Washington DC, USA. 12
October. US strategist George F. Kennan,
a hero of mine, once said, “The best an American can look forward to is
the lonely pleasure of one who stands at long last on a chilly and inhospitable
mountaintop where few have been before, where few can follow and where few will
consent to believe he has been”. This is an election
town at an election moment. For a
foreigner it is a fascinating and frankly uplifting experience to see American democracy
in action. Still, having watched last
week’s presidential debate between Obama and Romney from ‘over there’ and last
night’s vice-presidential debate between Joe Biden and Paul Ryan from ‘over here’
I am struck by how poorly all the candidates really understand the fundamental principles
of American foreign policy that Kennan helped establish.
My reason for being
here in DC is to attend a high-level round-table on current and emerging
threats and adversaries. Whoever takes
the White House next month will face a world that is both complex and
potentially dangerous, although not yet a world that is committed to a road to
war and disaster. Watching the debate
here I am struck by the same doubt as one finds in Europe, albeit with an
American accent. The economy is struggling; few of America’s recent foreign
ventures can be called a success. Like
Europe, I see too many power Americans lying to themselves and to their people
about the challenges that lay ahead.
In 1946 Kennan wrote a
telegram from Moscow that at a stroke re-connected American leadership with
strategic reality. Kennan (with the help
of Winston Churchill) ended Washington’s delusion that Stalin’s Soviet Union could
ever be a partner in the post-World War Two world that Franklin Delano
Roosevelt had envisioned prior to his 1945 death. The Soviets were rapacious occupiers who for
many central and eastern Europeans simply replaced one dictatorship with
another.
Today there is no
Soviet Union but nor are China, Russia or Iran ever going to be strategic partners
given their governments and systems of government. China is locked in an internal power struggle
within the Communist Party and between the Party and the People’s Liberation Army
that has led it into conflict with ALL of its major Asian neighbours. Moscow is run by a paranoid, illiberal,
nationalist elite that still has ambitions to re-establish its hawkish sphere
of influence in Europe and beyond should the West continue to falter. The Arab Spring (or whatever one might call
it) may lead to some flawed Muslim Brotherhood-type democracy (one man, one
vote once?) but it is clear that Al Qaeda sees it as much as an opportunity for
a future caliphate. And then there is
Afghanistan; America will need to be there in strength way beyond 2014 and
completely renovate its strategy therein if a future president is to ever
declare success, and pay the price in lives and geld that will demand.
The thing about Kennan
was not that he espoused an overly hostile anti-Soviet policy. He did not.
Rather, he helped lead led the way to the creation of an American statecraft which
not represented a profound break from the American isolationism of its peacetime
past. By so doing America established a strategic
concept and culture for American leadership that in time won the Cold War. America led not only because it could, but
because it had to.
Coming to Washington as
I have over many years I have watched the hollowing out of American leadership. Sometimes it has been masked by American bombast;
sometimes by moments of excessive modesty (yes it does happen). It has happened because American leaders have
abandoned the principles of American leadership and the deep belief in the values
and indeed the interests’ American success and world peace is built on.
International ‘relations’
are called as such because they are indeed just like relationships. It is not just
about treaties, meetings and diplomats.
It is about power and the instinctive understanding of friend and foe
alike of both one’s ability to realise one’s interests and whether one really
believes one can. My own country,
Britain, is declining fast not because Britain is no longer capable of
greatness, it is. It is declining
because the elite have lied so long to themselves and the British people that
they no longer know what to believe in.
The point about America
is that after a bruising decade it must now decide whether to be lonely and
lead or popular and decline. I suspect there
is not much ground between the two or that Americans have long to decide.
This election may well
be the moment the long and painful decline from the America’s lonely mountain-top
really begins.
America needs a Kennan
moment.
Julian Lindley-French
