History paper 3 to 4 pages

The following transcript contains a dialogue between David Gerger, editor of the U.S. New & World Report, and George Kennan, the statesmen who is largely attributed with being the “father of containment.” This particular exchange provides a unique historical snapshot into the mind of Kennan, as Kennan critiques the adaptation of a Cold War policy that he is largely credited with founding.

TRANSCRIPT

DAVID GERGEN: Well, you intended then to have political containment--

GEORGE KENNAN: Exactly.

DAVID GERGEN: --of the Soviet Union, not military containment.

GEORGE KENNAN: Exactly. And I was moved to this largely by what was happening in, in Western Europe, but also what I have been able to observe, serving in Moscow until 1936, through the final two years of the war--

DAVID GERGEN: Right.

DAVID GERGEN: Right. But you as a Soviet expert, as an authority who had lived there, found that you could not convince your own government.

GEORGE KENNAN: No, I couldn't. I could--I found it easy to convince them that this was a very dangerous group of men. But I couldn't persuade them that their aspirations were political.

DAVID GERGEN: And not military?

GEORGE KENNAN: And not military. They were not like Hitler.

DAVID GERGEN: Right. Now in your book, you went on to argue, and I found this quite striking, that because of the containment policy, because what you believe is a misreading of Soviet intentions, we actually found ourselves in the Far East in a situation where we felt we could, we had to maintain a military presence in Japan, and in your opinion, that contributed to the North Korean invasion of South Korea. The Russians needed to take Korea. If we were going to have Japan, they needed to take Korea.

GEORGE KENNAN: Yeah. I, I felt that we should have tried to negotiate with the Russians in a realistic way before we went about rearming the Japanese and building up our own forces there and concluding a treaty, which left our forces there indefinitely.

DAVID GERGEN: So in your view, though, we might have avoided a Korean War?

GEORGE KENNAN: I think we might have avoided it, and avoided the whole great Korean problem had we done this.

DAVID GERGEN: But did you--you wrote in your book that you felt that Vietnam also had its roots in the containment policy--

GEORGE KENNAN: That's right. And this was unnecessary. I don't--these are not my own ideas, but John Davies, who is a formidable expert on China's affairs, Davies always told us, don't kid yourself, Ho Chi Minh is a nationalist, not a Communist. Communists are going to try to use him but that he's too smart, and they can't do it.

DAVID GERGEN: All right. For my generation, it's a surprise to hear those interpretations because I learned growing up that the containment policy had been a great success, that--and I believed that we were right in Korea, and I believed we were right in Vietnam, but you're really arguing a very different perspective.

GEORGE KENNAN: It was a success in Europe.

DAVID GERGEN: Uh-huh.

GEORGE KENNAN: And it led to the possibility of a Marshall Plan.

DAVID GERGEN: All right.

GEORGE KENNAN: And by the time that was done, we had, we had really resisted any danger of a Russian political conquest of Italy or France.

DAVID GERGEN: But it over-militarized our response, in your judgment?

GEORGE KENNAN: That I'm sure is correct.

DAVID GERGEN: So--

GEORGE KENNAN: The real response was the Marshall Plan….

DAVID GERGEN: There are echoes in what you're saying of Barbara Tuchmann as she looked back over history, she wrote that book The March of Folly, and indeed, Robert McNamara in his most recent book has argued that Vietnam was based on some false understandings on our part or false wisdom on our part.

GEORGE KENNAN: It was. Well, it was--we look for general policies, very sweeping policies--

DAVID GERGEN: Right.

GEORGE KENNAN: --in the world. And that isn't the way international affairs work. We ought to look at every problem on its own merits.

DAVID GERGEN: Um-hmm.