Cold War, Containment, and Grand Strategy
An Interview with John Lewis Gaddis, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Historian
Yale Journal of International Affairs: Professor Gaddis, you are well-known for both your work on the Cold War and the policy of containment. Did containment help the United States win the Cold War?
Gaddis: I think containment helped all of us win the Cold War, not just the U.S.; it was a very positive development for everyone that the Cold War stayed cold and did not get hot. It seems to me that the policy of containment, the way George Kennan outlined it, offered a third way between appeasement and fighting a third World War. It really was the critical idea that kept that disaster from happening. Obviously, there were a lot of other people besides Kennan involved in making containment work. But the “Big Idea” was his, and was absolutely critical.
YJIA: How effective is containment as a method to contain today’s state actors such as Iran and North Korea, and non-state actors such as al Qaeda?
Gaddis: We have to judge each of these situations on their own merits. Kennan was very careful to say that containment would never have worked against Nazi Germany, because Hitler had a timeline for aggression and believed that only he could carry that out. So I think it’s good to keep that caution in mind whenever anyone is talking about containment, whether that is in reference to Iran, North Korea, or non-state actors. Things to consider are, what are their interests? Are they out to commit suicide? In which case containment is not going to have much effect on them. Do they want to remain a state and a regional power? If so, containment might work. I think the Iranians fall into that second category, but no one knows for sure. And the last thing I would do would be to venture any predictions about the North Korea regime. Or about non-state actors because containment presumed the existence of a state in the first place. When you move beyond that, you’re really playing a different ballgame.
YJIA: Some of your work in the past has focused on the impact of specific individuals. Historically, how important has individual personality been in shaping relations between states? Can you give examples of individuals who were “the right person at the right time?”
Gaddis: Sure. Julius Caesar was in the right place at the right time most of the time, until he wound up on the floor of the Roman Senate in 44 BC. History is full of great characters that had decisive impacts; it would have been very different without them. There are moments, though, in which the system is sufficiently locked in that no great leader is going to alter the course of events. But in crisis situations, where the old order is breaking down and some kind of new order is arising, then specific individuals really can have a huge impact. It took the breakdown of the old regime in France, and then of the French Revolution, to pave the way for Napoleon. The same would be true of Lenin, for Mao, and for that matter for Lincoln. So I do see a relationship between crisis and leadership.
YJIA: You were recently awarded the Pulitzer Prize for your biography of George Kennan, known as the architect of containment. What is it that made Kennan’s work, particularly his “Long Telegram,” so interesting to IR scholars and practitioners?
Gaddis: This goes back to the “third way” between appeasement and fighting a third world war. I was surprised to find that Kennan was more influenced by literature than by theories of international relations, especially the literature of pre-revolutionary Russia. He lectured at Yale in 1946, soon after sending the Long Telegram, and he spent most of his time talking about a Chekhov short story.
In it, a mistress who owns an estate is trying without much success to get a school built, and the blacksmith is telling her, “Don’t issue orders, just wait until the villagers themselves have decided it is a good idea, at which point they will cooperate.” And Kennan said that should be our model for dealing with the Soviet Union. We couldn’t order it to get out of Eastern Europe, or insist that it drop communism, but there could well come a point at which the Russian people themselves, possibly even the Soviet leadership, might come to see that they were gaining nothing from dominating Eastern Europe, or from an arms race, or from preserving a domestic system that was not working. That was an uncanny anticipation of Gorbachev four decades later. It came out of the study of literature, which reinforces my belief that there really is a link between that subject and grand strategy.
YJIA: Let’s talk about grand strategy for a moment. Along with people like Paul Kennedy and Charles Hill, you began a Grand Strategy (GS) program here at Yale. This intensive, two-semester course has turned into one of the most popular programs at Yale, and is being duplicated at other institutions such as Dartmouth, Duke, and the United States Military Academy at West Point. What is the value of a Grand Strategy program, and why do think it is being emulated at other colleges and universities?
Gaddis: I think it provides a kind of ballast, or gravitas. If you had to go forward in the world as a young person with increasing levels of responsibility but had to find your own way, like monkeys typing on a keyboard, it would be a hugely inefficient process. We often take for granted the value of having parents, the value of having mentors, the value of having superior officers in the military, coaches in an athletic setting . . . they save us time, they give us training. And the concept of GS is just an extension of that idea. There’s a reason people keep coming back to the classic texts we teach, some as old as 2,500 years. They aren’t going to tell you what to do in some specific crisis, but they can give you the self-assurance that comes from a sense of how people have managed—or mismanaged—similar problems in the past. That’s better than having no sense of the past at all, of just flying blind.
YJIA: Yale, like many of the Ivies, has recently seen a return of its Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program to campus after a long absence. There has also been an increase in veterans enrolling as students and military fellows. In terms of international relations study and practice, do you see any benefits or potential pitfalls in this increase of academic/military relationship either here at Yale or in other institutions of higher learning?
Gaddis: I see huge benefit, and I think it was a scandal that for so many decades the connection between Yale and the military was broken. This is, after all, supposed to be a “full service” institution, meaning that it should train its graduates for all kinds of fields. It does it for law, for medicine, and for business, so the idea that it should have nothing to do with the military was, I think, wrong from the outset. The military today is a totally different institution from what it was when it was kicked off campus during the Vietnam War. It’s done its part in rethink- ing its mission, and it was high time that Yale did the same. So I’m very pleased that this is happening.
Not all of our students, obviously, will go into the military. But they need to share classroom experiences with people who will—that’s good for the military folks also. Part of our thinking in setting up the Grand Strategy program was that Yale had some responsibility to think about national security, so having the military back on campus strongly reinforces that connection.
YJIA: Vladimir Putin just enacted legislation that widened the definition of “treason” inside Russia. Some pundits are marking this as an effort to stifle free speech, and are wondering if we are about to enter another Cold War. Do you think another Cold War is possible between the United States and another country, like Russia?
Gaddis: Cold wars have happened throughout history—they just haven’t been called cold wars. They have been called “international rivalries” or “difficult relationships” or what have you. But if you think about it, the frequency of these is much greater than those that have led to all-out hot wars. So to say that Russian-American relations are not always harmonious is not to say anything significant, because that’s what I’d expect. Putin’s authoritarianism doesn’t surprise me either: that’s traditional in Russia. I see no evidence that Putin is on the way to becoming a communist. He’s going in another direction, which may be oligarchy but is much more consistent with capitalism than with Marxism/Leninism. As far as the treason thing is concerned, the climate goes back and forth on this in Russia. There are periods of accessibility and there are periods of closing down. These are just the shifts in the climate that you’d find in you dealing with any authoritarian country. I don’t think it’s a return to the Cold War.
YJIA: What kinds of international relations policy advice might you offer to the Obama administration as it enters a second term?
Gaddis: It would be to think about the international system as a whole. These days it’s multipolar, with several great powers. None are likely to go to war with any of the others anytime soon. Rivalries will exist, but so too will internal contradictions. So far from this being a “balance of power” system, in the sense that you’re trying to maintain some kind of military equilibrium, I think what you’re seeing now is a “balance of contradictions” system.
Every one of these countries is afflicted with serious internal problems. China is, Russia is, and certainly the European Union is. We are too, but would we want to trade places with any of them? I think, on the whole, that we’re better equipped to deal with the conflicts in our own society than they are.
So we ought not to hyperventilate over peripheral events in the world. We need to re-think where our vital interests really lie. We need to let the natural balance that exists between the great powers manifest itself, and then we need to place ourselves in the “Kissingerian” position of being able to tilt slightly towards one or another so that we remain closer to them all than they do to one other. Meanwhile, we need to concentrate more carefully on resolving our own internal contradiction. because they do have external consequences.
YJIA: Many of our readers either are, or aspire to be, inter- national relations scholars or practitioners. From your experience in researching so many different IR topics, and the people involved in them, what do you feel are some common traits you might find in successful IR scholars or practitioners?
Gaddis: The ability to be a generalist is probably the most important. International relations encompasses just about everything you can think of, so to approach it from only an economic angle, or a historical one, or a military one, is too narrow. There is way too much specialization. The people who’ll be successful in the IR field will be those who can keep an eye on a lot of balls at the same time, and understand their interconnections. That requires an ecological view of international relations, and that’s what we’re trying to encourage in the Grand Strategy program.
YJIA: Do you have any upcoming projects that you’d like to share with us?
Gaddis: I’m tempted to stop with the Kennan book. It was a lot of work, but I guess it came out okay, so why not quit while I’m ahead? It upsets people when you say that, though, so the cover story is that I’ll write something on grand strategy, focusing on the tension between the generalist, who knows many things, and the specialist, who knows how to do one big thing well—on foxes and hedgehogs, if you will. My argument will be that you need to be both, but at different points in your career. So how do you know when to be which? But that’s just an idea. There’s no deadline for this project, so at the moment with the Kennan book done I’m just relaxing, enjoying teaching and being able to read things for fun. Whether any of this amounts to anything is not a big concern of mine right now.