Tag Archives: Political Theory

George Kennan on the Realities Behind US Foreign Policy (Links added)

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I have been meaning to post the surrounding text of the famous passage in which George F. Kennan, a noted Sovietologist, cold warrior, and advocate of realpolitik, expressed his view that US policy in the post-war years should be unsentimental in its attitude toward Asia. As director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff from 1947 to 1950 (under George Marshall and Dean Acheson), Kennan was one of the principal architects of US post-war strategy and the formulator of the policy of long-term “containment” of the Soviet Union. So the piece makes for interesting reading today, especially in light of the following:

*the destruction of Asian savings by the US government-generated debt & dollar tsunami
*the rise in food prices in Asia
* the ongoing rush by Asian governments (along with everyone else) to buy up world farmland
* the potential for global water-wars in the immediate future.

KENNAN:

II. Far East

“We are deceiving ourselves and others when we pretend to have the answers to the problems which agitate many of these Asiatic peoples.

Furthermore, we have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.

For these reasons, we must observe great restraint in our attitude toward the Far Eastern areas. The peoples of Asia and of the Pacific area are going to go ahead, whatever we do, with the development of their political forms and mutual interrelationships in their own way. This process cannot be a liberal or peaceful one. The greatest of the Asiatic peoples-the Chinese and the Indians-have not yet even made a beginning at the solution of the basic demographic problem involved in the relationship between their food supply and their birth rate. Until they find some solution to this problem, further hunger, distress, and violence are inevitable. …..

…In the face of this situation we would be better off to dispense now with a number of the concepts which have underlined our thinking with regard to the Far East. We should dispense with the aspiration to “be liked” or to be regarded as the repository of a high-minded international altruism. We should stop putting ourselves in the position of being our brothers’ keeper and refrain from offering moral and ideological advice. We should cease to talk about vague and — for the Far East — unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better……”

— George F. Kennan, Policy Planning Study 23 (PPS23), Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1948

[From Russell Wvong’s website, via
Gilles D’Aymery in a piece on the improper use of this quote by Noam Chomsky and others atSwans Commentary.

On the Need for Wisdom in Politics

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A useful description of the importance of prudence or wisdom (sophia) rather than theory or formal education in statesmanship:

Following a discussion of virtue as a mean between extremes, Aristotle attributes to concrete action a higher degree of truth than to general principles of ethics.

The mark “of a man with high moral standards is his ability to see the truth in each particular moral question, since he is … the standard and measure for such questions.” (20) Ethics in politics, then, is not merely announcing moral postulates or retreating before the complexities of the world.

What matters, said Voegelin, are

not correct principles about what is right by nature in an immutable generality, nor the acute consciousness of the tension between the immutable truth and its mutable application (possibly even with tragic overtones), but the changeability, the kineton itself, and the methods to lift it to the reality of truth. The truth of existence is attained when it becomes concrete, i.e., in action. (21)

In classical and Christian ethics, the first of the moral virtues is sophia or prudentia because without adequate understanding of the structure of reality, including the conditio humana, moral action with rational coordination of means and ends is impossible. (22)

Voegelin’s characterization of the spoudaios (who sees the “truth in concrete things”) carries an important moral message for the democratic statesman. No amount of single tangible facts imparted through education can substitute for the type of experience that pushes great men to the limits of their human possibilities. The knowledge of the statesman grows out of the eternal laws by which man moves in the social world. The validity of those laws, the Aristotelian truth that man is a political animal, does not derive from “objective” facts in conformity with the mathematizing models of the natural sciences. The key to those laws of man lies in the practical wisdom through which the statesman elevates his experiences into universal laws of human nature. (23)”

— “Eric Voegelin and Reinhold Niebuhr on the Moral Resources of Democracy,” Greg Russell in Modern Age, Sep 22, 2006