Spirits of the Cold War: Contesting Worldviews in the Classical Age of American Security Strategy

1. The Care of the Self: Kennan, Containment, and Stoicism

12 Introduction in scholarship. Clausewitz’s work itself suggests one major reason why. His approach to what he calls the “moral elements” of strategy is largely romantic. The moral elements are among the most important in war. They constitute the spirit that permeates war as a whole, and at an early stage they establish close affinity with the will that moves and leads the whole mass of force, practically merging with it, since the will is itself a moral quantity. Unfortunately, they will not yield to academic wisdom. They cannot be classified or counted. They have to be seen or felt.25 Thus he suggests that intuition and experience, rather than reason and analysis, are best suited to understanding and evaluating the “moral elements ” of strategy. Here Clausewitz is referring to something like “morale ,” but his assumptions carry over into a great deal of work on the value dimensions of national strategies. They are assumed to lie beyond a rational domain of critical inquiry, and thus be impenetrable by “academic wisdom.” The ineffable genius of the nation, the inscrutability of the collective will, the sublime power of organic social forces—such romantic themes have done far more to justify the excesses of collective action than they have done to encourage understanding among students of war, strategy, and foreign policy. Moreover, these themes stand against the Herdian insight that motive forces are objectified in language, and thus can yield to a degree of “academic wisdom.” From this hermeneutical perspective, to address the “spirit” (Geist) of a people is not to address an ineffable and impenetrable subjective realm, but an empirical if inexact realm of outward human conduct. The subjective is objective. This means, among other things, that language is context as well as text. Thus while one may argue, as Parry-Giles does, that critics must attend to the distinction between the private motives of the speaker and his or her public articulations, it is also the case that whether in private or public, as Marx confessed, we always work with “borrowed language.” Man makes his own history, but he does not make it out of the whole cloth; he does not make it out of conditions chosen by himself, but out Introduction 13 of such as he finds close at hand. The tradition of all past generations weighs like an alp upon the brain of the living. At the very time when men appear engaged in revolutionizing things and themselves, in bringing about what never was before, at such very epochs of revolutionary crises do they anxiously conjure up into their service the spirits of the past, assume their names, their battle cries, their costumes to enact a new historic scene in such time-honored disguises and with such borrowed language.26 Borrowed language, which is always borrowed through the media of sociality and publicity, means that while political actors assume a distinction between their private thoughts and their public performances, and while there is good reason for historians and critics to ground their analyses in such a distinction, it is the case as well that public performances of the past are the context for present private thoughts, and moreover that the public performances of an individual actor will inevitably have a kind of “feedback” effect on his or her subsequent private thoughts. Thus while strategy and language are distinct concepts, strategy is deliberated, articulated, and debated in and through “given” public languages . Inasmuch as these languages contain an aspirational as well as an instrumental aspect, they reach toward some purpose, end, value, or ideal that is rational in the sense of being contestable.27 Contesting Strategy This contestability has to do with world making, as language, Hannah Arendt writes, offers a “very articulate and obstinate testimony” about the sort of world humans have made. Indeed, Arendt argues that language can teach us as much about our world as can our theories.28 Sensitive readings of the texts people have left us represent a means of understanding the sort of world they imagined themselves to be a part of. In articulation we can discern a set of attitudes, ideas, and communicative habits that constitutes a way of seeing and being in the world, and an aspirational horizon. To articulate—the act of putting ideas and feelings into words—once 14 Introduction principally meant, and sometimes still does mean, “to joint.” With respect to speech, articulation...