Since first speaking to EuroMaidan protesters on Kyiv’s Independence Square in December, McCain has tirelessly beaten the Cold War drum, rallying Senate Republicans to support increasingly harsh sanctions on Russian officials and corporations.
McCain and other foreign policy hawks have settled on a 21st century iteration of George Kennan’s post-World War II policy of containment. To them, and to most hawkish pundits rehashing the virtues of Kennan’s policy, containment was a policy of confronting “Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the Western world” with the “adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and maneuvers of Soviet policy,” as Kennan argued in his historic 1947 “X-Article” in Foreign Affairs.
But Kennan knew that preserving the free institutions of the Western world couldn’t be accomplished simply by fighting proxy wars or subverting borderlands. To Kennan, containment was both a domestic and a foreign policy. The U.S. had to build democracy and freedom at home to defeat communism abroad. In the penultimate paragraph of the “X-Article,” Kennan concluded that “The issue of Soviet-American relations is in essence a test of the overall worth of the United States as a nation among nations. To avoid destruction the United States need only measure up to its own best traditions and prove itself worthy of preservation as a great nation.”
Even though isolating the Soviet Union politically and economically was one of the fundamental aspects of American foreign policy during the Cold War, Kennan thought the Cold War might be won or lost at home. That meant expanding democracy, not just hunting down alleged communist spies. Unfortunately, whether or not the U.S. was measuring up to “its own best traditions” soon became judged by Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Although African Americans were largely left out of these “best traditions” in the post-war era, as Mary Dudziak writes in Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy, as the U.S. tried to “reshape the postwar world in its own image, the international attention given to racial segregation was troublesome and embarrassing. …The need to address international criticism gave the federal government an incentive to promote social change at home.”
Measuring up to our best traditions is an ongoing pursuit, and perhaps McCain’s drive to re-implement containment can reenergize our modern struggle. I have criticized contemporary American foreign policy-makers’ devolution into 1950s-style rhetoric before, and I hope this essay doesn’t read like an endorsement. But if McCain and other interventionists want to implement a policy of containment, it is important to remember that Kennan’s policy had two parts.
If we are going to arm Ukraine, we should also rearm our democracy to remind Ukraine and other parts of the world that the U.S. is a beacon of freedom, that when Obama says that “we believe in democracy, with elections that are free and fair, and independent judiciaries and opposition parties, civil society and uncensored information so that individuals can make their own choices,” he actually means it.
That the U.S. remains a democracy is subject to debate. A study published recently by Princeton University finds that the U.S. is more oligarchical than democratic. According to one of the study’s authors, Princeton’s Martin Gilens “contrary to what decades of political science research might lead you to believe, ordinary citizens have virtually no influence over what their government does in the United States. And economic elites and interest groups, especially those representing business, have a substantial degree of influence. Government policy-making over the last few decades reflects the preferences of those groups — of economic elites and of organized interests.”
As a resident of Kyiv, where the two front-runners in the May 25 presidential election are political veterans and corrupt oligarchs, that’s how I’d describe Ukraine.
If the U.S. government is trying to convince Ukrainians that closer association with Russia means the suppression of fundamental rights, it should reconsider prosecuting Julian Assange and Wikileaks, and should stop spying on its citizens. This is not to say that the U.S. is somehow less democratic or free than Russia. However, wouldn’t it be nice if Ed Snowden were wrong in saying that the U.S. government watches its own people “more closely than anyone else in the world”?
Buried deep in the Russian Aggression Prevention Act is Section 308, which outlines ways for the U.S. to provide “Support for democracy and civil society organizations in countries of the former Soviet Union.” Promoting democracy and civil society was an important aspect of American foreign policy during the Cold War, and it remains so today.
But as Ukraine and other former Soviet states consider a future aligned with Russia or with the West, we should give show them democracies and civil societies on which to model their own. Somehow, American foreign policy in the new Cold War seems to have little to do with America.
Kennan, prophetically, concluded the “X-Article”:
“…the thoughtful observer of Russian-American relations will find no cause for complaint in the Kremlin’s challenge to American society. He will rather experience a certain gratitude to a Providence which, by providing the American people with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent on their pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear.”
Kyiv Post staff writer Isaac Webb can be reached at [email protected] and on Twitter at @IsaacDWebb.
