In spring of 1953, newly elected President Eisenhower sat down with his staff to discuss the state of American strategy in the cold war. America, he insisted, needed a new approach to an urgent situation. From this meeting emerged Eisenhower’s teams of “bright young fellows,” charged with developing competing policies, each of which would come to shape global politics. In Spirits of the Cold War, Ned O’Gorman argues that the early Cold War was a crucible not only for contesting political strategies, but also for competing conceptions of America and its place in the world. Drawing on extensive archival research and wide reading in intellectual and rhetorical histories, this comprehensive account shows cold warriors debating “worldviews” in addition to more strictly instrumental tactical aims. Spirits of the Cold War is a rigorous scholarly account of the strategic debate of the early Cold War—a cultural diagnostic of American security discourse and an examination of its origins.
In spring of 1953, newly elected President Eisenhower sat down with his staff to discuss the state of American strategy in the cold war. America, he insisted, needed a new approach to an urgent situation. From this meeting emerged Eisenhower’s teams of “bright young fellows,” charged with developing competing policies, each of which would come to shape global politics. In Spirits of the Cold War, Ned O’Gorman argues that the early Cold War was a crucible not only for contesting political strategies, but also for competing conceptions of America and its place in the world. Drawing on extensive archival research and wide reading in intellectual and rhetorical histories, this comprehensive account shows cold warriors debating “worldviews” in addition to more strictly instrumental tactical aims. Spirits of the Cold War is a rigorous scholarly account of the strategic debate of the early Cold War—a cultural diagnostic of American security discourse and an examination of its origins.
Spirits of the Cold War: Contesting Worldviews in the Classical Age of American Security Strategy
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Overview
In spring of 1953, newly elected President Eisenhower sat down with his staff to discuss the state of American strategy in the cold war. America, he insisted, needed a new approach to an urgent situation. From this meeting emerged Eisenhower’s teams of “bright young fellows,” charged with developing competing policies, each of which would come to shape global politics. In Spirits of the Cold War, Ned O’Gorman argues that the early Cold War was a crucible not only for contesting political strategies, but also for competing conceptions of America and its place in the world. Drawing on extensive archival research and wide reading in intellectual and rhetorical histories, this comprehensive account shows cold warriors debating “worldviews” in addition to more strictly instrumental tactical aims. Spirits of the Cold War is a rigorous scholarly account of the strategic debate of the early Cold War—a cultural diagnostic of American security discourse and an examination of its origins.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781628951592 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Michigan State University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2011 |
| Series: | Rhetoric & Public Affairs |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 343 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Ned O’Gorman is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He has served as the President of the American Society for the History of Rhetoric.
Read an Excerpt
SPIRITS OF THE COLD WAR
CONTESTING WORLDVIEWS IN THE CLASSICAL AGE OF AMERICAN SECURITY STRATEGYBy Ned O'Gorman
Michigan State University Press
Copyright © 2012 Ned O'GormanAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61186-020-7
Chapter One
The Care of the Self: Kennan, Containment, and Stoicism
* * *
Among so many dangers therefore, as the natural lusts of men do daily threaten each other withal, to have a care of one's self is not a matter so scornfully to be looked upon, as if so be there had not been a power and will left in one to have done otherwise. —Thomas Hobbes, De Cive
The eminent Cold War historian and Kennan biographer John Lewis Gaddis describes strategy as "quite simply the process by which ends are related to means, intentions to capabilities, objectives to resources." However, this conception of strategy is deceptively simple. As Paul Kennedy has shown, approaches to strategy in the twentieth century grew increasingly broad. The two world wars and the long Cold War pushed strategic thinkers to consider more and more "the longer-term and political purposes of the belligerent state as a whole." The failure to win a long-term peace after World War I forced strategists to ask again what is meant by "victory," and what is meant by "defeat." Similarly, the conflict between the United States and the USSR caused many to ask what is meant by "war," and what is meant by "peace." As the scope and nature of such key terms in strategic thinking were broadened, so was the scope of strategy itself, reaching its apogee in an understanding of "grand strategy." This understanding, Kennedy notes, concerns peace as much as war, reflects on the long-term economic and psychological factors of war and peace, recognizes the crucial place of diplomacy, and addresses issues of political culture. "The crux of grand strategy," Kennedy concludes, "lies therefore in policy, that is, in the capacity of the nation's leaders to bring together all of the elements, both military and nonmilitary, for the preservation and enhancement of the nation's long-term (that is, wartime and peacetime) best interests." In this way, there is far more to strategy than Gaddis's definition might suggest. Strategy entails reckoning with a nation's "best interests." It seeks to organize a nation for successful being in the world, however, and by whomever, that is envisioned.
George F. Kennan's "containment" is widely considered the preeminent strategic concept of the Cold War, gaining the distinction as a model "grand strategy." In its most straightforward formulation, containment is presented as a strategy that aimed at restraining Soviet expansionism through the projection of U.S. power and the building of resilient alliances with non-Communist states. Kennan's own oft-cited words from his enormously influential "X" article in Foreign Affairs in 1947 (reprinted soon after in publications like Reader's Digest and Life) underlie this understanding of containment.
In these circumstances it is clear that the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.
And,
Soviet society may well contain deficiencies which will eventually weaken its own total potential. This would of itself warrant the United States entering with reasonable confidence upon a firm containment, designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counterforce at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world.
Yet, as numerous commentators since have shown, these summary statements, pithy though they were, were also deceptively simple. Kennan's "X" article (hereafter simply X), as well as its famous antecedent, the "long telegram" (LT), left unanswered vital questions about the means of containment, the limits of the strategy, and even one of its central foci, the precise nature of Soviet motivations. The result was a legacy of confusion that rivaled containment's legacy of influence.
Since the publication of Kennan's Memoirs in 1967, in which Kennan himself tried to clarify his thinking, numerous critics and scholars have tried to sort out the meaning of containment. Unsatisfied with Kennan's own explanation, these writers have presented a critical puzzle with a consistent form: how is it that the obviously flawed or incomplete articulations of containment in LT and X still had such tremendous influence? Thus, in 1972 Charles Gati speculated that the powerful but troubled legacy of X may be due to "a subtle yet important difference between what Kennan said and how he said it." Kennan's "relatively simple explanation of the Soviet challenge in world affairs" made X tremendously influential, to the point, according to Gati, that it became "ingrained in the American political conscience," but it nevertheless belied Kennan's more complex understanding of the Cold War. So too, in one of the most important studies of the 1970s of Kennan's containment, C. Ben Wright suggested that Kennan's words in the LT ran ahead of him as he felt he had to "exaggerate" the problem in order to "alert" policymakers. Meanwhile, "Some of Kennan's proposals were vague at best, suggesting different things to different people." Wright argues that Kennan's early articulations of containment were rigid, militaristic, and globalizing, despite Kennan's efforts in his Memoirs to say otherwise. Furthermore, Wright intimates that it was precisely this rigidity that made Kennan's containment so influential, and so problematic.
More recently, Frank Costigliola has argued that the rhetorical power of LT, X, and other early Cold War writings by Kennan lay in "metaphors of gender and pathology" that provoked sharp emotional responses in readers. Costigliola argues the emotive source of this language was Kennan's "quasi-mystical [and eroticized] hope of becoming ... a link enabling Russian society and American society to help each other." His hopes and desires unfulfilled, Kennan blamed the Soviets and invoked "a basic polarity between masculine and feminine" in his language to "emotionalize and polarize issues." While this gendered polarity strengthened Kennan's rhetoric, Costigliola argues it compromised the analyses of LT and X. Indeed, pathos (and pathology) has appeared paradoxically in critical analyses of Kennan's work as both a principal source of its persuasive power and as central to its analytical confusion. More than paradox, Robert Ivie suggests, the place of pathos in Kennan's thought was "self-defeating," as Kennan ended up trying "to manage unacknowledged affect instead of understanding its influence on the deliberative process." The realist thus pursued an unrealistic ideal of the American democratic polity.
These important studies, although distinct in their particular concerns and conclusions, together point to several key characteristics of Kennan's rhetoric. First is simplicity, whether understood as his simple presentation of Soviet motives, the rigidity and firmness of his viewpoint, rigid binaries like feminine versus masculine, or a failure to reckon with the polity as it is. Second, each critic rightly notes that in fact the global situation was more complex than Kennan's simplicities allowed. Third, each study turns to the complex role of pathos in Kennan's thought. Their consensus, therefore, is that through simplicity Kennan's containment gained in rhetorical power what it lost in analytical weight, and that pathos played a central role in this trade-off. Not coincidentally, all four writers present Kennan as ultimately confused, conflicted, or, at the very least, inconsistent.
Yet there is a consistency in this inconsistency, or so I will argue, one that makes Kennan's rhetoric more than a powerful peculiarity in the annals of American foreign policy, or even an important example of a conflicted Cold War realism, but the expression of a historic worldview. In articulating containment, I argue, Kennan was in a certain sense possessed by an ideal not his own, the historic stoic ideal of, in one word, constancy. Constancy, I argue, helps account for the apparent vacillations in his strategic thought, the curious admixture in his prose of appeals to "simplicity" and appeals to "complexity," and the vexed place of pathos. At the core of the stoic ideal is the notion of the complexity of simplicity. Constancy represents the emotive dimension of that notion. I want to argue that constancy is at the core of Kennan's containment, and that Kennan imagined America, in its ideal posture, metaphorically as a stoic state. Stoicism, broadly conceived, comprised the worldview of containment. Thus, in response to the question, How is it that a flawed "containment" still had such tremendous influence? I would add an answer as yet unaccounted for: stoicism as a worldview. Because worldviews are language views, they have rhetorical power, as they offer an aspirational horizon and a common, historic, and relatively consistent means of emplacement in the world.
Stoicism as Worldview
Historically speaking, my turn to stoicism is in no way a leap, despite the fact that students and scholars of Kennan have neglected this aspect of his approach to the Cold War. As Richard Tuck has argued, neostoicism of the seventeenth century, a new philosophy of the state, had a profound influence on the development of political realism, as much if not more so than Machiavelli. A century later, at the time of the founding of the United States, stoicism enjoyed tremendous cultural capital as both an ethical and a political concept. It was, along with civic republicanism, part of a culture-wide neoclassical preoccupation, and it is, in the end, impossible to disentangle it fully from other classical concepts and concerns in the early American republic. Nevertheless, the distinct influence of stoicism can be seen in George Washington's "Farewell Address" (composed, over the course of a number of years, in consultation with James Madison and Alexander Hamilton), where the importance of a self-care based on a disinterested appraisal of "interest," according to the "natural course of things," is explicitly set against the confusions, complications, and passions of the world of appearances at large (as distinct from, although not at all opposed to, civic republican emphases on the importance of virtue, the public good, public participation, and the corruptive influences of luxury and sloth). "Excessive partiality," Washington warned of international relations, "for one foreign nation and excessive dislike of another, cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other." Here and elsewhere, as I will discuss, neostoicism entailed a political philosophy, indeed a political ethic, that urged rational self-care and outward action limited to, as Washington wrote, "interests" and "the natural course of things" within a world of real or potential upheaval, suffering, fanaticism, and general irrationality. A similar ethic would find new life in the Cold War, as American infantrymen, generals, pilots, scientists, workers, politicians, and citizens were summoned to a singular national character type, one that looked coolly upon the crises of the world, rationally calculated effective responses according to the logic of necessity, and acted accordingly. In sum, in turning to stoicism I am turning not merely to an ancient ethical ideal, but to a profound influence upon both European and American modern cultures.
Moreover, features of Kennan's language so often highlighted by historians and critics—language like firmness, manliness, strength, and objectivity—represent an ethical vocabulary whose history is impossible to tell without some reference to stoicism. To read Kennan at any point in his career is to be confronted with recurring commonplaces that are part of the ethic of stoicism: the need for a sober outlook on world affairs; the imperative of a long-term perspective on history; the problems of America's "legalism" and "moralism"; the trouble with public opinion, popular leadership, and mass media; the importance of a "balance of powers" in the world; a concern with the "mind-set" of other peoples and nations; and, above all, the primacy of America taking care of itself and living rationally within given limits. As these ideas were woven into Kennan's discourse, containment was more than merely a principle of counterforce vis-à-vis the Soviets. It was a way of seeing and being in the world, and thus came with normative as well as strictly instrumental imperatives. It entailed, as the conclusion to X insisted, Americans "pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear." Or, as LT stated, "Finally, we must have [the] courage and self-confidence to cling to our own methods and conceptions of human society." To be sure, containment had military and other traditional strategic components, but it was something more than this. It was, at a minimum, very much like the sort of "grand strategy" that Kennedy describes, bringing together "all of the elements ... for the preservation and enhancement of the nation's long-term ... best interests."
Indeed, early in 1949 the Commission on the Organization of the Executive Branch of Government, known as the Hoover Commission after its chair, former president Herbert Hoover, submitted its findings to Congress, arguing that Truman's Policy Planning Staff, of which Kennan was director, needed to turn from day-to-day operational concerns to long-range planning. As Wilson D. Miscamble shows, Kennan embraced the recommendations—turning to issues of European integration, Britain's future, and the long-range issues of nuclear weapons—even as he would become frustrated with their implementation. Thus, in the winter of 1949 he developed further a distinction he had made in "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" between "the momentary whims of democratic opinion" and "intelligent long-range policies," arguing that the nation should move beyond a focus on the means-ends "objectives" of foreign policy toward a "guiding element." "It lies really," he argued in a public lecture at Dartmouth College, faintly echoing Washington, "in our concept of ourselves in relation to our world environment. It lies in the way we picture to ourselves our own personality as a nation, and the nature of the world around us, and our function as a member of the international community. It lies, if you will, in the way we cast ourselves, as one of the actors, in the drama of world history." Thus "containment" was forwarded as a kind of ethical script for America, embedded in a worldview. Indeed, he went on at Dartmouth to urge that his conclusions about state of world affairs entailed certain duties for America.
Above all, they obligate us to greater modesty and greater humility in our estimate of ourselves. They obligate to fight over-confidence like the plague. They obligate us to watch out for comfortable and grand catchwords like "world leadership" and "selling democracy" and "raising living standards everywhere." They obligate us not to let the term "world peace" become an abstract thing, but rather to insist upon looking at it in the context of political realities. And finally, they obligate us to bear in mind that foreign policy is not a glamorous form of escape from the unpleasantness of domestic problems, but that foreign policy begins at home. It begins with keeping the top-soil from sliding off these hills outside of Hanover here; it begins with clearing out the blight that is fastening on the big cities; it begins with finding democratic ways in which to channel the new leisure and the cash surpluses which are finding their way into the hands of people in this country into something more satisfying and more constructive than slot machines and the television sets.
"We have got to save ourselves first," Kennan concluded, echoing the stoic "care of the self."
Almost forty years later, Kennan argued publicly again, this time in the pages of Foreign Affairs, that the spirit of his "containment" was much broader than a narrow strategy of resisting Soviet expansion. The language he used to describe this broader notion of containment strongly echoed that which he had used at Dartmouth.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from SPIRITS OF THE COLD WAR by Ned O'Gorman Copyright © 2012 by Ned O'Gorman. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Care of the Self: Kennan, Containment, and Stoicism
2. Protest and Power: Dulles, Massive Retaliation, and Evangelicalism
3. Deeds Undone: C. D. Jackson, Liberation, and Adventurism
4. The American Sublime: Eisenhower, Deterrence, and Romanticism
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index