The end of the Vietnam War

George Kennan

George Kennan, the famous American diplomat, expert on the Soviet Union and original author of the "containment" strategy, wrote a few paragraphs for the New York Review of Books in its issue of 06/12/1975 giving his thoughts on the end of the Vietnam War. He wrote:

The lessons of Vietnam are few and plain: not to be hypnotized by the word "communism" and not to mess into other people's civil wars where there is no substantial American strategic interest at stake.

Kennan was one of the leading proponents of the "realist" school of foreign policy. Whoever promoted that name for their particular viewpoint had good marketing instincts, because I would hope that all foreign policy experts would try to be realistic. But we know very well from recent experience that not off of them are.

In line with his Realist outlook, he hoped that the US would take a more realistic, pragmatic and informed view of other nations. For instance, recognizing that the USSR and China were "national rather than communist great powers", by which he presumably meant that they recognized national interests distinct from their ideologies.

On today's hotspot for the US, he wrote, "In the Middle East we should be concerned to establish for the first time a power of independent decision—vis-à-vis both parties; for without that we can play no useful and constructive role at all."

Both parties, in this case, I take to mean Israel on the one hand and the Arab states on the other. It's almost nostalgic to think how simple things looked for American policy in the Middle East then. Of course, in reality, it was devilishly complicated then, too, but still...

Kennan wanted to see a significant reduction of American military commitments abroad:

Elsewhere, there can indeed be an extensive curtailment of American involvement. We need have little fear of the establishment of pseudocommunist regimes in Third World countries. They may be unfortunate for the inhabitants; they need not be for us. They have the advantage that their anti-Americanism is declared, not concealed; and they offer less provocation to our inane impulse to involve ourselves everywhere, to dispense arms and largesse, and try to be loved. (my emphasis)

I suppose we can safely say that Cheney and Bush have done away with the "trying to be loved" business.

And, as he did for much of the last couple of decades of his life or longer, he stressed the importance of environmental problems:

Besides the strategic problems, our main international tasks lie in the environmental field: the curtailment of the inexcusable misuse of the oceans, the bringing of ourselves and others to desist from the mad production of atomic wastes for which we have no safe means of disposal, the frank confrontation, generally, with the abuse modern industrialization and urbanization are inflicting on the usefulness of the earth as a seat of human living. It is here that there lie our greatest possibilities for leadership and for usefulness to ourselves and others in the aftermath of Vietnam. (my emphasis)

Tags: george kennan, vietnam war