[HN Gopher] The Ghosts of Kennan
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The Ghosts of Kennan
Author : Thevet
Score : 18 points
Date : 2022-12-29 19:24 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.foreignaffairs.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.foreignaffairs.com)
| miguelazo wrote:
| >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.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| (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?)]
| thriftwy wrote:
| 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...
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| if it was the original DMB, 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?
| [deleted]
| paganel wrote:
| 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 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.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_de_Marenches
| cafard wrote:
| His memoirs are well worth reading, as is _Sketches From a Life_.
| ArtWomb wrote:
| 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
|
| https://albert.ias.edu/handle/20.500.12111/627
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| > _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_ )
|
| ====
|
| also an interesting discussion of the role of money ("the
| golden rule") in US politics, ca. 1950s
|
| ====
|
| > _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
| AlbertCory wrote:
| 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.
| pphysch wrote:
| > 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.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| 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.
| pphysch wrote:
| 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.
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