Since Lukacs’s own anti-anticommunism closely tracks Kennan’s, this part of Kennan’s views receives special attention, and Kennan’s 1953 Notre Dame speech in which he outlines his concerns about the dangers of “an alarmed and exercised anti-communism” is included in its entirety in an appendix at the back of the book. Beyond the immediate distortions and errors that this sort of anticommunism encouraged in policymaking, it also threatened to inculcate a narrow and provincial attitude towards foreign cultures and impose a deadening hand on the study of the liberal arts. Well might we heed today his warnings against similar attempts to “make a semi-religious cult out of emotional-political currents of the moment, and particularly when . . . these currents are ones exclusively negative in nature, designed only to appeal to men’s capacity for hatred and fear, never to their capacity for forgiveness and charity and understanding.” Not for nothing does Lukacs classify this speech as one of Kennan’s finest hours.

If this was the face of Kennan’s humanism and the expression of his liberal mind, his concern for cultural life and achievement also informed his realistic desire to limit the potentially universal aspirations of the Truman Doctrine by focusing attention first and foremost on Europe. Not only was this where the need for containment was most obvious and greatest, but what was at stake in preserving Europe in the process was important as well. Kennan spent quite a few years of his life in Europe, knew German and Russian, and—something seemingly at odds with his opposition to past American intervention in the affairs of the Continent—possessed a keen appreciation for the civilizational unity that existed, had to exist, between America and Europe. “From his early youth Kennan had an intellectual and even spiritual respect for Europe—especially for Old Europe. . . . At least on one occasion he, at least implicitly, suggested that America owed something to nations (and not only the English-speaking ones) in that part of Europe that originated and shared some of America’s own traditions.”

One American tradition that Kennan adhered to was that of nonintervention. He rejected the idea of regime change and openly opposed proposals advocating attempts to “rollback” Soviet control in eastern Europe. His citation of John Quincy Adams’s famous line that “we do not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy” gave this view new life, and he repeated it often during the 1990s, when such warnings were desperately needed but rarely heeded. Enunciated today, such a view might be more often associated with the pre–World War II Old Right, but in the ’50s as now it set Kennan sharply at odds with “the Right” as it was developing at the time. “This profoundly conservative and traditionalist American found that his worst adversaries were the American “conservatives”—an increasing mass with whom, by 1980, more Americans were willing to identify themselves than with “liberals.”

Lukacs observes how this “conservatism” advanced in step with the growth of American hegemony and was in many ways tied to support for that hegemony. “No people is great enough to establish world hegemony,” George Kennan had written already in 1940. A conscientious, patriotic dissenter to the end, scorned by virtually all “conservatives” and often dismissed by “liberals,” he possessed no illusions that the American people enjoyed exceptional status exempting them from this truth.