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On December 15th, the New America Foundation hosted Nick Thompson to discuss his recently published book The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War with Steve Clemons, Director of the American Strategy Program. Thompson, a Schwartz Fellow at New America and currently a senior editor at Wired Magazine, read passages from his book and reflected on grand strategists today as compared to the era of Kennan and Nitze.
As Nitze’s grandson, Nick Thompson had unparalleled access to his grandfather’s papers and was given additional access to George Kennan’s diaries by the Kennan family to write the book. Thompson described being struck by the how the opinions on nuclear arms and war held by these two men converged near the end of their lives after working opposition for most of their careers. The book excerpts highlighted the complexity of Nitze and Kennan, who too often have been categorized as simply “the hawk” or “the dove.” Thompson described the prolific careers of both men: Nitze as the “diligent, bureaucratic insider,” who effectively served in administration after administration, and Kennan as the “perceptive, elegant outsider,” whose words outpaced most policy reviews in brilliance and length. The Hawk and the Dove explores a side of cold war history through the narrative of these two fascinating lives.
In the question and answer session, Steve Clemons reflected on the number of “casual Curtis LeMay’s” today in Washington’s foreign policy community and asked what Kennan and Nitze would have to say about current grand strategists. Thompson reflected that both Kennan and Nitze, despite their differences, were consistently focused on the costs of war. Kennan often reiterated his belief that the US could not fulfill all of its international ambitions and tended to mess up military interventions. Nitze, while the architect behind nuclear arms accumulation, was primarily concerned with nuclear weapons as a way to prevent war. Thompson acknowledged the point that today we do not see figures with the same staying power in shaping lines of thought in American Grand Strategy.
--Alex Taylor, Research Intern with the American Strategy Program
