The Foreign Service Journal, February 2004

ples undergirded the notion that the practices of nations should conform to established interna- tional legal norms and conven- tions. “A world of law” should become the idealized state guiding the actions of all members of the international community, and the violations of the rule of law would serve as justification for corrective action by the U.S. and the world community involving the use of military force. Kennan was most vociferous in condemning such assertions. As he put it in American Diplomacy : “The idea of the subordination of a large number of states to an international juridical regime, limiting their possibilities for aggression and injury to other states, implies that these are states like our own, reasonably content with their national borders and status, at least to the extent that they would be willing to refrain from pressing for change without international agreement. ... We tend to underestimate the violence of national mal- adjustments and discontents elsewhere in the world if we think they will always appear to other people as less important than the preservation of the juridical tidiness of international life.” Understandably, Kennan was impatient with offi- cials and media pundits who encouraged the postures of moral superiority vis-à-vis law-breaking states. After all, he argued, there is little in the historical record to suggest that American values and virtues were the result of “acts of immaculate conception.” The trajectory of Kennan’s thinking led him to link legalistic approaches to the resolution of international conflict with the perceived importance of military force for problem solving. He acknowledged the role of mil- itary force as an important deterrent factor in shaping policy actions, but expressed skepticism about the use of force for compellance purposes. He contended that compellance strategies, once adopted, threatened to undermine the effectiveness of diplomacy as an instru- ment for peaceful resolution of disputes. In Kennan’s view, war (compellance) fought in the name of high moral or legal principle achieves little positive purpose “short of some form of domination.” The 1999 NATO aerial campaign against the Serbian government may be illustrative. Intended to end Belgrade’s ethnic cleansing of Albanian Kosovars, it soon resulted in Kosovar domination of the resid- ual Serb population in the province, laying the foundation for future Balkans conflict. As already noted, early in his academic career, Kennan evinced growing reservations concerning the injection of military considera- tions into the mix of diplomacy and economic assistance programs for national security planning purposes. At the core of Kennan’s doubts was his belief that the Cold War was essentially a political struggle, and military imperatives should be regarded as subsidiary. His primary caution was that once released from a subsidiary role, military desiderata would come to dominate policy planning. In addressing civil wars or insurgencies in the “Third World,” the ambassador admonished in Measures Short of War that one “could not see how any great nation can make itself the arbiter of civil wars of other countries and come out with a clear pattern.” Vietnam proved him prescient. The U.S. learned that the power to destroy is not the power to control, in Southeast Asia at least. In another memorable comment in the same book, he observed: “I personally believe that armed force is a poor weapon with which to meet a political assault. To intervene, you can’t make the outcome enduring unless you are prepared to remain in occupa- tion of foreign territories for an indefinite period of time ... and in the end it defeats itself.” As the Cold War had begun to wind down, the ambassador argued that the U.S. should begin to with- draw from many of its security commitments and urged that we turn to the United Nations and various region- al organizations to assume crisis prevention and peace- keeping responsibilities. In Around the Cragged Hill , he pointed to the military arm of the European Union as a suitable replacement for NATO, and called for the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from continental Euro- pean countries. Kennan also remained steadfast in his opposition to continued reliance on nuclear weapons after the end of the Cold War, arguing that dependence on convention- al force, rather than reliance on weapons of mass destruction, is the better part of wisdom. With the col- lapse of the Soviet Union, he applauded the deep cuts in the American and Russian nuclear arsenals, but also F O C U S 38 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 4 The ambassador’s relocation to the academic community was not an easy passage.