US politics, ca. 1950s
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> I don't see quite the same number of really great and revered older scholars that seemed to be around when I first came [to IAS]. Of course, we owed a lot of those to Hitler and to Stalin who pushed them out into our society. They were really great European scholars. There are not so many of those, it seems to me, in this country. — GFK
> The Cold War might not have taken the forms it did if we had known what the other people were really doing instead of acting on the basis of our own worst fears. And I've become convinced that our government is not a government in which things should be done in secret, for better or for worse. If that's a limitation, it's a limitation that comes from the nature of our society. — GFK
Does (did) he have an opinion on the record about Iran-Contra ?
Given that the interview took place in 1990, post-1986, I think that was his on-the-record opinion about Iran-Contra. (assuming, which I believe we can, his opinions are consistent enough for particular instances to have the same valence as general platitudes?)
Who would be today's George Kennan in U.S. diplomacy, foreign policy?
From a distance you can only see war-loving naivetes.
John Mearsheimer
Quite interesting. I'm not left with any strong impression of what Kennan actually would have done had he attained any power. "Inchoate yearnings" seems to best describe his thoughts.
Creating an unelected council of wise men because the people aren't capable of governing themselves -- if that was his best idea, you can see why he left the government and was continuously unhappy about everything, even being proven right in 1989.
As for diplomacy and negotiating, JFK said, “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate." I think that sums it up pretty well.
> Creating an unelected council of wise men because the people aren't capable of governing themselves -- if that was his best idea, you can see why he left the government
Bilderberg Group, Atlantic Council, World Economic Forum, and Trilateral Commission all popped up within a decade of him leaving government. While he didn't implement "his" idea, the next generation certainly did.
In Germany at least foreign policy is democratically controlled.
But there's a lot of atlanticist think tank money around which influences politicians and journalists.
E.g.: I'm reading Sueddeutsche Zeitung which participates at "Munich Security Conference".
So Sueddeutsche Zeitung (Foreign Policy Redaction) often reads like a Nato pamphlet. (actually there are some thoughtful people in Feuilleton)
This is the most predictable guy:
Baerbock too. Before she was selected for government, an Atlantic Council member said her policy opinions "are in lockstep with" NATO. How convenient.
and your point is... ?
We can go back to Plato for an earlier expression of that idea.
Those groups you cited all have unofficial power, and they're all intensely controversial.
Yeah, but only because giving them official power would be horrible optics in America particularly.
Those organizations are de facto where Western policy has been shaped for 50+ years.
That's a matter of opinion, I'm afraid. We may have hit the limits of useful discussion here.
It's like saying "Big business controls our foreign policy." Or maybe, "International Zionism controls our foreign policy." You're welcome to think that, but I'm not going to engage.
> Or maybe, "International Zionism controls our foreign policy." You're welcome to think that, but I'm not going to engage.
That's completely uncalled for and makes it look like you are arguing in bad faith.
Sorry, I don't think so. "Unelected cabals operating behind the scenes" -- that's an age-old trope. And there are certainly HN'ers who'd subscribe to that. Just try mentioning the West Bank and watch them pop up.
>What he did understand was diplomacy and statecraft.
There are few, if any, people left in the federal government who understand these things. Least of all in the upper echelons of the State Department. They are mostly just careerist technocrats who have bought into the arrogant neocon illusion best captured by Karl Rove:
“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
These days we get better diplomacy and restraint from the Pentagon leadership, ironically.
(a) interesting that he wished to unfreeze the Cold War. Unlike Kennedy and Khrushchev*, however, Kennan managed to avoid getting cancelled.
(b) viewing action as its own virtue was one of Mussolini's tropes: neo- something other than -con.
* the pair of whom, in a different time line, might have managed it?
> ... a new endeavour, not a new balance of power, but a new world of law, where the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved. — JFK
[Edit: looks like the wake of McCarthy caught Kennan. So he may not exactly have been cancelled, but reading between the lines I suspect that's how he wound up an academic (the modern equivalent of sent to a monastery?)]
Whoa, that's the landscape monologue from Russian DMB movie!
What year was that?
…while the enemy is plotting their assault, we change the landscape, even manually. When the attack starts, the enemy is lost on unfamiliar terrain and loses ability to fight. That's the reason, that's our strategy…
if it was the original ДМБ, that was 2000; "Rove" was 2004 (I don't know if he's admitted ownership)
As mentioned in a sibling comment, however, elevating "men of action" over "eggheads of reality" has the sort of history that Ezra Pound celebrated in the mid-1900s. IIRC there was a substantially-sized war fought over the principle at the time?
I'm now reading an interview book with this most excellent gentleman, Alexandre de Marenches [1] (the book was published in the late 1980s, the gentleman has passed away in the meantime), who used to be head of for French foreign intelligence services in the 1970s (among many other things he did in his life). Even back then he was saying pretty much the same thing, i.e. that in the whole free West there were at most 10 people who really understood diplomacy and how geopolitics works, and Kissinger was one of them.
Back to the current intellectual nous (or lack thereof) of the current State Department, is telling when you compare how much Kennan intellectually prepared himself prior to him getting posted to Moscow in the 1930s to the low level of intellectual discourse coming from present-day State Department luminaries.
Kennan actually took a dive in the dark and visited inland Russia just to experience it and its people, and all this during Stalin's times, during the purges. Something tells me a guy like McFaul (former US ambassador to Moscow) would have never done that, has never done that, but that hasn't stopped him from writing a book on Russia which is taken seriously by some powers that be.
As you say, the only hope for the West, from an intellectual coupled with an understanding of geopolitics pov, comes from the Pentagon people.
Later edit: More on the Marenches gentleman, who was just a very interesting guy: at some point during the interview (this was happening back in 1986) he did mention as an actual potential threat for the West the possibility of the Shiites getting control of the whole area from the Mediterranean all the way to the border with Pakistan, i.e. Iran managing to extend its control over Iraq and Syria and "get" to the Shiites who live in Lebanon. That is just what has happened, more or less, ever since the West lost the plot in the Syrian Civil War, never mind the whole Iraq War debacle (caused by guys like Rove and his friends).
Also, and related to the tech world and this forum, towards the end of the 1970s the same Marenches made up a list of 8 rare metals which he was regarding as essential for modern industrial development (I'm too lazy to copy-paste the list in there, cobalt was part of the list, that I remember). He soon realised that the Russians has direct access to all those 8 metals, while the US and the free West more generally speaking had direct access to only 4 out of those 8. After he quit his job at the helm of the French foreign intelligence services in 1981 he actually presented Reagan with that list and with a map of where each metal was more heavily concentrated/located. Reagan kindly asked Marenches to hand him that list, which Marenches of course did.
Prior to that, the same Marenches and French foreign intelligence services were instrumental in setting up the 1978 Battle of Kolwezi, in Southern Congo. It so happens that the region around Kolwezi is very reach in cobalt, as can be seen in maps from this official German website [3]. The US authorities only now realise that they can't let Congo slip [4], but guys like Marenches and Kennan and Kissinger were ahead of the game by decades.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_de_Marenches
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kolwezi
[3] https://www.bgr.bund.de/EN/Themen/Min_rohstoffe/Downloads/st...
[4] https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...
McFaul did do that (visit Russia just to experience it) prior to his appointment, as well as things such as appearing as a guest on "Evening Urgant" during; you are almost certainly thinking of his successors.
Merci bcp pour de Marenches. Haben Sie schon von dem Kongo-Müller gehört?
I wonder how much of grabbing V Bout from Thailand was due to a desire to give E Prince a wider hand in "protecting" African resources?
> Haben Sie schon von dem Kongo-Müller gehört?
Unfortunately I don't speak German just yet, even though I did manage to understand your short question without a google translate. That Kongo-Müller also seemed like a very interesting guy, hadn't heard about him.
Fascinating. I’m going to look up this Marenches guy. Thank you.