KENNAN

A critical biography of a principal architect of the Cold War.

George F. Kennan (1904-2005), a scholar at heart who had a significant role in the Foreign Service, grew up a passionate admirer of all things Russian—other than the government of the Soviet Union. Historian Costigliola, who edited The Kennan Diaries, shows how Kennan’s politics verged on fascist as he was formulating many of his views on global affairs. One of his most admired friends was the far-right German nobleman Ferdinand von Bredow, who was later murdered as a rival of Hitler’s. As for Kennan, “though neither a jingoist nor a militarist, he did favor an ethnically homogeneous United States and an end to immigration.” During his rise through the diplomatic hierarchy, Kennan reported closely on developments in the Soviet Union but ran afoul of Franklin Roosevelt at a time when Franklin was seeking closer relations with the Stalin regime in the alliance against Hitler. When World War II ended, Costigliola writes, Kennan advocated a policy of containment, which posited that an independent Europe, led by a united Germany, would serve as a counterbalance to both American and Soviet power. Instead, that policy of containment was militarized, which Kennan opposed to the extent that he became a critic of it in his later years. “In the post–World War II era,” writes the author, “Kennan would never accept the Cold War order as permanent.” Still, even as he challenged the idea that America police the world, the lectures and articles he wrote served to build official American consensus about the Cold War, which had terrible consequences in a doctrine that put American troops on the ground in Vietnam. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Kennan warned sharply against extending NATO into Eastern Europe, which he feared would antagonize Russia—which it did, and as a result, Russia invaded Ukraine.

A valuable resource for students of 20th-century geopolitics.