Lessons Not Learned

Abstract

This chapter offers an account of the foreign policy establishment's rejection of almost all of George Kennan's advice from the Vietnam War on and of that rejection's often disastrous results. At the time of Kennan's death, America's foreign policy establishment consisted of two groups: neoconservatives and liberal internationalists (or interventionists). Neoconservatives regularly defend their claim by appealing to democratic peace theory, according to which democracies do not wage war against one another; global democracy would thus presumably result in eternal peace. The world, however, has never been made up exclusively of democracies and attempts to impose democracy on nondemocratic states often, as US history has shown, lead to war. In contrast to neoconservatives, liberal internationalists seek to align America's foreign policy with goals projected by international institutions such as the United Nations. Neither group has learned anything from Kennan. Both wish to harness American power in an effort to remake the world in the image of the United States. Both, that is, possess a crusader mentality. In almost every case, however, the target state has resisted the democratic crusaders; better to be ruled by one's own than by foreigners.