George Kennan vs. the Morons and Warmongers

Portrait of George F. Kennan (1947), then-Director of Policy Planning in the United States State Department. Photographer, Harris & Ewing.

At PatrickFoyDossier.com, Patrick Foy details the post-Cold War arrogance of Washington, D.C., and suggests that the thinking of the “morons and warmongers” like Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice, Mike Pompeo, Tom Friedman, Richard Haas, Robert Kagan, Tony Blinken, who are thought of “luminaries” in Washington, should be replaced with the advice of the “original Cold Warrior,” George Kennan. Foy writes:

This unipolar-world crusade was advocated by private-agenda actors, neocons and neoliberals, who were themselves in the saddle in Washington carrying out policy.

A saner course of action would have been to call out of retirement the wise man of U.S. foreign policy, George Kennan, along with ace Pentagon analyst Chuck Spinney. The latter must have been a Kennan enthusiast, because not too long ago he brought to my attention a mind-boggling 1987 statement, contained in Kennan’s book, At A Century’s Ending, Reflections 1982-1995:

“Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial complex would have to remain, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.”

Could that be true? Was it the crux of the problem? The U.S. economy required a threat, real or imagined, to keep its economy humming. Simple as that? Perhaps it was intuitively understood by high Pentagon officials, acting as insiders and front-men for the military-industrial complex.

Ergo, the “peace dividend” was not an option. H.W. Bush’s New World Order, an ego-trip presided over by Washington’s masterminds, was the alternative, the only solution.

If summoned to duty, Kennan and Spinney would have put their heads together to arrive at a peaceful and honest scenario for the U.S. to engage the world, in place of a fraudulent, self-serving crusade.

I’m thinking Kennan in charge at the State Department and Spinney at the Pentagon, both granted plenipotentiary powers by the White House to checkmate the mischief-makers. You can’t rewrite history, of course, but it is fun to try.

I’m not a fan of Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs columnist for the Financial Times. He has become of late little more than a me-too shill for the Washington foreign policy establishment.

Back in November 2011, he wrote an informative review of Kennan’s definitive biography (by John Lewis Gaddis). Rachman recorded the following. It is all you need to know about George Kennan…

“After his retirement from active diplomacy, Kennan spent much of the rest of his life as a bitter critic of U.S. foreign policy and of American culture in general. Although some regard him as the first cold warrior, Kennan himself became an opponent of the Vietnam war and a passionate advocate of nuclear disarmament. Later, after the end of the cold war, Kennan fiercely criticized the policy of enlarging Nato to take in the countries that had once belonged to the Warsaw Pact, arguing that this was needlessly provocative towards Russia.”

The word “needlessly” is apt! Clearly, Kennan should be considered a wise man not just for his famous Long Telegram outlining the containment of the Soviet Union in the aftermath of the Second World War, but for everything else he wrote and lectured about thereafter.

Next to him, Washington luminaries like Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice, Mike Pompeo, Tom Friedman, Richard Haas, Robert Kagan, Tony Blinken etc. can be written off as morons and warmongers.

Read more here.