BOOKS
709
This would presumably
commit
us to Britain and Japan as the key–
stones of our policy; and it is somewhat in these terms, though not
very explicitly, that Mr. Kennan conducts his critique of U. S. foreign
policy since 1914.
If
the worst danger was to shatter the world equi–
librium and the next worst was to forsake the peripheral powers, then
clearly we should have sought a negotiated peace in the First World
War, intervening only if necessary to avert the destruction of Britain; w(>
should have revived Germany more quickly after the war, thereby re–
pairing the gap in the international fabric; we should never have
fooled around with a Chinese solution in our Far Eastern policy, which
could only have meant the abandonment of the periphery in order to
enthrone chaos; and, if we had backed Germany and Japan under
moderate leadership, we might have forestalled the devotees of the
Thousand Year Reich and the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
No one would be quicker than Mr. Kennan to admit the speculative
character of his observations. One may well wonder, for example,
whether the preservation of Imperial Germany or the support of Im–
perial Japan against China might not have whetted more appetites
than it satisfied; or why the balance of power requires that we must
always back the island power against the mainland, especially when the
island is the seat of aggression. Baldly stated, indeed, Mr. Kennan's
whole thesis may seem only a more urbane version of the
Realpolitik
to
which innocents tend to turn when the facts of international life sud–
denly burst upon them.
But what differentiates the Kennan approach from that of, for
example, the followers of Professor Hans
J.
Morgenthau is that he
takes the revelations of international amorality in his stride; more than
that, he comprehends them in his understanding of the tragedy of
history. Mr. Kennan, in other words, is deeply moral, rather than
moralistic, like Judge Hull, or immoral, like the boys who have just
discovered that politics involve power. He does not think that interna–
tional questions can be solved by the enunciation of ethical generalities;
nor does he think they can be solved by a cynical division of the spoils.
The fact that international relations are amoral does not mean to him
that moral factors play no part; nor does it absolve the individual from
moral responsibility. This, indeed, is in his
vie~
the tragedy of history:
man cannot escape decision, but the complexity of events diffuses the
burden of
guilt,
and, beyond this, so much is inherently insoluble.
In order to fill out the book, the publishers have added Mr. Ken–
nan's two notable
Foreign Affairs
essays on the Soviet Union. They
show admirably the realism, the equability and the compassion with
