By Victor Take, Landmarks Magazine (Substack), 4/6/24

[Editor’s note: this is the fourth installment of the Simone Weil Center’s Symposium on ‘Containment 2.0.’ The first two installments can be read here, here, and here]

Victor Taki is a historian interested in imperial Russia’s Balkan entanglements and the intellectual history of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. His latest book Russia’s Turkish Wars was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2024.

It has become customary in certain quarters to contrast the current international imbroglio to the good old days of the Cold War: in comparison with the present-day protagonists, the two superpowers of yore might indeed appear as paragons of self-restraint. By the same token one might be tempted to contrast George Kennan’s foreign political wisdom to the collective folly of the mainstream media experts in the West. However, I would emphasize the continuity.

Late in his life, Kennan was a rare voice of caution advising the Clinton administration against the first post-1991 round of NATO expansion, yet his “Long Telegram” never really impressed me as a fair description of the Soviet Union and its foreign policy. The following words in particular strike me as a fundamental misperception: “[We] have here a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with the US there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure.”

This misperception reflected a profound difference of political cultures of the two countries shaped by very different historical experiences and geographic conditions. Despite its initial parochialism, post-Petrine Russia ultimately became an integral part of European great power politics. Both in its pre-1789 “balance of power” variant, and in its post-1815 “Concert of Europe” version, this great power politics was nothing other than a modus vivendi of a handful of states whose rulers for all practical purposes abandoned the hope of imposing their will (rules, norms) on the rivals. Two centuries of this historical experience produced among Russian elites a notion of great power equality that was strong enough to prevail over the early Soviet revolutionary messianism and become a defining characteristic of both Soviet and post-Soviet Russian foreign policy. It stood behind the Soviet interest in “peaceful co-existence of the two systems,” just as it informs present-day Moscow’s rhetoric of “indivisible security.”

It is precisely this notion of great power equality that the American political establishment never accepted, as is clear (among other things) from both Kennan’s initial concept of containment and the current attempts to revive it. The basic reasons for this are easy enough to see. Unlike Russia, the United States has never been part of the European balance of power or the European Concert. In a century of self-chosen isolationism, they turned from a country, which had been smaller and weaker than a European great power, into a country that eclipsed all of them by its economic and ultimately military might. In itself, this difference of scale and potential is not a barrier to the development of a modus vivendi mentality – the powers that balanced each other in Europe were after all vastly different in terms of territory, population, wealth, etc. However, the discrepancy in scale was further enhanced by a highly advantageous geographic position of the United States and a messianic collective psychology that has its roots in the Calvinist concept of double predestination. As a result, American foreign policy makers have been quite insensitive to Moscow’s post-1945 security concerns and, at the same time, tempted to exploit its strategic vulnerabilities.

Decades of Cold War “containment” have manifestly failed to make Russian elites abandon their great power mentality, yet this policy may still succeed in making the Russian perception of the United States similar to Kennan’s initial (mis)perception of the post-WWII Soviet Union. In fact, the Foreign Affairs proposal for a new containment may stimulate the Russian leadership to conclude that “we have here a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with us there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if American power is to be secure.” Once the master of the Kremlin makes this conclusion, the authors of “new containment” may rightfully celebrate an important step forward in their efforts to reshape the world in America’s image, yet will the world become a safer place?