Kennan, Realist?

Dan Drezner is correct to dispute David Adesnik’s claim that George Kennan was a realist. Kennan certainly had much in common with realists. He believed that foreign policy should be conducted by impassionate professionals, and should be insulated from the popular will. This accords very nicely with the 18th century world of European power politics that modern realism is derived from. However, Kennan central point in Sources of Soviet Conduct was that Soviet foreign policy was driven by the internal contradictions of the authoritarian communist state, not from a systemic imperative.

This places Kennan outside the modern school of realism. Of course, that’s not the whole story, because prior to Man, the State, and War the lines that defined realism were not as clear as they are today. Carr and Morgenthau, for all their virtue (and the former has considerably more than the latter) could be quite sloppy in assessing foreign policy determinants. Kennan’s realism was more of the traditional conservative variety than the modern systemic form.