Mr. X on America's Role in the Middle East

Ali Wyne

Security, Middle East

The U.S. would do well to recall George F. Kennan's cautionary counsel.

Reflecting on the faith that generations of U.S. policymakers placed in George Kennan’s explication of containment, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently expressed his concern that the United States lacks a comparable construct to address the Middle East’s unraveling:

“If you accept the premise that we face a generation-long period of turbulence and violence in the Middle East, the lack of an overarching strategy for how you react to a region in flames is a problem. Are there fires we should just let burn out? Who are our friends? Who should we support?”

Kennan was not a scholar of the Middle East. While the State Department had reassigned him to its Jerusalem consulate in June 1937, and he had even begun learning Hebrew, the Roosevelt administration ultimately had him stay in Washington on account of his insights into the Soviet Union—insights that understandably occupy the defining role in his diplomatic legacy. Still, his perspectives—especially those he articulated in the later years of his life—bear directly on the convulsions now gripping the region. In a March 1995 essay for Foreign Affairs, he exhorted the United States to revisit the wisdom of its third president, John Quincy Adams. In a July 4, 1821, address he delivered while secretary of state, Adams warned that if America were to assume

“banners [other] than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy and ambition, which assumed the colors and usurped the standards of freedom.”

Kennan also observed how difficult it is for a country, even one of surpassing influence, to intervene in another’s “domestic affairs or in its conflicts with its neighbors” “without creating new and unwelcome embarrassments and burdens” for itself.

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