By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Challenges In Drawing Lessons From History

Why study history? We hope to better guide our future by understanding the past. History also could prepare us for action. In this context, the diplomat and historian George F. Kennan ranks as one of the most influential figures in foreign policy. Kennan was a sui generis thinker, a trenchant critic of communism and capitalism, and a pioneering environmentalist. Living between Russia and the United States, he witnessed firsthand Stalin’s tightening grip on the Soviet Union, the collapse of Europe during World War II, and the nuclear arms race of the Cold War. 

The history of the world has evolved through the interactions of billions of individuals, each pursuing various goals and faced with multiple challenges. We have in this book spoken a great deal about the challenges but less about the plans –​ beyond the basic human needs for food and shelter and certain psychological temptations that humans commonly face. We reflect here on what world history might tell us about the purposes of human life.

Individuals, each pursuing various goals and each faced with multiple challenges. We have in this book spoken a great deal about the challenges but less about the plans –​ beyond the basic human needs for food and shelter and certain psychological temptations that humans commonly face. We reflect here on what world history might tell us about the purposes of human life.

It seems worthwhile to reflect on whether the combined efforts of billions of humans over the millennia have had any sound effects. We could enhance our confidence that our actions today will lead to a better future if we identify progress in the past course of human history.

Making the world a better place may seem a tall order –​ though only if we neglect the evolutionary insight that the world has improved chiefly through multiple minor changes. It is, therefore, tempting to follow a thought process such as: “I am an X,”; “The X is worthy,”; or “Therefore, it is meaningful to be an X.” There is a formidable logic to this source of meaning. And it resonates with the basic human tendency to identify with groups. It can complement our first source of sense if it guides us to work toward the prosperity and happiness of group X in a way that is not harmful to the members of not-​X. Humans can accomplish much when we jointly attach a shared meaning to specific activities. The danger, of course, is that a strong group identity can guide us toward acts of hostility toward non-members. It can also steer us away from self-knowledge by encouraging us to absorb group X’s beliefs and practices without question. World history provides a set of lessons that should guide us toward a positive type of group identity:

For example, at the advanced age of 94, George Kennan was still arguing that the Cold War hadn’t been inevitable—that it could have been avoided or, at least, ameliorated. A decade after that 44-year conflict ended, Kennan, the somewhat dovish father of the United States Cold War containment strategy, contended in a letter to his more hawkish biographer, John Lewis Gaddis, that while Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was alive, an early way out might have been possible.

The so-called Stalin Note from March 1952—an offer from Moscow to hold talks over the shape of post-World War II Europe—showed that the United States had ignored the possibilities of peace accomplished through “negotiation, and genuine negotiation, in distinction from public posturing (italics original),” Kennan wrote in 1999.

Those words still resonate today. Because public posturing is mostly what we’re seeing as the United States finds itself spiraling toward a new kind of cold war with China and Russia. Yet almost no debate or discussion about these policies is taking place in Washington. Especially when it comes to the challenge from China—which has replaced the Soviet Union as the primary geopolitical threat to the United States—politicians on both sides of the aisle see political gain in out-hawking each other by calling for a tougher stance against Beijing. What is emerging, as a result, is a long-term struggle for global power and influence that could easily outlast the first Cold War. This is despite President Joe Biden’s insistence after a November 2022 summit meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping that “there need not be a new Cold War.” When Secretary of State Antony Blinken makes his first visit to Beijing in a few weeks, it will be an attempt to repair diplomatic relations suspended since former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan last year.

The reasons for the ultra-nationalism and anti-Western fervor of Putin and his Kremlin supporters are complex and reach back deeply into Russian history. But Kennan may well have been right about the perils of poking the Russian bear too hard for too long. A little-noted U.S. Army study commissioned by the Trump administration nearly five years ago anticipated both Putin’s aggression and popular Russian support for his Ukraine invasion. The study, co-authored by intelligence specialist C. Anthony Pfaff, concluded that “the Russian people share the same sense of geographic insecurity and political humiliation as their government [and] demonstrations of global power and confrontation with the West, especially in Eastern Europe, will only serve to bolster the popularity of any future Russian government.”

This realpolitik sensitivity to other nations’ strategic interests was a constant theme in Kennan’s thinking. In the late 1950s, in a series of radio addresses that Costigliola writes were “arguably more impressive” than Kennan’s famed “long telegram” and “X” article laying out the groundwork for containment, Kennan “shook the very foundations of Cold War regime in Britain, West Germany, and the United States.” He challenged the division of Germany into western and eastern halves, the rigid heart of the Cold War orthodoxy at the time. Kennan proposed that the West and East could find a way to negotiate a partial disengagement if the Westerners withdrew from Germany in return for a Soviet military pullback from Eastern Europe. A reunified Germany that would remain neutral and only lightly armed would be a buffer, avoiding the brinkmanship that occurred later in 1958-59 and then again in 1961-62, culminating in the Cuban missile crisis and the threat of Armageddon. Germany would also not remain in NATO—echoing the deal first offered by Stalin in 1952. Kennan proposed keeping some nuclear weapons for deterrence, but he said that tactical nukes would only cement the division of Europe. He warned that a runaway nuclear arms race would ensue if nothing were done.

His proposals, the so-called Reith lectures, never went anywhere—especially after Moscow launched Sputnik in 1957, raising the threat of nuclear apocalypse on New York and Washington—and Kennan was accused of Munich-style appeasement. His friend and strategic archrival, Dean Acheson, complained that Kennan “lived part of the time in a world of fantasy” and even, at one point, compared his old diplomatic comrade to a species of ape engaged in “absurd and idle chatter.” Kennan was devastated and lamented that no one in power was “interested in a political settlement with the Russians.” The Soviet collapse a little over three decades later appeared to vindicate Washington’s hard-line strategy, but people also tend to forget just how close the world came to all-out nuclear war in the interim.

Kennan also presciently opposed the Vietnam War. In Senate testimony in 1966 that was so closely followed around the country that it “pre-empted I Love Lucy,” Costigliola writes, Kennan declared that containment did not apply to a civil war in Vietnam that would only damage prestige by attacking “a poor and helpless people.” Quoting John Quincy Adams, he said the U.S. should not go “abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” But as with NATO’s response, U.S. policies were entrenched by then.

The critical question today is whether Washington’s posture of confrontation is similarly entrenched. One reason both Democrats and Republicans agree on a harsh response to China is a mutual sense that Beijing has long duped them. For most of the last quarter-century, both U.S. political parties were eager to engage China, only to conclude that its leaders were mainly interested in stealing intellectual property and building up China’s economy to displace the United States as the world’s leading power. Biden, accordingly, has populated his China advisory team with hawks such as Kurt Campbell and Rush Doshi.

Beyond that bipartisan consensus, there has long been a political bias toward confrontation over negotiation—at least since former British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain gave a bad name to appeasement at Munich. The politics of all wars—including cold wars—are such that presidents gain an advantage by looking decisive and tough-minded. The benefits of such an approach are immediate—a robust and leaderly image for the president and higher poll ratings—while the costs are long-term and diffuse: ever-worsening global warming, the slow escalation of an arms race, and the even slower unraveling of the international system, the vague but increasing threat of future pandemics. As for a more conciliatory, realpolitik approach, on the other hand, its benefits are long-term and diffuse, and its costs immediate: an image of weakness and indecisiveness, which no U.S. president likes, especially when he’s fighting a war.

Those questions go to the heart of a book about the Cold War, The Kennedy Withdrawal: Camelot and the American Commitment to Vietnam, where it is argued that even presidents who might realize the potential hazard of overreacting can nonetheless be pulled in. In his book, Selverstone dissects one of the last enduring shibboleths of the Cold War: the Camelot myth that President John F. Kennedy would have avoided the quagmire of Vietnam had he lived.

True, Kennedy was, by many accounts, always leery of being pulled into a conflict that he, as a young senator, recognized was essentially a nationalist movement against French colonialism. As Silverstone writes, Kennedy told his Senate colleagues as far back as 1954 that “no amount of American military assistance … can conquer an enemy which is everywhere and at the same time nowhere.” The Kennedy Withdrawal: Camelot and the American Commitment to Vietnam. Even so, he was still a confirmed Cold Warrior, worried about credibility and ready to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support.

Silverstone depicts Kennedy and his national security team as believers in the “domino theory” that President Eisenhower first explicated in the 1950s. This theory held that if South Vietnam fell to the communists, other nations in the region would also fall like dominoes—one after the other. And in the “long twilight struggle” (Kennedy’s words) known as the Cold War, the fall of those Asian dominoes would undermine American credibility worldwide.

Silverstone challenges what he calls the “Camelot” view of the Kennedy withdrawal—the notion promoted by Kennedy court historians and partisans that Kennedy was determined to withdraw U.S. forces from Vietnam, thus avoiding President Johnson’s quagmire supposedly created in the wake of Kennedy’s assassination. Very little in history or politics, and very little about the machinations of the Kennedys is that simple. 

As a Senator from Massachusetts, Kennedy, Silverstone notes, took public positions that “were sharply critical of the Truman administration--for its handling of the Chinese civil war . . . and for its handling of the Korean War.” Senator Kennedy was a foreign policy “hawk” who criticized Eisenhower for not spending enough on conventional defenses and negligently allowing a “missile gap” to develop in favor of the Soviet Union. Kennedy ran to the “right” of Vice President Richard Nixon on foreign policy issues during the 1960 presidential campaign.

President Kennedy, in his inaugural address, promised to “bear any burden” and “pay any price” to defend liberty. He significantly increased the number of U.S. military forces in South Vietnam. Kennedy and some of his advisers characterized the defense of South Vietnam as a “vital” or “significant” U.S. interest. Silverstone identifies the considerations that shaped JFK’s approach to Vietnam as “modernization, foreign aid, counterinsurgency, . . . flexible response . . . [and] general concerns about credibility and falling dominoes.”

Domestic politics was never too far away from Kennedy’s consideration of Vietnam or, for that matter, any other issue. And it was here that Kennedy and his advisers formulated plans for a symbolic withdrawal of 1000 troops in 1964 or 1965. But Kennedy did not want to be the president who “lost” Vietnam the way Truman “lost” China. Truman suffered politically both for the “loss” of China and the stalemate of the Korean War.

Silverstone notes that the critical national security document on U.S. policy toward Vietnam produced by Kennedy’s task force on Southeast Asia was NSAM 52, which “pledged the administration ‘to prevent Communist domination of South Vietnam; to create in that country a viable and increasingly democratic society; and to initiate, on an accelerated basis, a series of mutually supporting actions of a military, a political, economic, psychological and covert character designed to achieve this objective.’” Under this plan, the Kennedy administration sent U.S. servicemen “streaming into South Vietnam.”

Silverstone criticizes the Kennedy team for their “reluctance to distinguish between peripheral and state interests” and for developing a habit of using U.S. military forces to “send signals” of American resolve. Kennedy’s military “advisers,” Silverstone notes, were engaging in combat, regularly accompanying South Vietnamese troops into the field against the Viet Cong.

Kennedy consistently portrayed his administration’s actions as helping South Vietnam “win its fight.” Kennedy understood the political danger of over-committing American forces in a country most Americans knew little about. But he also understood the political minefields of the “falling dominoes” and another Korean War-like stalemate. Kennedy was nothing if not politically cautious.

Silverstone provides plenty of evidence for a token Kennedy withdrawal of forces but very little evidence—other than self-serving recollections of Kenneth O’Donnell, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and the egregious Robert McNamara--that Kennedy intended to withdraw U.S. military forces from Vietnam. The “Camelot” version of the Kennedy presidency is as fictitious as the English legend.

The best Silverstone can do to speculate about JFK’s real intentions in Vietnam. And he suggests that Kennedy and his national security team would probably have acted based on the military situation on the ground as it evolved over the next several years. And it is worth remembering that most of the people advising Lyndon Johnson on Vietnam after Kennedy’s death were Kennedy’s people.

“Rather than signal an eagerness to wind down the U.S. assistance effort,” Silverstone concludes, “the policy of withdrawal—the Kennedy withdrawal—allowed JFK to preserve the American commitment to Vietnam.” The rest, as they say, is history.

There are, no doubt, more differences than similarities between the Cold War conflict that pitted the Soviet Union and the United States against each other and the current tensions between Beijing and Washington. And yet those differences might offer an even greater chance for breaking the descent into long-term Sino-American conflict than existed during the Cold War. In contrast to that earlier era, when the Soviet Union and the United States lived in entirely separate spheres of influence, the world economy is well integrated, and both the United States and China have gained much of their wealth by trading and investing in it. Xi discovered this anew as the Chinese economy slowed dramatically last year, and its population shrank. Moreover, the new challenges demanding sustained international cooperation—in particular, stopping climate change and future pandemics—are far more pressing than they were then. Indeed, it is very likely that the threats from global warming and new COVID-like viruses are far greater than the strategic threat that China and the United States pose to each other.

Unlike the Soviet Union, which surrounded itself with cooperative, tightly controlled governments, China today finds itself virtually surrounded by U.S. allies or Westernized states that counterbalance its growing military power. The Biden administration has already laid down a strict policy approach to China, including helping arm Australia and Japan; forming the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue with Japan, India, and Australia; and orchestrating an unprecedented decoupling of high-tech trade with China, including a frankly protectionist industrial policy aimed at boosting U.S. competitiveness.

Friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty,” as Kennedy declared in his inaugural address. Selverstone argues that Kennedy “continued to operate from a worldview that embraced the precepts of domino thinking … and the demonstration of resolve.” Costigliola notes that Kennedy shied away from embracing Kennan because the latter supported “disengagement.”

But other scholars disagree. Harvard University historian Fredrik Logevall, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam, and a not fully completed two-volume biography of Kennedy, said that Kennedy was a far more subtle student of history than former President Lyndon B. Johnson and was skeptical of the domino theory. He believes Kennedy would have found a way to scale down the U.S. presence in an unwinnable war. “I don’t think the Cold War was inevitable, and I don’t believe a major U.S. war in Vietnam was inevitable,” Logevall said in an email.

What do you think about it now? Just as Acheson and others argued about the Soviet Union during the Cold War, many policymakers today say that China under Xi seeks only to buy time while it grows stronger vis-a-vis U.S. power—and then strikes against Taiwan. Beyond that, Beijing is looking to supplant the United States as the world’s leading power, no matter what it takes, the hawks say. And Xi is marrying his vast, technologically advanced economy with Russia’s resource-rich state to see this ambition through.

Perhaps. But it is worth noting that while Beijing has backed Putin rhetorically, it has not delivered military or much economic aid to Moscow’s aggression in Ukraine. The China-Russia partnership may be flimsy as the Sino-Soviet association did in the early Cold War. Meanwhile, the Biden administration’s apparent preference for public posturing over genuine efforts at a realist approach—negotiating a modus vivendi with China and, perhaps someday, a post-Putin Russia—poses serious risks. Once again, with almost no debate in Washington or other Western capitals, NATO plays a controversial role.

Although the alliance was expressly designed for threats across the “north Atlantic,” to little notice last summer, NATO expanded its focus to what was effectively a new containment policy toward China. At its summit in Madrid, the alliance invited the leaders of Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand to join in for the first time, and NATO’s new “strategic concept” named China as one of its priorities, saying Beijing’s ambitions challenge the West’s “interests, security, and values.”

If Biden doesn’t want a new cold war, it would hardly be surprising if Xi thought he did. And yet, with Xi on a back foot because of his disastrous COVID shutdown and a sagging economy, new possibilities for diplomatic engagement may now exist. “I do not think Xi sees himself or China in an existential struggle with the United States over competing for ideological systems,” Leffler said. “I do not think Xi thinks American and Chinese interests are mutually exclusive.” Or, as Kennan would put it, according to Frank Costigliola’s book, “sharply opposed positions are just the asking price in the long, necessarily patient process of diplomacy.” One thing is certain: We won’t know for sure unless serious diplomacy is attempted if Kennan were alive today if he would agree.

 

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