Part 1.

George F. Kennan is best known for his role in shaping American foreign policy toward the Soviet Union in the aftermath of World War II. The turning points in Kennan’s career—the “Long Telegram” of February 1946 and the nom de plume “X” article, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” published a year later in Foreign Affairs—formed the basis of America’s “containment” policy toward the Soviet Union. Although briefly serving as U.S. ambassador to Russia in 1952, Kennan’s useful input as the State Department’s chief expert on Russia contributed to a successful, long-term, Cold War strategy that prevented military confrontation, avoided nuclear war, and eventually contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was Kennan’s sharp intellect, knowledge of history, wise counsel, common sense, and sound judgment that formulated the realpolitik strategy of containing Soviet expansion that served U.S. national interests so well.

Considering the recent neoconservative saber rattling over Russia’s use of military force to control Crimea and Ukraine, Kennan believed U.S. foreign policy should rest on sound principles that advance our vital national interests, not moral posturing that imposes “democracy” and “human rights” in some ambiguous vacuum via military force. Contemporary foreign policy blunders—destabilizing nations in volatile regions in the name of “spreading democracy,” “promoting equality,” “liberating” aggrieved minorities, “protecting the rights of the LGBT community,” etc.—may bolster the careers of Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright, but such policies also unleash real havoc, death, and destruction abroad. Kennan warned about the consequences of forcing other regions to conform to Western moral standards, or what remains of them, in a perceptive article, “Morality and Foreign Policy” for Foreign Affairs (1985),

There have been many instances, particularly in recent years, when the U.S. government has taken umbrage at the behavior of other governments on grounds that at least implied moral criteria for judgment, and in some of these instances the verbal protests have been reinforced by more tangible means of pressure. These various interventions have marched, so to speak, under a number of banners: democracy, human rights, majority rule, fidelity to treaties, fidelity to the U.N. Charter, and so on. Their targets have sometimes been the external policies and actions of the offending states, more often the internal practices. The interventions have served, in the eyes of their American inspirers, as demonstrations not only of the moral deficiencies of others but of the positive morality of ourselves; for it was seen as our moral duty to detect these lapses on the part of others, to denounce them before the world, and to assure—as far as we could with measures short of military action—that they were corrected….

Interventions of this nature can be formally defensible only if the practices against which they are directed are seriously injurious to our interests, rather than to our sensibilities. There will, of course, be those readers who will argue that the encouragement and promotion of democracy elsewhere is always in the interests of the security, political integrity and prosperity of the United States. If this can be demonstrated in a given instance, well and good. But it is not invariably the case. Democracy is a loose term. Many varieties of folly and injustice contrive to masquerade under this designation. The mere fact that a country acquires the trappings of self-government does not automatically mean that the interests of the United States are thereby furthered. There are forms of plebiscitary “democracy” that may well prove less favorable to American interests than a wise and benevolent authoritarianism. Read more