George F Kennan's Long Telegram, The Elites, And Ukraine

I've kept ruminating on the quote from C Wright Mills that appeared in the Washington Post piece I linked in yesterday's post:

“[The power elite] are in command of the major hierarchies and organizations of modern society. They rule the big corporations. They run the machinery of the state and claim its prerogatives. They direct the military establishment. They occupy the strategic command posts of the social structure, in which are now centered the effective means of the power and the wealth and the celebrity which they enjoy.”

But to that I added another, from Mills's The Power Elite:

[T]he focus of elite attention has been shifted from domestic problems, centered in the ‘thirties around slump, to international problems, centered in the ‘forties and ‘fifties around war. Since the governing apparatus of the United States has by long historic usage been adapted to and shaped by domestic clash and balance, it has not, from any angle, had suitable agencies and traditions for the handling of international problems. Such formal democratic mechanics as had arisen in the century and a half of national development prior to 1941, had not been extended to the American handling of international affairs. It is, in considerable part, in this vacuum that the power elite has grown.

A key document in this period was George F Kennan's Long Telegram of February 22, 1946, which is viewed as forming the basis for US Soviet policy in what would become the Cold War. Kennan is an intriguing figure. Not often noted is that a great uncle, also named George Frost Kennan (1845-1924), was an adviser to the railroad baron Edward H Harriman on, of all things, Russian policy. According to Wikipedia, the younger Kennan (1904-2005), following the early death of his mother,

At the age of eight, he went to Germany to stay with his stepmother in order to learn German. He attended St. John's Military Academy in Delafield, Wisconsin, and arrived at Princeton University in the second half of 1921. Unaccustomed to the elite atmosphere of the Ivy League, the shy and introverted Kennan found his undergraduate years difficult and lonely.

After receiving his bachelor's degree in History in 1925, Kennan considered applying to law school, but decided it was too expensive and instead opted to apply to the newly-formed United States Foreign Service. He passed the qualifying examination and after seven months of study at the Foreign Service School in Washington, he gained his first job as a vice consul in Geneva, Switzerland. Within a year he was transferred to a post in Hamburg, Germany. During 1928, Kennan considered quitting the Foreign Service to return to a university for graduate studies. Instead, he was selected for a linguist training program that would give him three years of graduate-level study without having to quit the service.

. . . In 1929 Kennan began his program on history, politics, culture, and the Russian language at the University of Berlin's Oriental Institute. In doing so, he would follow in the footsteps of his grandfather's younger cousin, George Kennan (1845–1924), a major 19th century expert on Imperial Russia and author of Siberia and the Exile System, a well-received 1891 account of the Czarist prison system.

Although the younger Kennan remained with the State Department, he became steadily more unhappy there and was especially disturbed by what he saw as President Roosevelt's pro-Soviet policies.

In January 1944 he was sent to London, where he served as counselor of the American delegation to the European Advisory Commission, which worked to prepare Allied policy in Europe. There, Kennan became even more disenchanted with the State Department, which he believed was ignoring his qualifications as a trained specialist. However, within months of beginning the job, he was appointed deputy chief of the mission in Moscow upon request of W. Averell Harriman, the ambassador to the USSR.

Averell Harriman was the son of Edward Harriman, and he had become the public face of the Harriman fortune (the Harriman family had left the Republican party after the Theodore Roosevelt justice department sued to break up the Harriman railroad empire; Averell throughout his life was a highly influential Democrat). There can be no question that the younger Kennan had the ear of Averell due to the older Kennan's relationship with his father.

In Moscow, Kennan again felt that his opinions were being ignored by President Truman and policymakers in Washington. Kennan tried repeatedly to persuade policymakers to abandon plans for cooperation with the Soviet government in favor of a sphere of influence policy in Europe to reduce the Soviets' power there. Kennan believed that a federation needed to be established in western Europe to counter Soviet influence in the region and to compete against the Soviet stronghold in eastern Europe.

Kennan via Averell Harriman strongly influenced US Cold War policy, and I find it hard not to conclude that this policy was, first, ultimately successful, and second, in conformance with the wishes of the elites, since Averell Harriman was a centrist figure, and some version of the Cold War containment policy advocated by Kennan was maintained through alternating Republican and Democrat administrations until the Soviet collapse.

This is not to say that the execution of the policy was perfect. The Wikipedia account goes on to stress that Kennan thought the Soviet Union was too weak to risk all-out war, and his recommendations had been misunderstood as pursuing only military containment, which he is quoted as saying, "as much as any other cause, led to [the] 40 years of unnecessary, fearfully expensive and disoriented process of the Cold War".

This is one explanation for the failure, first, of the US intelligence establishment to foresee the Soviet internal collapse, and second, the failure of the US military establishment to foresee the weakness of the Russian army in the Ukraine invasion. I think estimates have been correct that, had Russia even tried to invade Poland instead, the result would have been an immediate rout instead of the months-long stalemate in Ukraine.

This leads me to a puzzle: the US military and State Department, backed by what must surely be the defense elites, has pursued a remarkably successful policy of fighting Russia "to the last Ukrainian" with US and NATO weapons and intelligence but no troops, a strategy which Ukrainian leadership itself has backed. For six months, the White House has effectively kept hands off, and indeed it appears that initial reluctance by the administration to supply first Migs and then long-range artillery to Ukraine has quickly been circumvented behind the scenes.

Nevertheless, we see continued efforts by the US military, presumably encouraged by a different branch of the military elites, to promote something beyond a gender-neutral culture; as of last year, the Pentagon has fully embraced the latest transgender fad:

The Pentagon announced new policies on Wednesday that undo the Trump-era rules that effectively banned transgender people from serving in the military.

The new regulations provide "access to the military in one's self-identified gender provided all appropriate standards are met," the Defense Department said in a statement, and "provide a path for those in service for medical treatment, gender transition, and recognition in one's self-identified gender."

Is this a quid pro quo? Let's recognize that people who undergo surgical gender change become lifelong medical patients, requiring ongoing hormone and other therapies, as well as psychological counseling. The military may feel this is a cost worth paying if the political authorities will give them a free hand in Ukraine and similar conflicts, but I don't think this is any sort of long-term solution. It's an attempt to patch over ever-widening cracks among the elites themselves, and that's the actual state of affairs.