1.  Kennan argued in PPS/23 (February 1948) that the US did not have
    solutions to the problems faced by the Asian countries -- in
    particular, the problem of balancing population growth and food
    supply in China and India -- and that because of its great wealth,
    the US would be envied and resented.  He predicted that the Asian
    mainland would fall under Soviet influence, regardless of what the
    US did; he recommended that rather than trying to prevent this,
    the US ought to focus on keeping Japan and the Philippines out of
    the Soviet sphere of influence, and leave the rest of Asia alone.
    [http://www.geocities.com/rwvong/future/kennan/pps23.html]

2.  Chomsky's quote makes it appear that

    (a) Kennan was saying that the US ought to hold people down, when
        in fact he was saying that the US ought to leave them alone;

    (b) the real goal of US foreign policy was to "maintain the
        disparity" in wealth between the US and the rest of the world,
        when in fact Kennan was arguing that the US *could not* reduce
        the disparity in wealth between the US and Asia.  The goal
        of US foreign policy immediately after World War II was to
        contain the Soviet Union, by restoring the balance of power in
        Europe and Asia.
        [http://www.geocities.com/rwvong/future/kennan/pps13.html]

    In my view, this illustrates Orwell's comment about propagandists
    suppressing material facts and removing quotes from their context.

    Chomsky's response:

        On (1), Kennan is lucid and completely unambiguous. He begins
        with a fact: we have 6% of the world's population, and 50% of
        its wealth. We then have an explicit goal: we must "maintain
        this position of disparity". There is no ambiguity at all
        about what disparity he is talking about: it is our
        overwhelming wealth as compared to others. He then he adds a
        further consideration: we must maintain the huge disparity of
        wealth between us and others "without detriment to our
        national security" in the face of certain "envy and
        resentment." That may require varied tactical decisions. But
        in pursuing them, we must keep to the primary goal....

    Chomsky is taking a single sentence from the middle of a 21-page
    document and arguing that this represents the primary goal of US
    foreign policy, ignoring the rest of the document and numerous
    other documents in which it's clear that the primary goal of US
    policymakers was containment of the Soviet Union.  In their view,
    the Soviet Union was a threat not because it stood outside the
    capitalist economic system, but because of its military power, its
    hostility towards the capitalist countries, and its willingness to
    use violence (primarily violence by Soviet-controlled Communist
    parties rather than outright invasion, in Kennan's view).  (Note
    that in 1948, the US had 10 divisions; the Soviet Union had 25
    divisions in East Germany and Poland, and 40 divisions in the
    Western zones of the Soviet Union.  Of course, the US had a
    monopoly on the atomic bomb until 1949.)

    From Kennan's "Long Telegram", February 1946:

        In summary, we have here a political force committed
        fanatically to the belief that with US there can be no
        permanent *modus vivendi*, that it is desirable and necessary
        that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our
        traditional way of life be destroyed, the international
        authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be
        secure. This political force has complete power of disposition
        over energies of one of world's greatest peoples and resources
        of world's richest national territory, and is borne along by
        deep and powerful currents of Russian nationalism. In
        addition, it has an elaborate and far flung apparatus for
        exertion of its influence in other countries, an apparatus of
        amazing flexibility and versatility, managed by people whose
        experience and skill in underground methods are presumably
        without parallel in history. Finally, it is seemingly
        inaccessible to considerations of reality in its basic
        reactions. For it, the vast fund of objective fact about human
        society is not, as with us, the measure against which outlook
        is constantly being tested and re-formed, but a grab bag from
        which individual items are selected arbitrarily and
        tendenciously to bolster an outlook already preconceived.
        This is admittedly not a pleasant picture. Problem of how to
        cope with this force is undoubtedly greatest task our
        diplomacy has ever faced and probably greatest it will ever
        have to face.
        [http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/coldwar/documents/episode-1/kennan.htm]

    From Kennan's 1952 dispatch on "The Soviet Union and the Atlantic
    Pact":

        ... the conditions that existed as World War II came to an end
        seemed to offer high promise for the success of such
        tactics. The effects of Nazi rule on the social fabric of the
        occupied countries, as well as of Germany herself, had
        weakened the traditional institutions of those countries, and
        had in fact performed a good deal of the work which the
        Communists would in any case have wished to carry out in order
        to soften these countries up for seizure of power by Communist
        minorities. The postwar exhaustion and bewilderment of peoples
        everywhere heightened vulnerability to Communist pressures and
        deceits. The positions gained in Eastern Europe by the advance
        of the Red Army in the final phases of the war, plus the
        Soviet right, on the basis of Yalta and Potsdam, to a
        prominent voice in the determination of the future of Germany,
        protected by the veto power in the Council of Foreign
        Ministers, made it seem to Moscow implausible that vigor and
        hope and economic strength could ever be returned to the
        Western European area otherwise than on Moscow's terms; and
        these terms, in the Kremlin's mind, would be built around a
        set of conditions in which the triumph of Soviet-controlled
        forces would be assured. In France and Italy, furthermore, the
        Communists had succeeded in exploiting both the resistance to
        the Germans and ultimately the liberation from them, for
        purposes of infiltration into every possible point of
        political, military and economic control, and had thereby
        reached positions of influence from which it seemed most
        unlikely that they could be dislodged without chaos and civil
        war. In these circumstances the Kremlin had good reason to
        hope that a relatively brief period--let us say three to five
        years--would see Communist power, or at least Communist
        domination, extended to the Western European area in general,
        even in the absence of any further military effort by the
        Soviet Union. By virtue of such a development, as Moscow saw
        it, the preponderance of military-industrial strength in the
        world would be assembled under Soviet control. England would
        represent at best an isolated industrial slum, extensively
        dependent on the Communist-controlled Continent across the
        channel. Taken together with the possibilities for Communist
        success in China, where the immediately desired phase of
        "expelling the imperialists" seemed to he progressing almost
        unbelievably well with no effort at all on Moscow's part, all
        this meant that prospects were not bad for the rapid advance
        of the Kremlin to a dominant and almost unchallengeable
        position in world affairs. Thus the lack of desire or
        expectancy for a new major foreign war did not mean that
        Moscow had no hope for the expansion of Bolshevik power in the
        postwar period.
        [http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB14/doc1.htm]

3.  A further comment:

    (c) Chomsky says that Kennan represents the "extreme dovish" end of
        the spectrum.  In fact, Kennan's view was (and is) that US
        foreign policy should be based on enlightened self-interest, not
        democracy and human rights (except by example).  It should be
        clear from PPS/23 that Kennan was arguing *against* people who
        believed that US foreign policy should be based on democracy,
        human rights, and world benevolence, such as Henry Wallace,
        former Vice-President and Secretary of Commerce and
        presidential candidate in 1948.  And, of course, there *was*
        an attempt at "altruism and world-benefaction", Truman's
        "Point Four" program.
        [http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/andrewss.htm]

4.  I am *not* arguing that US foreign policy is virtuous and
    benevolent, or that Kennan himself has never made any
    recommendations which cannot be criticized on moral grounds.  In
    the same document, PPS/23, Kennan recommends that the US encourage
    the Western European countries to retain, develop, and exploit
    their African colonies, as a source of food and raw materials,
    with no mention of the interests of the Africans themselves.
    (This recommendation was studied for a year and a half before
    being dropped for practical reasons; see Anders Stephanson,
    "Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy.")  Here, Chomsky definitely
    has a point.  He's also right to criticize US foreign policy in
    Latin America (although according to Wilson Miscamble's "George
    F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 1947-1950",
    Kennan had no influence on US policy in Latin America).
    [http://groups.google.com/groups?
           selm=afe9ed76.0202131956.3fb1b0d0%40posting.google.com]

    The US has done plenty of immoral things.  But *it shouldn't be
    necessary to make stuff up*, and I think Chomsky's quote of
    PPS/23 is so misleading that it falls into this category.

Why spend time arguing about this?  I think it's important to pay
attention to US foreign policy, and to criticize it -- particularly
considering the current policy of the Bush Administration -- but
*first you need an accurate picture of the facts*.  And I think
Chomsky gives a very misleading picture.  I have a particular interest
in the PPS/23 quote because I've read quite a bit of Kennan's
writings, and it seems to be worth responding to because it gets
posted a lot.  (Since May, it's been posted to 31 different
newsgroups, ranging from alt.music.pink-floyd to
soc.culture.scottish.)

I've tried to put together a brief introduction to international
politics for people who want to learn more, as an
alt.politics.international FAQ:
[http://www.geocities.com/rwvong/future/apifaq.html]

I've also put together a Global Issues FAQ:
[http://www.geocities.com/rwvong/future/globalfaq.html]

Links to Kennan's writings:
[http://www.geocities.com/rwvong/future/kennan.html]

Russil Wvong
Vancouver, Canada
www.geocities.com/rwvong