BOOKS
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personal ethics (or, even, despite certain columnists, in the playing of
chess or of poker). Like any serious art, foreign policy is a craft for
professionals. Though we had a professional tradition in the early days
of the republic, when our very security depended on our external rela–
tions, this vanished in the course of the nineteenth century.
It
is only in
the past generation that this tradition has begun to revive.
George Kennan's
American Diplomacy, 1900-1950
is a profession–
al's meditations upon the half-century of awakening. Kennan, of course,
is a foreign service officer of unusual literacy and thoughtfulness. Years
of writing dispatches to the Department in Washington usually have a
benumbing effect on the literary style of our diplomats, and often in
the long run, on their intellectual habits as well. Kennan has amazingly
escaped from the inhibitions of professionalism. His attack on problems
is fresh, direct and penetrating; his style is graceful, subtle and some–
times moving. Above all, he approaches the past with a firm and devel–
oped philosophy of diplomacy.
The first essay (most of the book consists of lectures delivered last
winter at the University of Chicago) deals with the Spanish-American
War; the second, with the Open Door policy. Both illustrate for Mr.
Kennan the combination of fecklessness, happenstance and confusion
which attended America's stumbling entry into the great world. People
occasionally had flashes as to what it was all about-Theodore Roose–
velt, in certain moods, Admiral Mahan, Lewis Einstein- but in general,
the key problems of foreign policy were misunderstood and ignored.
The besetting sin, in Mr. Kennan's judgment, was the legalistic–
moralistic approach to international problems-the effort to define in–
ternational relations in terms of abstract and formal principles of
behavior, accompanied by the belief that the promulgation of these
principles was a contribution to world order. This habit of mind drew
on both the juridical proclivities of the lawyers who dominated our
government and on the sentimental idealism of all upright Americans
confronting a wicked world; in Cordell Hull, Mr. Kennan might have
added (but diplomatically did not), the two motives came to classical
union. Their dominance prevented Americans from thinking systematic–
ally and professionally about the concrete realities of power.
To the American mind, Mr. Kennan writes, it is implausible that
people should have aspirations more important than the preservation of
international peace; but this, alas, is not true; the world is far more
dark, willful and turbulent than we imagine. We cannot assume that
nations, like people, are moral beings (it is an insecure enough as–
sumption about people). Thus, the only safe basis for foreign policy is
