The Foreign Service Journal, September 2019

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | SEPTEMBER 2019 39 T his morning we consider the relations between sovereign governments and the measures that they employ when they deal with each other … short of reaching for their weapons and shooting it out. …The traditional lists of “measures short of war” (see chart next page) were drawn up with the idea of the adjudication or the adjustment of disputes, and not primarily with the idea of exercising pressure on other states. … The problems we are faced with today in the international arena are not problems just of the adjustment of disputes. They are problems caused by the conflict of interests between great This article has been excerpted from George Kennan’s first lecture at the National War College delivered on Sept. 16, 1946. The distinguished diplomat had been named Deputy Commandant for Foreign Affairs at the new institution. The entire set of lectures has been published as a book, Measures Short of War: The George F. Kennan Lectures at the National War College , 1946-1947 (National Defense University Press, 1991). centers of power and ideology in this world. They are problems of the measures short of war which great powers use to exert pressure on one another for the attainment of their ends. In that sense, they are questions of the measures at the disposal of states not for the adjustment of disputes, but for the promulga- tion of power. These are two quite different purposes. Governments are absorbed today not with try- ing to settle disputes between themselves, but with getting something out of somebody else, so they often promulgate a policy which goes very, very far. Governments have to use pres- sure on a wide scale; and therefore these tradi- tional categories are not often applicable to conditions today. Now let’s go on to measures of pressure, as distinct from adjustment. The first thing that strikes me about measures of pressure is that they differ significantly in the case of totalitarian and democratic states. …Totalitarian governments have at their disposal every measure capable of influencing other govern- ments as a whole, or their members, or their peoples behind their back; and in the choice and application of these measures they are restrained by no moral inhibitions, by no domestic public opinion to speak of, and not even by any serious consid- erations of consistency and intellectual dignity. Their choice is Measures Short of War (Diplomatic) This presentation of diplomacy’s work in 1946, when the United States faced a new postwar world of great power competition, remains as relevant today as ever. FOCUS ON PREVENTIVE DIPLOMACY BY GEORGE F. KENNAN