Rise of the Rest

Pankaj Mishra

The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria
Allen Lane, 292 pp, £20.00, July 2008, ISBN 978 1 84614 153 9
The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order by Parag Khanna
Allen Lane, 466 pp, £25.00, April 2008, ISBN 978 0 7139 9937 2

In 1946, George Kennan, then the deputy head of the US mission in Moscow, sent a 5300-word telegram to Washington, hoping to alert his superiors to the threat of Soviet expansionism. Kennan had complained repeatedly and fruitlessly about what he saw as America’s indulgent attitude towards the Soviet Union, but for a crucial moment in 1946 his idea that the US should strike an alliance with Western Europe in order to contain Soviet Communism found listeners in Washington. The so-called Long Telegram, subsequently turned into an article in Foreign Affairs, became the basis of the Truman Doctrine, which proclaimed America’s willingness to fight the spread of Communism, militarily as well as economically.

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[*] Atlantic, 160 pp., £12.99, May, 978 1 84354 811 9.

Vol. 30 No. 21 · 6 November 2008 » Pankaj Mishra » Rise of the Rest (print version)
Pages 13-15 | 4163 words

Letters

From Anders Stephanson

Pankaj Mishra’s interesting review of Fareed Zakaria’s Post-American World and Parag Khanna’s Second World (LRB, 6 November) was not in every respect accurate. George Kennan’s Long Telegram of Feb-ruary 1946 was not the basis for the famous ‘X Article’ in Foreign Affairs, which was actually a truncated and inferior version of a talk he gave in early 1947. The Truman Doctrine of March 1947 was announced a few months before the X Article and was thus not based on it (there is a very indirect connection to the Long Telegram). Kennan was not alienated by ‘the mid-1950s’ but already in late 1948 and certainly when, a year later, he was kicked sideways and upstairs, having voiced most inconvenient opposition in the State Department to the emerging Nato. More vital perhaps, his differences with the Truman Doctrine are not chiefly about force and military containment but about universalism and binary politics: Kennan adamantly opposed the simple division of the world that underpinned the Truman Doctrine: totalitarianism, on the one hand, and freedom, on the other. He remained, after all, a firm supporter of Salazar’s reactionary dictatorship in Portugal and always rejected the idea that democracy is somehow identical with ‘the West’, not to mention the attached notion of the United States as the messianic guardian of ‘the Free World’. The Soviet threat (as he grasped it) was particular and to be dealt with in particular ways. What the administration took from the Long Telegram, however, was the notion of a completely unresponsive and fanatical opponent with whom no real diplomacy and agreement were possible. This became the negative axiom of the US project we now know as ‘the cold war’.

Anders Stephanson
Columbia University