Mr. X and the Pacific: George F. Kennan and American Policy in East Asia

by Paul J. Heer

George F. Kennan is well known for articulating the strategic concept of containment, which would be the centerpiece of what became the Truman Doctrine. During his influential Cold War career he was the preeminent American expert on the Soviet Union. In Mr. X and the Pacific, Paul J. Heer explores Kennan’s equally important impact on East Asia.

Heer chronicles and assesses Kennan’s work in affecting U.S. policy toward East Asia. By tracing the origins, development, and bearing of Kennan’s strategic perspective on the Far East during and after his time as director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff from 1947 to 1950, Heer shows how Kennan moved from being an ardent and hawkish Cold Warrior to, by the 1960s, a prominent critic of American participation in the Vietnam War.

Mr. X and the Pacific provides close examinations of Kennan’s engagement with China (both the People’s Republic and Taiwan), Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. Country-by-country analysis paired with considerations of the ebb and flow of Kennan’s global strategic thinking result in a significant extension of our estimation of Kennan’s influence and a deepening of our understanding of this key figure in the early years of the Cold War. In Mr. X and the Pacific Heer offers readers a new view of Kennan, revealing his importance and the totality of his role in East Asia policy, his struggle with American foreign policy in the region, and the ways in which Kennan’s legacy still has implications for how the United States approaches the region in the twenty-first century.

Genres: History, Politics, China

316 pages, Hardcover

First published May 15, 2018

Reviews

[DFZRTONG · Rating 4 out of 5]

Paul Heer’s book on the development of George F. Kennan’s East Asian foreign policy is an excellent complement to the policymaker’s evolving reflections on the US role in the region during the Cold War. The book primarily documents and assesses Kennan’s involvement as a diplomat in the US policy toward East Asia. In other words, the book examines how Kennan became involved in the process of formulating American policy in East Asia during the early Cold War period as an expert on the Soviet Union. Kennan played a key role in pushing the United States to withdraw from the Chinese Civil War, reorienting the US policy toward Japan, and developing the concept of “peripheral defense” in the Western Pacific. However, his influence soon waned: this was reflected in the fact that his views on the Korean Peninsula and Vietnam were largely ignored, and the impact of the Korean War eventually overshadowed his strategic vision for the US policy in East Asia. Heer provides a historical perspective that reveals how Kennan, who previously lacked sufficient expertise and experience in this area, but became deeply involved in exerting influence. Heer’s research meticulously traces Kennan’s views on different Asian countries and assesses the positive and negative impact of Kennan’s policy proposals for the region.

The scholarly value of this book is reflected in several ways: Firstly, it uses a large number of primary sources, including declassified the US government archival documents and personal papers of Kennan and others involved. Secondly, the book is the first scholarly monograph to comprehensively and systematically address the relevance of Kennan to American policy in East Asia. Thirdly, the author’s discussion of Kennan’s relationship as both a policymaker and a policy critic are of academic value for further study. The importance of Heer’s study lies in his careful analysis of Kennan’s historical role and in the reflection, it provokes on the possible relevance of Kennan's views to contemporary the US policy in Asia more than 70 years later. In other words, the book may also be instructive for understanding today’s American policy in East Asia.

Heer begins by focusing on Kennan’s tenure as director of the State Department’s Office of Policy Planning under George Marshall and shows how Kennan shaped the US policy toward Japan and China between 1947 and 1949. Emphasizing that Japan was the cornerstone of American containment policy in East Asia, Kennan reoriented the initial the US occupation policy to support Japan’s economic recovery and political and social stability in order to make Japan a reliable ally. Kennan believed that Japan must eventually reassume its defense responsibilities as an independent player in international affairs. As for the US policy toward China, Heer describes Kennan as the principal architect of the push to disengage the United States from intervening in China’s civil war (2018, p,49). However, the most glaring inconsistency emerges in the thinking about North Korea and Vietnam. As Heer points out, Kennan has always insisted that the fate of these two countries is unimportant to the US security interests. As a realist, Kennan always believed that Japan was the only country of strategic importance to the United States in all of East Asia, and that the main element of the US “containment policy” in East Asia was to prevent Japan from falling under Soviet control. Other regions, including mainland China, the Korean Peninsula and Southeast Asia, were not strategically important enough for the United States to be sacrificed when necessary. The US defense system in East Asia should therefore always focus on offshore islands, excluding mainland Asia from the US defense design (Heer, 2015, pp. 90-91). Although this strategy comes at the cost of America’s international reputation, which is also a key element Kennan values. Heer argues that Kennan’s containment planning for East Asia is narrow, which explains his views and policy positions on China, the Korean Peninsula and Vietnam. To some extent history bears out Kennan’s judgment, the United States failed to follow Kennan’s advice and plunged its military forces into the quagmire of the Korean and Vietnam wars, which ultimately led to more disastrous consequences.

In Heer’s view, Kennan’s lack of attention to the Asian continent was partly due to his Eurocentric focus on the threat from the Soviet Union, and partly due to his unfamiliarity with Asian affairs and personal bias. Heer points out the flaws and prescience in Kennan’s strategic vision of Asia and demonstrates the inconsistencies and dilemmas in the issues of American credibility and prestige that Kennan had to deal with during the Korean and Vietnam wars (2018, pp. 201-203). Heer believes that Kennan was not always right, but he was almost always able to focus on the right issues and used his strong analytical skills and unemotional approach to world affairs to develop a professional strategy for dealing with the region and its actors, although he remains partially responsible for the failure of the US policy in East Asia.

Another interesting aspect of this book is that it deals with how psychological emotions at the level of American society influenced Kennan’s planning in East Asia policy. Although the author does not go further, it is clear from Kennan’s analysis of China that American policy toward China at that time was strongly influenced by popular emotions and was not entirely the result of an objective assessment to protect national interests. If the author could research further in this regard, considering on the one hand how American social sentiment hindered Kennan’s efforts to advance his policy planning, and on the other hand analyzing the extent to which Kennan’s professional judgment was influenced by his own emotional perceptions, it might be able to present a more comprehensive picture of Kennan’s thinking on the US policy in East Asia.

Overall, the book makes an important contribution to the early history of the Cold War in East Asia, and Heer’s study of Kennan’s ideas can push readers to further consider the historical impact of the Cold War in Asia and help us better understand and respond to the geopolitical challenges and opportunities in East Asia in the 21st century.

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

A strong work, useful in surfacing primary sources, smooth in extracting sense from them, and thoughtful about the ways that Kennan's world and worldview dissolved into ours.