A realist of the old school
Douglas Hurd
CENTURY'S ENDING: REFLECTIONS 1982-95 by George Kennan W. W. Norton, £19.95, pp.351 Let me get a small cavil out of the way — George Kennan has had 40 fruitful years for reflection, compared with his 20 years as an American Foreign Service Offi- cer and planner. This latest volume of reflections would have been more effective if slimmer. Everything is well written, but in this bringing together of many occasion- al essays, reviews and talks, there is some repetition and loss of originality. But the book justifies its journey across the Atlantic. Kennan's years of study have ripened the experience of his diplomatic career. This began, amazingly, 64 years ago in Riga, and ended in 1952 when the Russians refused to let him continue as ambassador in Moscow.
Kennan condemns as strongly as anyone the brutalities of Stalin and his successors. He was dismayed when in 1946 the State Department expected the Soviet Union to behave as a peace-loving democracy. In the following year his celebrated article in Foreign Affairs, written under the name X, launched the concept of containment. Kennan argued that the containment poli- cy should not have led to an arms race, let alone a nuclear arms race. Soviet leaders were ruthless and unscrupulous but they were not mad like Hitler and never intend- ed to attack the West. Kennan particularly criticised Reagan's foreign policy. Accord- ing to him the West had no justification for the scary and wasteful build-up of weapons. The generals on both sides frightened the politicians into giving them the dangerous toys they wanted.
But a simple question surely remains unanswered here. How would the Soviet leadership, ruthless as Kennan describes, have reacted to the temptation offered by a soft and militarily inferior West? Person- ally I am glad that we did not put this temptation in their way. Nor do I agree with Kennan's update of his thesis, when he rebukes the West for talking too much now about Nato and questions of security in its dealings with the states of Central Europe. It is not the West which is pressing Nato membership on Poland, Hungary and the Czechs; it is they who are requesting it, following the logic of their history and geography. The issues of the 21st century may, I suppose, turn out to be world trade, climatic change, and globalisa- tion of this and that. But if I were a Pole, before wholly concentrating on these great new questions I would want to feel satis- fied on such old-fashioned matters as sta- ble frontiers, peaceful neighbours and guarantees of security.
Kennan belongs to the realistic as opposed to the moralist school of Ameri- can foreign policy. The following maxim is
Interventions on moral principle can be formally defensible only if the practices against which they are directed are seriously injurious to our interests rather than jw our sensibilities.
It follows that Kennan is sceptical about preaching human rights to other countries. The United States should confine itself to setting a good example. He criticises as empty the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, as part of which the Soviet Union accepted specific obligations of human rights. A few years ago I would have agreed with him. American (and now also German) moralis- ing can be galling, particularly when addressed, as in Bosnia, to others doing a good deal more to mend the disaster. But the Helsinki Final Act•worked. It gave the Western powers a legal basis for constantly prodding the Soviet authorities on particu- lar humanitarian cases. Well before the change of political systems in Moscow this prodding began to have some effect, for example in the gradual flow of Jews out of Russia to Israel. There are still plenty of regimes in the world which do not have a decent respect for the opinions of mankind. But they find it inconvenient to be constantly prodded in private or pillo- ried in public. The drip of water does not completely wear away these stones, but it makes a useful indentation. Of course Kennan, following the same line of thought, strongly opposes armed intervention in a humanitarian cause. He is scathing about the American intervention in Somalia. The book went to print before the Americans grasped the nettle in Bosnia. There is no American interest, by Kennan's definition, to justify the presence of American troops in that distant Balkan land of no possible economic or strategic importance. Yet there they are, and we all know why.
How are we all to deal with the CNN, or indeed BBC, factor? Madeline Allbright, US Ambassador to the UN, calls CNN the 16th member of the Security Council. Sudden tragedies, instantly reported into millions of homes, produce haphazard but powerful flash floods of emotion which sweep away the barriers of reasoned analysis. There were two market bombs in Sarajevo, in February 1994 and July 1995. No one knows who was responsible for the first. The second was rapidly attributed to the Bosnian Serbs. Neither changed the underlying facts, the balance of forces or the intellectual or moral nature of the tragedy. Yet both acts of slaughter changed, quickly and fundamentally, the policies of the Western powers.
This influence is spasmodic. It costs a lot to send a TV crew to Tajikistan or Afghanistan, so the continuing slaughter in those countries goes largely unremarked. The most intense inrush of letters to the Foreign Office during my time was not about Bosnia, let alone about Maastricht, but about Cambodia, a faraway country of which we certainly knew little until for a short time the killing fields and the Khmer Rouge provided a sombre theme for television programmes. The civil war in Liberia, after six years of almost unnoticed savagery, sprang for a day or two into the headlines because of a dramatic murder case in the capital. Of course public opin- ion wants it all ways. Americans accept American troops in Bosnia, but only for a year, whatever the dangers in Bosnia at the end of that time. People want to feel virtu- ous, but not to suffer casualties. They want Saddam Hussein out, but are not ready to govern Iraq. They are ready to be libera- tors, but not rulers, even when it is only through rule that liberty might be sus- tained.
A licensed heretic, like Simon Jenkins in the Times, can argue that ministers should take no notice of all this. Since these people are determined to kill each other, he says, they should be allowed to do so without let or hindrance. By contrast, President Mitterrand began to elaborate a doctrine of justified armed intervention by the international community in the relief of suffering, just as Metternich believed in his time in the right of armed intervention on behalf of legitimacy. Most governments will avoid generalisation of either kind. No foreign minister in a democracy can be sure that he and his colleagues will be able to resist entirely one of these unpre- Harry Boyd never could handle wine.' dictable flash floods. He will try to put up barriers informing public opinion of the realities and the limitations of external intervention. He will not, like the Israelis, pretend that technology enables modern soldiers or airmen to punish only the guilty. But he will also, with his allies and part- ners, try to avoid the dilemma. He will work to identify dramas before they become tragedies, and study how to apply pressure from outside before that pressure has to take the form of bombing and killing the innocent or taking on indefinite semi- imperial commitments.
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