Kennan on the Perils of American Society

I. Overall Statement of Interest

The first question that I intend to explore during my final three semesters relates to the nature of what US national security strategy should prioritize between the dichotomy of international and domestic spheres. The answer to this question will be built off the back of the writing of one of the most influential US diplomats in the nation’s history: George Frost Kennan, who wrote throughout the majority of the twentieth century, most significantly during the formative years of the Cold War, 1945-1947. This question will explore the direction that US policy could have gone and the message that Kennan meant to convey throughout his policy of ‘containment,’ which was forged by his intimate knowledge of the Russian nation, the USSR and his study of empire. The exact first question is whether George Kennan, in his writings, chiefly meant to promote an internationalist defense against the advance of Communism globally in line with the Truman Doctrine or a more conservative view in which the US should be willing to fight Communism at critical geographic junctures such as Western Europe and Japan, and instead focus on its internal cohesion.

The second question will explore Kennan’s views of domestic society, specifically in regards to technocracy and the need for a more cohesive nation, something he describes at length in his 1938 unpublished paper, The Prerequisites, and his 1993 book, Around the Cragged Hill: A Personal and Political Philosophy. While the relevance of the views of one man may be legitimately questioned, Kennan’s perspective, forged by both quintessentially American experience and wildly unique adventures in academia and diplomacy, ought to counsel us today in our dynamic world. Kennan’s multidisciplinary career will set me up well to explore a broad range of fields in my project from history, to political science to international relations and even philosophy. His hesitance to unilaterally support doctrinaire thinking reflects how I aim to think, but he still fits the dual classification of “hedgehog” and “fox” in his friend Isiah Berlin’s famous classification of thinkers in grand strategy.

I will explore these questions via primary source research, with the eventual final product being a scholarly essay. My paper will contribute to the existing body of research on George Kennan, sometimes known as the “Kennan industry,” by providing an analysis of his domestic policy prescriptions that have been little discussed due to Kennan’s significance as a grand strategist. This project will also serve as my honors thesis, although I will need to be ahead of the honors program schedule due to the procedures and deadlines for progress on my paper that I lay out later in the application.

I developed an interest in this question via a few factors along my academic journey. My passion towards the study of US foreign policy and international affairs generally developed during my first semester of college, which I spent studying abroad in Prague, Czechia, an epicenter of European culture and history. The classes I have taken at UConn have further fostered this interest, particularly HIST 3516: The Rise of US Global Power, which focused on America’s role in the world from Woodrow Wilson, and exposed me to thought-provoking primary source document analysis. Another catalyst has been my involvement with the Alexander Hamilton Society, a national organization that seeks to promote a Hamiltonian role for the US internationally, and generally encourages collegiate students’ interaction with topics in US foreign policy. Through my tenure this semester as the UConn chapter vice president, my beliefs regarding the best doctrine for America to follow in this increasingly multipolar world. The final, and most critical factor that has encouraged my interest in this question has been my independent reading, chiefly of the two texts: Kennan: A Life between Worlds and George F. Kennan: An American Life. Both books seek to be biographies of Kennan, but the authors John Lewis Gaddis of Yale University and Frank Costigliola of the University of Connecticut, present different takes on the diplomat and his legacy. Gaddis portrays Kennan as a hero of the Cold War, slighted in the post-Democrat era, but foundational to the fomentation of US Cold War Strategy. Gaddis’s On Grand Strategy has also been a supplement to his work on Kennan, in which he seeks to expose students to the question of how to avoid failure in grand strategy from the example of Xerxes’s failure to balance ends and means in his invasion of Greece to Roosevelt’s success at doing so up to his death in 1945. Costigliola, on the other hand, seeks to illustrate Kennan as a deeply emotional prophet, whose predictions were often molded more by pathos than logos. Both authors illustrate Kennan in different lights, with Costigliola building on the psychoanalytic approach from his 1997 article “‘Unceasing Pressure for Penetration’: Gender, Pathology, and Emotion in George Kennan’s Formation of the Cold War” and Gaddis building on the strategic review began in his 1980 book Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy during the Cold War.

Both questions are related to my long-term goals as I aspire to work in the US foreign policy production process for a federal agency like the Department of Commerce or the State Department. I also plan to pursue higher education, likely in the form of a masters degree in international relations, and therefore this opportunity to investigate my research questions at a more intensive level than typical undergraduate study will not only make me a better candidate for top graduate schools like Georgetown’s Walsh School of Foreign Service and the Harvard Kennedy school, but will more importantly prepare me better for the rigor of postgraduate coursework.

My learning plan and my project plan support each other as many of the classes that I am taking throughout my final three semesters have the purpose of strengthening my writing skills as an aspiring political scientist, a historian and a philosopher. Classes on environmentalism, international finance, and German history will bolster my ability to understand Kennan, who was a passionate conservationist, a crucial player in the Marshall Plan and other transnational economic plans and whose life was deeply shaped by German culture. The experience I will gain from my project plan through independent research and extensive writing on a concentrated interest will strengthen my skills as a student and foster academic success in my remaining time as an undergraduate.

II. Learning Plan

My learning objectives for the remainder of my time at UConn are to gain a greater understanding of the history of US foreign policy and to learn more about international affairs, specifically in Central Europe. I am also seeking to develop my reading, writing and analysis skills, as these qualities will strengthen me as an academic and a professional candidate.

My learning objectives are supported by my course selection via various classes that allow me to deepen my understanding of international affairs and US foreign policy. Through my classes on German culture and history, I will not only better understand the Central European nation more as a pivotal player in affairs on the continent, but will also perceive Kennan in a different light, as he was of German heritage, born and raised in Milwaukee, a predominantly German city, and would eventually live in Germany at multiple points throughout his life and spoke the language fluently. The seminar and thesis classes I have chosen will contribute to my ability to write as a historian and as a political scientist, and will benefit my perspective by exposing me to different ways of thinking that will strengthen myself as a learner and my University Scholar final product. The courses related to US history, the Vietnam War and the class on the history of the presidency, will advise my knowledge of the American role in the world, especially via one of its greatest failures, and also bolster my understanding in the realm of more domestic political mechanisms.

Additional opportunities that I have identified that will allow me to pursue both broad and project-specific interests largely relate to US foreign policy. Over winter break, I will have the chance to read Winston Churchill’s The Gathering Storm under the tutelage of a professor from the University College London via the Hertog Foundation, and learn about the impact of classical influence on our modern day republic from a former Princeton Professor through the American Enterprise Institute. In the spring, I will continue to build my knowledge of US foreign policy through reading Walter Russell Mead’s Special Providence in the UConn Alexander Hamilton Society Book Club, and discuss with my peers the merits and cons of the four strands of ideology in US foreign policy the book identifies. On a more project-specific basis, I also will travel to the Princeton Seeley G. Mudd Archives Library in the beginning of the summer to spend a week with the primary sources as it holds the George F. Kennan Papers, and walk the grounds of the Institute of Advanced Study, where Kennan spent much of his time after retiring from government.

III. Project Plan

Field of Interest, Statement of Problem, Deliverables

The project that I intend to pursue is the writing of a scholarly essay that seeks to answer my guiding questions through two extensive sections, which fuse primary and secondary source analysis. The method by which this product will address my guiding questions is relatively straightforward as they will be the foundation of the thesis for my scholarly essay, where I will seek to answer each question to the best of my ability.

Literature Review

My project will seek to make an extremely small contribution to a field dominated by giants, chiefly Professor Frank Costigliola, John Lewis Gaddis and Kennan himself. My project will provide an analysis of Kennan’s policy prescriptions in a domestic policy framework that have not been analyzed as laboriously due to Kennan’s expertise in Russia, empire and American foreign policy.

The first scholarly literature that will be foundational to my project is Costigliola’s Kennan: A Life Between Worlds. In his biography of George Kennan, Costigliola explores Kennan’s lifelong fixation on the internal conflict inside himself and in the world between Civilization and Eros. Kennan is portrayed as an emotional outsider who only got a foot in the door when his ideas lined up with convention and a prophet who failed to prevent his own eerily accurate predictions. Costigliola emphasizes how Kennan saw containment as a means to Soviet-American diplomacy, rather than an end, and that his advocacy for the strategy in “The Long Telegram” and “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” were significantly influenced by Kennan’s ambition, and the bitter taste of the 1934-35 Moscow nirvana of cultural integration that Stalin and other Soviet elites ended with the purges of the late 1930s. Also emphasized are the personal aspects of Kennan: the seismic effect that his mother’s death during his birth had on him, the illnesses that would afflict him his entire life, familial difficulties, his deep feeling of connection with the Russian people, and his abilities as an eloquent and prolific writer. The purpose of this biography was to supplement the areas of Kennan’s life, chiefly the complexities of the personal, that Costigliola felt Gaddis’s connection to Kennan obscured, and view of containment as a necessary evil, if not the ideal Cold War trajectory.

The next work is not technically scholarly as it is produced by a non-university publishing house, its contribution to the legacy of Kennan is arguably second to none, as Gaddis was Kennan’s authorized biographer. John Gaddis’s George F. Kennan: An American Life leaves no stone unturned in the story of Kennan’s life, centering on Kennan’s time as the Head of the Policy Planning Staff, but stretching from his Wisconsinan birth to his death in Princeton. The biography, the only of many accounts of Kennan’s life to be approved by the man himself, portrays Kennan as a prophet and concludes that Kennan’s greatest legacy is as a teacher, among other notable contributions to the scholarship of history and the US Foreign Service. Gaddis indirectly portrays the containment that Kennan’s “Long Telegram” and “X” article gave birth to as ideal, if slightly more militarized than its creator would have preferred, and crucial to the fall of the USSR. Gaddis frames Kennan as a critic of US government policy who rarely found himself in the majority opinion, particularly in his stance as a nuclear weapon abolitionist. The text is likely the most comprehensive biography of Kennan among the sources I have gathered thus far, but in some ways lacks objectivity. Gaddis’s relationship to Kennan likely caused the biographer to be more charitable in the cultivation of Kennan’s image than Costigliola, Miscamble, and fellow Kennan biographers.

The final foundational text is a journal article also by Costigliola that dissects the rhetorical choices, relevant history and gendered framing that allowed a seemingly obscure dispatch to become one of the founding documents of US Cold War strategy. The article explains how the euphoric atmosphere of 1934 Moscow, Kennan’s desire to roll back the ‘progress’ of US society and his eroticism of the Russian people led to Kennan framing the global struggle of the Cold War as a clash between a “cruel, masculine” rapist and the West as a feminine figure, vulnerable to the Soviet thirst for conquest, but capable of fending off the threat by hardening itself with the necessary “political manliness.” Costigliola’s article is not only a crucial source in the study of Kennan and the Cold War, but also a watershed methodological piece as the author’s examination focuses largely on the effects of how Kennan delivered his warning regarding the Soviet spectre and necessary American action instead of the merits of the Long Telegram’s substance. This essay largely serves as a jumping off point for Costigliola’s subsequent work: The Kennan Diaries, his 2016 article on Kennan and Russia, and his 2023 book, Kennan: A Life Between Worlds, all of which, while reliable, serve to buttress the ubiquitous thesis established in this article: that the personal is often just as important as the political in explaining history and politics.

While this review may seem short and concentrated, much of the meat of the research will come from the paramount five primary resources, Kennan’s books: American Diplomacy, Around the Cragged Hill: A Personal and Political Philosophy and pieces of writing by Kennan, published and unpublished, including “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” “The Prerequisites” and “The Long Telegram.” These sources have much to offer in regards to my overall questions and will be the most important to the success of my final product. Also relevant will be supplemental reading on technocracies as it is the prescription Kennan provides in “The Prerequisites” and a solution to America’s problems he seems to prefer throughout his life.

Methods and Theoretical Approach

As I am fusing my honors thesis and University Scholar project, I will luckily have a rigid structure formed by the three classes that POLS students need to take in step with their paper, which will allow me to go above and beyond a typical thesis paper. The process by which I will conduct my project is first by analyzing primary source and secondary source documents and recording how each document contributes to or opposes the central theses of my paper. After collecting this qualitative data, I will then proceed to lay out this analysis in my paper with a first section discussing whether Kennan’s most urgent message was domestic or international at length and a second section outlining Kennan’s prescriptions for the problems ailing American domestic society. A final third section will tie these sections together and attempt to connect Kennan’s writings to our contemporary political and international environment. In a specific step by step approach, I will work to finish a total collection of primary and secondary sources by the end of the Fall 2025 semester, read, annotate and collect research of these documents through Winter and Spring 2026, as well as drafting a workable thesis and outline for my scholarly essay. I will spend Summer 2025 creating a rough draft, then use Fall 2026, Winter 2027, and the first months of Spring 2027 to perfect my essay with the help of faculty advisors and also will submit to student journals for possible publication.

The theoretical approach that I will take towards my research and final product is a microhistorical qualitative analysis that focuses on the ideas of one man, George Kennan, to attempt to reveal prescriptions to larger social problems, as this method will match well with my heavy reliance on Kennan’s writings. A qualitative analysis will best fit my project as my final project is an essay written off the basis of textual evidence. I will also work to integrate an application of phenomenology into my project, which seeks to analyze the subjective experience of Kennan from his first-person perspective.

Significant Work in the Field

Costigliola, F. (1997). “Unceasing Pressure for Penetration”: Gender, Pathology, and Emotion in George Kennan’s Formation of the Cold War. The Journal of American History, 83(4), 1309–1339.

Costigliola, F. (2016). ‘I React Intensely to Everything’: Russia and the Frustrated Emotions of George F. Kennan, 1933–1958. The Journal of American History, 102(4), 1075-1101.

Costigliola, F. (2023). Kennan: A Life Between Worlds. Princeton University Press

Gaddis, J. L. (2005). Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy during the Cold War. Revised edition. Oxford University Press.

Gaddis, J. L. (2011). George F. Kennan: An American Life. Penguin Press. Gaddis, J. L. (2018). On Grand Strategy. Penguin Press.

Gourevitch, P. “The Second Image Reversed: The International Sources of Domestic Politics.” International Organization 32, no. 4 (1978): 881–912. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2706180.

Harper, J. L. (1994). American visions of Europe : Franklin D. Roosevelt, George F. Kennan, and Dean G. Acheson. Cambridge University Press.

Isaacson, W., & Thomas, E. (2013). The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (Reissued ed.; originally published 1986). Simon & Schuster.

Kennan, G. F., & Costigliola, F. (2014). The Kennan Diaries. First edition. W. W. Norton & Company. Kennan, G.F.. The Prerequisites, Notes on the Problems of the United States in 1938; George F. Kennan

Papers, Box 240, MC076, Public Policy Papers, Department of Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

Kennan, G. F. (1946, February 22). Long Telegram. [Telegram from George Kennan in Moscow to the Secretary of State].

Kennan, G. F. (1947). The Sources of Soviet Conduct. Foreign Affairs, 25(4), 566-582. Kennan, G. F. (1958). Russia, the Atom and the West. Harper & Brothers.

Kennan, G.F. (1966). Realities of American Foreign Policy. W. W. Norton & Company. Kennan, G. F. (1967). Memoirs 1925-1950. Pantheon.

Kennan, G.F. (1983). Memoirs 1950-1963. Pantheon.

Kennan, G.F. (1994). Around the Cragged Hill: A Personal and Political Philosophy. W. W. Norton & Company.

Kennan, G.F. (2000). Sketches From A Life. W. W. Norton & Company.

Kennan, G. F. (2012). American Diplomacy: Sixtieth-Anniversary Expanded Edition. University of Chicago Press.

Leffler, M. P. (1993). A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War. Stanford University Press.

Lowenstein, R. (2016). America’s Bank: The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve. Penguin Books.

Steil, Benn. (2019). The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War. Simon & Schuster. Thompson, N. (2009). The Hawk and the Dove. Henry Holt and Company.