An Eerie Coincidence?
In 1948, George Kennan, one of the prime architects of US Cold War strategy and “Containment” opined presciently on the US’s domination of global resources.
The US was on top of the world. Continental Europe was in shambles. London was reeling under debt and was losing grip on its Empire, which had a mere thirty years prior seen its geographical zenith. Japan had been punitively destroyed and occupied by an American proconsul and newly independent India and soon-to-be independent China were wracked with poverty and were struggling to forge a path. Though the Soviet Union had acquired suzerainty over tracts of Eastern Europe at Yalta, the War had all but devastated the country and had set it behind generations demographically. Indeed, America was sitting pretty, unique in the world.
Kennan understood the scene well. He suggested that since the US had only 6.3% of the world’s population and had “50% of the world’s wealth” that it ought to “devise a pattern of relationships” that would “permit us to maintain this disparity.” To do so, he argued, the US had to “dispense with sentimentality and day-dreaming.” The day was “not far off” suggested Kennan, “when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts.”
Kennan might have been exaggerating but not by much. According to Angus Maddison, by 1950, the US boasted about 27% of World GDP. Asia, the world’s largest continent by population, as a whole had but two-thirds of the US’s GDP. Kennan understood what this meant; his admonitions to the US power establishment were indeed acted upon in a grisly way-and were felt harshly by the Koreans, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, Indonesians, Iraqis, and in fact directly or indirectly by the entire world as the US flexed its muscles militarily and economically and enforced a system of vast inequality.
Straight power concepts certainly paid off handsomely for the US. If one can avoid the “sentimentality” that might produce empathy or horror even at the death and destruction, the needless suffering of poverty and disease, and the constant violence stoked by the American need to “maintain this disparity” then one must give high marks to Kennan and his acolytes.
But things change.
Do straight power concepts still pay off in the same way? Can the US rattle its saber with the same impunity today with China or Russia? Can a “pattern of relationships” help the US against cyber-criminals or, worse yet, pandemics? Well, here we are.
And the mathematical comparisons are spooky. When Kennan issued his warning, the US had 27% of World GDP and 6% of the world population. Now, the country has less than 5% of the world’s population but has about 27% of the Covid-19 deaths. An eerie reversal of fortune indeed.
The straight power concepts we’ve dealt in- whether abroad or at home- have created an ineffectual mishmash of the country. Our theological devotion to markets is expressed when it comes to a religious insistence on them as regards any form of public welfare or health and a disdain for them when handouts are available for the wealthy and for corporations. As the virus rages through the country, we have states bidding for equipment and scrambling to import the life-saving manufactures of countries we’ve happily decimated — like Vietnam. The straight power concepts of a pandemic are being visited upon the US and its response is broken, illogical, anti-scientific, politicized, and fractured. Another pillar of US religion- that it is a city on a hill, deserving of it’s unfair share of everything- has now delivered its deadly payload as we get our unfair share of death and disease. We genuflect before a crazed tycoon as our friends suffer.
Architecting a world-system not born of the selfish, chest-inflation of the post War period but of a sustainable comity of peoples is the only task before us. This system flattens the curve of inequality, attends to public health, and organizes around common emergencies- like pandemics and climate change. This system rejects Kennan’s worldview (Kennan, in today’s terms, would be considered liberal as compared to the neocons who overtook the US.)
Kennan asked us not to “day-dream” about altruism. He gave us a nightmare. He asked us to “cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization.” We listened. Now we hear.
Just as we promoted the opposite of human rights, high living standards, and democracy abroad, we killed the same concepts at home.
The serpent has eaten its own tail.
