For most of his life – he was born in Wisconsin in 1904 and died in 2005 – Kennan viewed himself as a loser, an exile of a now-vanished world of reason, the ambassador of an “old regime” that nobody remembers.
1946 was the year in which George Kennan wrote his consequential Long Telegram that in many ways defined America’s Cold War strategy. It was also the year in which the German jurist and grand strategist Carl Schmitt, confronted with Hitler’s defeat and forced to defend himself before a denazification tribunal, drafted an essay which argued that victors write history but only losers can make sense of it. He dedicated it to Alexis de Tocqueville, whom he characterised as a paradigmatic loser. Schmitt writes of the 19th-century French aristocrat and diplomat: “Every sort of defeat was crystallised in his person, and not just accidentally but as a kind of existential destiny. As an aristocrat, he lost out in the revolution… As a liberal, he anticipated the revolution of 1848 and its divergence from liberalism, and he was cut to the core by the onset of terror he knew it would bring. As a Frenchman, he belonged to a nation that was defeated after twenty years of coalition warfare… As a European, he was again in the role of the defeated since he foresaw the development of two new powers, America, and Russia… that would push Europe to the margins. Finally, as a Christian… he was overwhelmed by the scientific agnosticism of his era.”
Although landing on the winning sides of both the Second World War and the Cold War, Kennan paradoxically fits Schmitt’s notion of an insightful loser. Kennan spent most of his life fighting not his enemies but his admirers, arguing that his master concept of “containment” was gravely misunderstood by Western policy makers. He contributed to the West’s victory over communism but was personally pessimistic (and often morally appalled) by American democracy and consumerist society. What others celebrated as triumph he interpreted as defeat. In the 1990s, when the American foreign policy establishment consensually advocated the expansion of Nato as the consolidation of the West’s victory in the Cold War, he called the decision to expand the alliance “a fateful error” in a piece in the New York Times.
He lamented that in pressing for “Nato’s borders [to] smack up to those of Russia we are making the greatest mistake of the entire post-Cold War era”.