Buchanan, Kennan, and the “Good War”
The following is the first installment in a three-part critical symposium on Patrick Buchanan’s Churchill, Hitler, and the “Unnecessary War.”
It is not surprising that Pat Buchanan’s new book, exploring the collapse of the British Empire and the connection of that disaster to England’s involvement in two world wars, should have received a strong endorsement from George F. Kennan, written (it might be surmised) shortly before this luminary’s death at the age of a hundred and one. Although Kennan praises Pat specifically for taking over and developing his argument that “the British guaranty to Poland [in 1939] was neither necessary nor wise,” there is little in Pat’s work that is not traceable to this once celebrated American exponent of political realism. There are other historians whom Pat cites, such as Giles MacDonogh, Thomas Fleming, John Charmley and my close friend Ralph Raico, all of whom have written critically about Churchill. But his main guide to enlightenment is Kennan. Moreover, the work by this author and onetime American ambassador to Russia that fuels Pat’s “revisionist” arguments, concerning the misuse of British power, the overly close connection between the U.S. and Britain, and the overextension of English participation in continental European conflicts, is Kennan’s American Diplomacy 1900-1950, a work that was first published in 1951.
When I was in college and later graduate school in the 1960s, this book was regularly assigned to undergraduates as an authoritative introduction to America’s role in international affairs in the 20th century. As Lee Congdon will surely explain in his forthcoming monograph, Kennan then enjoyed a certain cachet on the academic left as a critic of Cold War hawks, and he was even allowed to publish in the “anti-anti-Communist” New York Review of Books a tribute to the Prussian aristocracy that had tried to overthrow Hitler in 1944. By the 1980s Kennan had predictably come to rattle the neocons as someone who had never been particularly favorable to Israel and who had even shown the effrontery to warn against weakening the white minority government in South Africa. Despite Kennan’s mostly accidental association with the Left, the neocons, led by the sociologist Paul Hollander, correctly reminded us that Kennan was a reactionary—and certainly no friend of progressive democracy.
I bring this up because Pat’s discovery of Kennan indicates a union that was perhaps inevitable. Once their differences over the Cold War had begun to recede, paleoconservatives were bound to rediscover Kennan as a thinker of choice. How many true conservatives would disagree with these lines from his American Diplomacy?:
Today if one were offered the chance of having back again the Germany of 1913—a Germany run by conservative but relatively moderate people, no Nazis and no Communists, a vigorous Germany, united and unoccupied, full of energy and confidence, able to play a part again in the balancing-off of Russian power in Europe—well, there would be objections to it from many quarters, and it wouldn’t make everyone happy, but in many ways it wouldn’t sound so bad, in comparison with our problems today.
Although Kennan’s wistful observation is essentially sound, one could not imagine a “respectable” publication these days that would allow it to be printed on its pages. (Try for example the raging Teutonophobic Weekly Standard!) In the immaculately antifascist democracy that we bestowed on the Germans in 1947, moreover, anyone expressing Kennan’s views in print could conceivably face criminal prosecution for “rightwing extremist” verbal assaults on the “German liberal democratic order.” Indeed German journalists and scholars have been hounded by the “democratic” German government for saying far less than what Kennan and Buchanan have written.
On the less positive side, I am not particularly impressed by the arguments offered against England’s decision to guarantee the security of Poland. According to this view, stated by Buchanan and at least intimated by Kennan, without the empty British guarantee, which England was in no position to uphold militarily when Nazi Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the war would not have turned out in such a way as to ruin the British as a world power. The Soviets would have had to take the “brunt” of the German attack earlier, since a Soviet-Nazi pact would not likely have come about in 1939, setting up the division of Eastern Europe between two mass-murdering regimes.
But it is hard to see why such an alliance would not have come about, no matter what the British did by guaranteeing Poland’s territorial integrity. It was to the advantage of both the Soviet and German tyrants in 1939 to make a pact for territorial gain. And there is no reason to believe that Hitler would not have moved his armies westward after bringing down Poland, with or without a British guarantee to the then beleaguered Poles. A wealth of evidence, including broad hints in the Hossbach Denkschrift (November 1937), in which Hitler had revealed his plans for territorial acquisition to his generals, indicate that German westward expansion was in the cards even before the Anschluss with Austria in March 1938.
Another detail gets in the way of Buchanan’s imaginative reconsideration of the outbreak of World War Two. Nazi Germany failed over the long term to control European Russia, because it was fighting a two-front war. Buchanan’s wish for a great war, between Russia and Germany that would have spared “tens of millions” in Western Europe, is not based on convincing evidence. The only way Hitler was driven from power was in a two-front war, and tens of millions necessarily died to achieve that end. Although actions might have been taken to end that war sooner, and in a less unconditional and more humane fashion, without conceding Eastern Europe to Stalin, England could not have gotten rid of the Nazi government without taking up arms. Certainly the U.S. could not have afforded that luxury.
I am also not convinced by Buchanan’s suggestion that since Stalin exterminated more people than Hitler that Churchill made the wrong decision, in effect, using Stalin to deal with Hitler. In terms of England’s geopolitical interests, Nazi Germany represented a much greater threat than Soviet Russia, particularly after Hitler had launched Operation Barbarossa. Furthermore, once Hitler had sent armies into Russia, the Soviet Union and England, which had been at war with Germany since September 1939, were on the same side militarily. Pointing this out, however, is not to justify what Churchill later did, in order to remain in good odor with the Soviets or such brutal acts as Operation Keelhaul, in which the British and American governments actively assisted Soviet crimes against refugees who had fled Stalin’s tyranny. Such misdeeds, including the firebombing of defenseless German civilians, were certainly reprehensible but they were not necessitated by the fact that both the British and Soviets had fought Nazi Germany at the same time.
Having noted my areas of disagreement with Buchanan (or Buchanan/Kennan), it also seems necessary to note that generally I agree with almost everything else in this book. Whether the theme is Churchill’s critical role in unleashing the First World War, the disastrous consequences of England’s entry into that struggle (which helped to widen it into a World War), the folly of the Congress of Versailles, or the mistake of the British in exchanging their naval alliance with Japan for one with the U.S. in the 1920s, Buchanan’s book is on the mark. Although not likely to influence our neo-Wilsonian political class, his reassessment should cause some intelligent Americans somewhere to rethink our country’s role in the world. Moreover, unlike his questionable interpretations about the Second World War, his conclusions about World War One are so self-evidently correct that one must wonder why they are not more widely represented. The passages about World War One from Kissinger and other diplomatic historians whom Buchanan cites sound like the most hysterical propaganda manufactured by Wilson’s Department of Information. There is little to no evidence known to me that would justify this one-sided interpretation of Germany’s sole responsibility for the War or the soundness of the Treaty of Versailles. Although Buchanan, for the sake of comprehensiveness, should have gone into the now fashionable theories about exclusive German blame for the War, what Buchanan does present is enough to show us the dubious nature of all such anti-German views about the events of July and August 1914.
Comments
Buchanan’s association with Kennan is very interesting as is the conservative revision of the Cold War and its consequences. In an interview on Antiwar.com radio Charles Goyette asked Buchanan if he might pursue his research into Cold War revisionism. He replied, “that might be ‘a bridge too far’.” But I think it is heartening that conservatives can admit their errors and keep an open mind in their pursuit of the truth, the humble prerogative denied the clerisy of the warfare state.
I just have two questions about your observations. You wrote,
“I am also not convinced by Buchanan’s suggestion that since Stalin exterminated more people than Hitler that Churchill made the wrong decision, in effect, using Stalin to deal with Hitler. In terms of England’s geopolitical interests, Nazi Germany represented a much greater threat than Soviet Russia, particularly after Hitler had launched Operation Barbarossa.”
At the outbreak of the war, who had Hitler exterminated? In Human Smoke: the Beginnings of World War II and the End of Civilization, Nicholson Baker sees the Holocaust emerging from the war itself rather as a cause for the war.
What English geopolitical interests were threatened by Germany? It’s my understanding that Hitler wanted an alliance with England and supported the British Empire.
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I share Christopher Browning’s view that the Holocaust was not necessarily inevitable on the eve of the war and that the Germans were considering other, less murderous alternatives such as mass expulsion. The Germans were radicalized by the war, fearful of internal enemies, and racistly hateful against Jews, whom they blamed for the war, for Bolshevism, and for Germany’s “stab in the back” in World War I. When victory became more elusive, Hitler pushed more and more for granting Europeans the historical “gift” of a Jew-free Europe.
That said, the statement “the Holocaust emerging from the war itself rather as a cause for the war,” could be read to mean that somehow the Germans were not chiefly responsible for the mass murder of Jewish, Polish, and Russian civilians, which is patently false. Contextualizing and explaining the Holocaust should not absolve the various players--Hitler, Heydrich, Himmler, and the SS-Totenkopf campg guards--of their share of moral responsibility. There are sins of commission, omission, and negligence in any historical event, and we should not confuse the lion’s share of blame of perpetrators with those who unwittingly and unintentinoally may have provided them a pretext for their actions.
PS Dan, I realize it may not have been your intention to contextualize their actions morally, but your statement stood out to me and inspired me to make this point. If my conclusion from your statement does not represent your position, I certainly would welcome a further explanation.
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Anti-German hysteria was evidently whippped up prior to, and during WWI. I recall my best friend’s stories of how his Wisconsin dairy farm family, changed their name from Ranke to Rank, because nobody would buy milk from a “German"… Even now, 50 years later, the fear is part of their family legacy.
Another observation I agree with you on is the importance of a 2 front war in defeating Hitler’s Germany. With all the hoopla about the “Greatest Generation” that Tom Brokaw has been spreading, the fact is that WWII was a war of attrition with Nazi Germany, with the Russian’s suffering most of the attrition. Stalin knew he was being used, and that’s why he resolved to demand that Russia come out of the war with something to show for it besides a devasted landscape and acres of mass graves and cemetaries. In the light of this truth, a lot of the “Greatest Generation” hubris is just plain hard to listen to.
Aside from the differences that you might have with Buchanan over Poland and Hitler’s claims to get back German land and people stripped from it by Versailles, I think it’s widely acknowledged that WWII was just an extention of the unresolved issuses of WWI. And in light of current events and the Wilsonian crusade to turn the Mideast into a secular humanist, consumer capitalist culture under domination of International Finance Capitalism, will only end up in the end of the USA as a world power by the early 21rst Century, just like WWI/WWII led to the end of British power and influence in the 20th Century.
That is the message of Buchanan’s book…
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I completely agree! The fact that neocons defend WW One and Two as near identical struggles against the same enemy (Wilhelmine Germany being no different from Nazi Germany) is appalling. The fact that there is no “Kennanite” in the upper leadership levels of the American power elite today is profoundly disturbing. GWB and McCain would rather read Nathan Scharansky (a critic of Kennan)on democracy-building than the greatest diplomat that the US ever produced. The neocons have succeeded in perpetrating the lie that Kennan’s realism is identical to amoralism, whereas democracy-building is a fine blend of realism and idealism.
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Christopher Roach,
You wrote,
‘PS Dan, I realize it may not have been your intention to contextualize their actions morally, but your statement stood out to me and inspired me to make this point.”
No, I agree but I was a bit perplexed by Prof. Gottfried’s statement since it raised the question of whether England’s decision to go to war was justifiable at the time or in retrospect on the basis of mass murder.
Also in Human Smoke, Baker cites appeals made by German Jews to American Jewish organizations against American entry into the war because of fear of possible consequences that would, and indeed did, worsen their persecution.
Probably most Americans today would cite the Holocaust in support of the war so this raises the question of context and causality and the sequence of events.
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The seemingly perplexing idea that England and the US might have considered which
tyrant was more brutal before enthusiastically siding with Stalin against Hitler comes
up retrospectively in Buchanan’s book. Toward the end of the book, Pat calls into
question the moral and geopolitical value of fighting a bloody war that left Stalin in
control of Eastern and much of Central Europe. My response is to note that from
England’s point of view, it was Nazi Germany and not Stalinist Russia that in 1939
represented the greater threat. Moreover, contrary to what John Lukacs
blithely treats as inevitable, the Soviets did not have to be given so much territory
as the price of getting rid of Hitler. Once in the European war, the US behaved as
an inflexible servant of the Soviet will and as an implacable avenging angel against
the Axis countries.
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As Paul correctly observes, the US chose to be a “servant” of Soviet will. All this is well documented in R. Nisbet’s study of FDR and Stalin. While I agree with Nisbet that FDR wasn’t a traitor per se (a deluded fellow traveller, yes), it is not hard to see how the postwar US right got the impression that something subversive had happened over the clinking of champagne glasses at Yalta.
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Paul you are so right. the USA treated Stalin like he was a great democrat, not a mass murderer and partner of Hitler, who had a falling out. Stalin should have been kept as an arms length ally and told that no border ajustments would be allowed. Instead both Roosevelt and Churchill let him lead them around by the nose. We didn’t treat France like that. Stalin needed us more than we needed him. Sure the Russians did most of the fighting and dying. They had no choice in the matter. Roosevelt treated Britain worse than the Soviets. He bled them dry of all their gold and assets. He gave Stalin cart blanche for everything. Britain and France got nothing from the war, but the dstruction of their empires. Stalin was given half of Europe and an upper hand in China.
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“Stalin was given half of Europe and an upper hand in China.”
I remain unconvinced by hoary old right wing claims of betrayal at Yalta. Whether or not he was a pinko, FDR still wanted to minimize American casualties in Europe and get Russia into the war against Japan. Russian domination of Eastern Europe essentially remains an instance of force majeure.
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The Hossbach Denkschrift is not a good source to support Dr. Gottried’s contra Buchanan argument. Its authenticity is dubious, even forcing A.J.P. Taylor to reconsider his earlier endorsement of it in his classic “Origens of the Second World” when in his “Second Thoughts” he later stated that he was taken in by the “legend” of the document, only to learn “that it was a maneuver in domestic affairs...containing no directives for action beyond a request for increased armaments.”
Taylor also warned that “those who believe in political trials may go on quoting [it].”
I’m sure Dr. Gottfried doesn’t fall into that category, but the assertion that there is a “wealth of evidence” to support Germany’s alleged intentions to attack the West before September 1939 needs further elucidation.
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I don’t understand on what basis A.J. P. Taylor considers the Hossbach Memorandum to be
a fraud. Two English-language works that treat this and related subjects are Gerhard
Weinberg’s and Norman Rich’s studies of Hitler’s war aims in the East. Both works cite
evidence beyond the memorandum suggesting Hitler’s interest in moving his armies West
after having taken Poland, an interest that took form before the alliance with Stalin.
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Dr. Gottfried:
Read Taylor’s “Second Thoughts” appended to later editions of his book. Also, take a look at Dankwart
Kluge’s Das Hossbach “Protokoll”: Die Zerstoerung Einer Legende”, Leoni am Stanberger See: Druffel Verlag, 1980. It appears that the Protokoll, at least in part, was a forgery.
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“A wealth of evidence, ... that German westward expansion was in the cards even before the Anschluss with Austria in March 1938. “
The Buchanan thesis misses the elephant in the room:
WWII happened because Hitler started it. Not just Poland, but first Austria, then Czechoslovakia, given away by peace-loving Brits in Munich. And the italian adventure in Ethiopia ... and Manchuria swallowed by Japan. Fascists were on the march, and Britain abandoning Poland, appeasing further, and waiting for Hitler to attack West, (Holland, Denmark, Norway, France) would have delayed not prevented the war. “The Unnecessary War” perhaps could have or should have been a critique of Hitler’s hubristic over-reach.
“the US behaved as
an inflexible servant of the Soviet will and as an implacable avenging angel against
the Axis countries.” IMHO,this was mainly due to FDR’s fellow travelling blind spots wrt Soviet Union. He hadthe Commie spy Alger Hiss as his yalta ponit-man and probably believed all those lies Duranty reported in the New Your Times!
This is the true problem with the outcome of WWII. We begat the Cold War with this flawed WWII policy that gave too much to Stalin.
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“What English geopolitical interests were threatened by Germany? Adolf Hitler wanted an alliance with England and supported the British Empire.”
He even offered Great Britain extensive military protection as part of a peace agreement (Hitler made four peace overtures to Great Britain, they were all rebuffed). But Great Britain was hell-bent on destroying Germany. It’s like that story of the little boy who cut off his ears to spite his grandmother
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Mr G wrote: “...the Soviets did not have to be given so much territory
as the price of getting rid of Hitler.”
Speak for yourself. If giving ALL of Eastern Europe is not called “giving up much terrority” then perhaps you might agree that Israel be “given” the Muslims as the price of world peace and stability.
Of course, you won’t because your Jewish. And if you are Eastern European, like me, you can’t also agree that giving Stalin ALL of Eastern Europe was a “cheap” price for beating Hitler.
Academia is so Western European biased, and so derogatory toward the aspirations of the Eastern Europeans, that most of us almost accept it as “normal”. But to hear it from you, Mr. G, on Takimag’s site, is sad indeed.
Sorry I can’t agree with that.
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Was not “lebensraum” the primary driver of Nazi grand strategy? However, avenging Versailles was important also so after Poland, a move West against France is logical. But so what! If Britain had not gone to war against Germany, the U.S. would not have either.
Hitler would still attack Russia, and without American logistical support, Russia would have had a even a worse time, but Nazi regimes throughout the whole Eurasian landmass would have been Imperial overstretch to the extreme, and a long-drawn out, nasty stalemate in the east is the likely result. Nazis and Commies bleeding each other dry - sounds like a beneficial state affairs for the “free world.”
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“Academia is so Western European biased, and so derogatory toward the aspirations of the Eastern Europeans, that most of us almost accept it as ‘normal’. “
Being a great admirer of Eastern Europe I have to say, amen to that. I could not agree more. However, I am pretty sure Paul meant that ceding so much territory to Stalin was unneccessary.
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I’m wondering what Hitler would have done
if Poland had in fact accepted German demands
for Danzig and the corridor. My guess is that Germany
would have used that as a springboard for the Slovakiaification
of Poland (that is turned it into a slavic pro-German
puppet state a la Tiso’s Slovakia) if that was at all
possible. Then, maybe sometime in the early forties, Germany
would have gone after Soviet Russia, this time allied with
the Polish army, and President Taft of the US (no third term for
FDR if Europe is at peace in 1940 under this scenario) would
declare US neutrality.
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My good friend Paul Gottfried suggests that Britain feared Germany (Hitler) much more than the
Soviet Union of Stalin, in 1939. Certainly, by mid 1939 German expansion had become a major
worry for the Foreign Office. Yet, there is substantial evidence that all through the 1920s
and most of the 1930s major segments of educated British opinion feared an expansionist Soviet
Union (Communism) more that Naziism (and certainly more than Fascism). Communism was seen as
a direct threat to the free enterprize system; it was internationalist (as the conflict in
Spain had proven). As Ernst Nolte (in DIE EUROPAISCHE BURGERKRIEG) points out, it was the
(rightful) fear of Communism that drove so many Europeans to the conclusion that perhaps an
alliance with Mussolini (e.g. Stresa) or even directing Hitler’s expansionist tendances to
the east, might be justified. There are ample quotes from Stanley Baldwin and others (even
Churchill) to that effect. Of course, the German protectorate of what remained of Czechoslavakia
effectively ended the hopes engendered at Munich.
Still, in 1939 (as opposed to 1914) Germany did not present a real threat to the British Empire;
there were no German colonies, and the German fleet, although growing, was still no match
for the British one. The guarantee to Poland was foolhardy and unenforceable, and practially
guaranteed war. Hitler had long professed a desire for an alliance with the Polish colonels,
directed again Stalin and the Soviets. Of course, it is easy now to speculate of what MIGHT
HAVE BEEN if the Poles had made such an alliance---and whether Hitler would have respected
it. The fact is such a course was not taken. Chamberlain (supported by Churchill), rather than
urging negotiations, gave a pledge to the Poles that meant war and their annihilation.
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I “discovered” Kennan ten years ago. If anyone gets a chance they should read Kennan’s memoirs. His writing style has a kind of lyrical beauty to it, odd for a career State Department bureaucrat.
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