Realpolitik by Bew John;

Author:Bew, John;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2015-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Containment: Between Theology and Geopolitics

The various Cold War strategies that are often lumped under the banner of “containment” had elements of the new geopolitics and the ethical realism reflected in the theology of Niebuhr.47 A fusion of the two was evident in George F. Kennan’s legendary 1946 “Long Telegram,” on “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” which appeared (in an adapted form) in Foreign Affairs in 1947.48 It is worth noting that Kennan’s essay has some resemblance to Ludwig von Rochau’s analysis of German politics and society in Foundations of Realpolitik. Kennan had spent a number of years in Germany between the wars. In the summer of 1926 he was in Heidelberg, and then in 1929–30 and 1930–31 he was in Berlin, where Rochau had worked and Friedrich Meinecke taught. More important in terms of the comparison with Rochau, Kennan’s analysis of the Soviet system aimed to achieve a feat of analytical detachment and synthesis similar to that of Rochau in Foundations of Realpolitik. Kennan’s essay also offered an attempt to understand the relationship between socioeconomic conditions and ideas as guides to political behaviour (helped by Kennan’s mastery of Russian). In a Rochau-esque phrase, he regarded the character of the Soviet regime as the “product of [both] ideology and circumstances,” even quoting Vladimir Lenin on the unevenness of economic and political development.49

Kennan’s perspective was also shaped by the language of contemporary American Protestantism (particularly Niebuhr).50 While arguing for more restraint on the international arena, Kennan also described his “gratitude to a Providence which, by providing the American people with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent on … accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear.” Indeed, he later compared the Long Telegram to “an eighteenth-century Protestant sermon.”51 The description was a revealing one, and one might argue that it applied to a number of other famous texts on international affairs that appeared after the war.

In Kennan’s view, American foreign policy had to be placed in a harness to prevent it running away with itself. In 1948, he gave a series of lectures at the University of Chicago that formed the basis of his book, American Diplomacy. Mindful of past failures, he warned that the idealism of Woodrow Wilson “runs like a red skein through our foreign policy.” Wilson had lurched from isolationism into a philosophy of total victory. His mistake had been to assume that others could be made to think, talk, and walk like Americans. In particular, Wilson had declared war on German Realpolitik. This had informed his view that “Prussian militarism had to be destroyed to make the way safe for the sort of peace we wanted.” In a memorable metaphor, Kennan described American democracy as a prehistoric monster with a huge body and a brain the size of a pin: “he lies there in his comfortable primeval mud and pays little attention to his environment; he is slow to wrath—in fact, you practically have to

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.