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national interest; "our own national interest is all that we are
really
capable of knowing and understanding." International stability comes
from the accommodation of competing national interests at the "point
of maximum equilibrium." What we call peace is therefore a dynamic
and unstable equilibrium, threatened alike by internal change and by
external rearrangement. When the equilibrium is shattered, the forces
released are fanatical in their intensity and incalculable
in
their conse–
quences. The problem of statecraft is to avert the extremities of force by
reconciling the paradox of balance and change.
National interest, in Mr. Kennan's thinking, is simply what is
good for the nation; and he readily recognizes that this is a conception
which different people will charge with different implications. His own
concern in this book is clearly more to make the case against legalism
and moralism than to make the case for any particular version of the
national interest. But he does emphasize the indispensable point that
force cannot be treated as a concept outside of the given framework of
purpose and method; it must be included within the philosophy of na–
tional interest.
"If
this were better understood, there could be neither
the sweeping moral rejection of international violence which bedevils so
many Americans in times of peace nor the helpless abandonment to its
compulsions and its inner momentum which characterizes so many of
us in times of war." And he emphasizes too that the conception of the
national interest cannot be imposed upon a country; it grows out of the
country; it is the outward expression of the spirit and purpose of
na–
tional life. The attempt to separate foreign and domestic policy
is
artificial and mischievous.
If
you say that mistakes of the past were unavoidable because of our
domestic predilections and habits of thought, you are saying that what
stopped us from being more effective than we were was democracy, as
practiced in this country. . . . A nation which excuses its own failures
by the sacred untouchableness of its own habits can excuse itself into
complete disaster.
In discussing democracy, Mr. Kennan cannot avoid a certain skepticism
and even pessimism of tone.
It
is this perhaps which leads him eventual–
ly to seek refuge in the hope that the nation may yet be saved
in
foreign policy by learning to respect a professional elite of trained
diplomats.
Beyond this, he looks for American security to be preserved
by
preventing any single power from dominating the Eurasian land mass;
which means, he argues, that we have a special stake in the prosperity
and independence of "the peripheral powers of Europe and Asia."
