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As wars rage in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and as tensions rise in the western Pacific, America’s leaders and policymakers should tone down their rhetoric, prioritize vital as opposed to peripheral interests, and consult with the “gospels” of U.S. foreign policy realism–George F. Kennan, Henry Kissinger, and Robert D. Kaplan.
Realism, unfortunately, is in short supply in Washington, D.C., where legislators’ comments on foreign policy appear designed to make the evening news programs or tomorrow’s headlines in Beltway media, and where the Biden national security team seems fixated on leading an ideological crusade against “autocracy.” And while Kennan and Kissinger cannot personally be consulted, their writings (and their actions while in government) can and should be studied. Robert Kaplan is their philosophical successor–he is American foreign policy realism’s most profound voice in the early 21st century. A careful reading of the gospels of Kennan, Kissinger, and Kaplan may help to ground American foreign policy in prudential geopolitics.
Let’s begin with Kennan. He served as a foreign service officer and diplomat in Eastern European nations, Russia, and Germany before, during, and after the Second World War. He authored the Long Telegram in 1946 and “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” in 1947, which explained the need for a policy of containment of Soviet Russia. He served as the director of the State Department’s Policy Planning staff in the early years of the Cold War, writing and overseeing the drafting of numerous policy papers on Europe and Asia. He briefly served as our Ambassador to the Soviet Union, and later as Ambassador to Yugoslavia.
Kennan’s books American Diplomacy, The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order, The Fateful Alliance, Russia Leaves the War, The Decision to Intervene, and Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin are insightful and carefully written diplomatic histories. His books Russia, the Atom and the West, Realities of American Foreign Policy, and On Dealing With the Communist World are short, trenchant analyses of U.S. foreign policy in the 1950s and early 1960s. And to top it off, Kennan wrote three volumes of memoirs (including From Prague After Munich), introspective philosophical books Around the Cragged Hill and Sketches from a Life, collections of his essays in The Nuclear Delusion and At A Century’s Ending, and finally The Kennan Diaries (edited by Frank Costigliola). This is a veritable treasure trove of realist thinking grounded in empiricism and a keen understanding of human nature and the behavior of nation-states and empires throughout history.
In American Diplomacy, Kennan explained the geopolitical factors upon which American security rested:
[I]t [is] essential to us . . . that no single Continental land power
should come to dominate the entire Eurasian land mass. Our
interest has lain rather in the maintenance of some sort of stable
balance among the powers of the interior, in order that none of
them should effect the subjugation of the others, conquer the
seafaring fringes of the land mass, become a great sea power as
well as land power, shatter the position of England, and enter . . .
on an overseas expansion hostile to ourselves and supported by
the immense resources of the interior of Europe and Asia.
This statement, which Kennan wrote in 1951, still applies to America’s fundamental security interests in the early 21st century. The Eurasian land mass is the great continent from where challenges to U.S. security have arisen since the First World War–Wilhelmine and Hitler’s Germany, the Soviet Union, and today, China.
Kennan believed that the tragedies of the 20th century had their roots in the First World War, which he called the “seminal catastrophe” of that century. More specifically, the “peace” imposed at the end of that war, Kennan wrote, “had the tragedies of the future written into it as by the devil’s own hand.” He blamed the Wilsonian notion, which he termed a “colossal conceit,” that “you could suddenly make international life over into what you believed to be your own image; when you dismissed the past with contempt, rejected the relevance of the past to the future, and refused to occupy yourself with the real problems that a study of the past would suggest.”
This Wilsonian notion led, Kennan wrote in Realities of American Foreign Policy, to “Utopian” enthusiasms and schemes to remake the world in America’s image and, thereby, the loss of the “feeling for reality . . . about foreign policy.” We sought to universalize our values and habits. We assumed, Kennan wrote, that “our moral values, based as they are on the specifics of our national tradition and the various religious outlooks represented in our country, necessarily have validity for people everywhere.” And we assumed, he continued, that “the purposes of states . . . are fit subjects for measurement in moral terms.” “Moral principles,” Kennan explained, “have their place in the heart of the individual, . . . [b]ut when the individual’s behavior passes through the machinery of political organization and merges with that of millions of other individuals to find its expression in the actions of government, then it undergoes a general transmutation, and the same moral concepts are no longer relevant to it.”
In At A Century’s Ending, Kennan reprinted an essay he wrote in Foreign Affairs in 1985 on “Morality and Foreign Policy.” Here, he expanded on what he saw as America’s abandonment of realism in favor of the “histrionics of moralism,” which he defined as “the projection of attitudes, poses, and rhetoric that cause us to appear noble and altruistic in the mirror of our own vanity but lack substance when related to the realities of international life” and the “feeling that we must have the solution to everyone’s problems and a finger in every pie.” American foreign policy should instead seek global “stability” and bring our “commitments and undertakings into a reasonable relationship with [our] real possibilities for acting upon the international environment.” He recommended a foreign policy “founded on recognition of the national interest, reasonably conceived, as the legitimate motivation for a large portion of the nation’s behavior,” and noted that we should “pursue that interest without either moral pretension or apology.” Often, Kennan wrote, this meant “minding our own business whenever there is not some overwhelming reason for minding the business of others.”
Henry Kissinger’s undergraduate honors thesis was a lengthy reflection on the ideas of Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, and Immanuel Kant. His doctoral dissertation, later transformed into a book titled A World Restored, was on the diplomacy of Metternich, Castlereagh, and other European statesmen in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. In the mid-1950s, he authored Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, which discussed the option of fighting a limited nuclear war. Kissinger became a foreign policy adviser to Nelson Rockefeller, who had aspirations for the presidency. Kissinger acted as a consultant to the Eisenhower and Kennedy national security teams before assuming active government service as National Security Adviser to President Nixon and later Secretary of State in the Nixon and Ford administrations. Kissinger played a key role in Nixon’s opening to China and Nixon’s triangular diplomacy with China and the Soviet Union, negotiated a fragile but important peace in the Middle East that lessened Soviet influence in the region, and negotiated an end to America’s divisive war in Southeast Asia.
Kissinger’s realism can be found on page after page of his magnificent memoirs: White House Years, Years of Upheaval, and Years of Renewal. In his 1994 book Diplomacy, Kissinger recognized that American foreign policy in the 20th century was torn between the realism of Theodore Roosevelt and the idealism of Woodrow Wilson. Kissinger sided with Roosevelt, but understood the attraction of Wilson. He described Roosevelt as the “warrior-statesman” and Wilson as the “prophet-priest.” “Statesmen,” Kissinger explained, “focus on the world in which they live; to prophets, the ‘real’ world is the one they want to bring into being.” With echoes of Kennan, Kissinger described America’s fundamental geopolitical security interest as resisting “the domination of Europe or Asia by any one power and, even more, the control of both continents by the same power.” Like Kennan, he traced the tragic 20th century wars and revolutions to the Wilsonian “peace” of the First World War. Franklin Roosevelt was a Wilsonian in foreign policy who hoped that what Robert Nisbet characterized as his “courtship” of Stalin would strengthen the postwar peace. Instead, we had 45 years of Cold War. Kissinger noted that it was Nixon’s realism–especially the opening to China and triangular diplomacy–that set the stage for President Reagan to end the Cold War in the 1980s. Reagan, for all of his idealistic rhetoric, was a foreign policy realist who used ideology as a weapon to help defeat the Soviet Union.
Kissinger continued to preach foreign policy realism in his later post-Cold War books, especially Does America Need a Foreign Policy, World Order and Leadership. He once wrote in a 1956 essay in Foreign Affairs that “[f]oreign policy is the art of weighing probabilities; mastery of it lies in grasping the nuances of possibilities.” Kennan would have agreed. Indeed, Kennan once remarked that Kissinger “understands my views better than anyone at State ever has.”
Robert Kaplan perhaps understands Kissinger and foreign policy realism better than any contemporary writer on foreign affairs. Kaplan has been a foreign correspondent, government consultant, and writer on international affairs for four decades. His work combines on-the-scene reporting with geopolitical depth. In an essay in The Atlantic in 2013, republished in The Return of Marco Polo’s World, Kaplan compared Kissinger to Britain’s great 19th century Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister Henry Temple, better known as Lord Palmerston. In describing Kissinger’s realism, Kaplan wrote:
Ensuring a nation’s survival sometimes leaves tragically little
room for private morality. Discovering the inapplicability of
Judeo-Christian morality in certain circumstances involving
affairs of state can be searing. The rare individuals who have
recognized the necessity of violating such morality, acted
accordingly, and taken responsibility for their actions are among
the most necessary leaders for their countries, even as they
have caused great unease among generations of well-meaning
intellectuals who, free of the burden of real-world bureaucratic
responsibility, makes choices in the abstract and treat morality
as an inflexible absolute.
Kaplan in the essay defended Kissinger from the slings and arrows of his many critics who accused him of immorality and war crimes. Kissinger, he wrote, performed the work of a statesman, “aware of his own tragic circumstances and able to connect them to a larger pattern of events.” Kissinger’s realism was about “the ultimate moral ambition in foreign policy: the avoidance of war through a favorable balance of power.” Kaplan characterized Kissinger’s statecraft and writings as “emotionally unsatisfying but analytically timeless.” Which is a good description of Kaplan’s own writings.
Like Kissinger and Kennan, Kaplan understands, as he wrote in his book Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos, that “[i]t takes a shallow grasp of history to believe that solutions exist to most international problems.” “Often,” Kaplan noted, “there are no solutions, only confusion and unsatisfactory choices.” The world, he explains, “is not ‘modern’ or ‘post-modern,’ but only a continuation of the ‘ancient.’” Human nature hasn’t changed very much.
Kaplan also shares the broad geopolitical worldview of Kennan and Kissinger, and has updated it to assess the 21st century challenge of China to the U.S.-led world order. In a series of books–Monsoon, The Revenge of Geography, Asia’s Cauldron, and The Loom of Time, and in an essay written for the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment titled “The Return of Marco Polo’s World,” Kaplan, like Kennan and Kissinger, ties U.S. national security to the geopolitical pluralism of Eurasia.
Kaplan’s most vivid gospel of realism is set forth in The Tragic Mind, where he uses the ancient Greeks, Shakespeare, Conrad, Dostoevsky and other literary tragedians to highlight the dangers of foreign policy hubris and pride, the persistence of human ambition, and the impossibility of human perfectibility. The greatest statesmen, Kaplan writes, are those with a “tragic sensibility” and who understand the fragility of civilization.
In an essay in The National Interest in 2014, Kaplan noted that foreign policy realism is “not the evil invention of Henry Kissinger, but an American tradition going back to George Washington, John Quincy Adams, and wise men like George F. Kennan and Dean Acheson,” and he lamented that “Wilsonianism lives on . . . no matter how often it is shown to be flawed.” Realists understand that there are very real dangers of escalation in the Ukraine War, and that those American political leaders and commentators calling for direct attacks against Iran in the Middle East risk igniting a regional conflict with dangerous unintended consequences, even as tensions continue to rise in the western Pacific. World War III is on a lot of minds. Before things get out of hand, our leaders should consult the realist gospels of Kennan, Kissinger, and Kaplan.
Francis P. Sempa writes on foreign policy and geopolitics. His Best Defense columns appear at the beginning of each month.
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