Written By: Eva Beere
“At the bottom of Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity.”
George Kennan, Kennan’s Long Telegram, February 22nd, 1946
On a cold February day in Moscow in 1946, George F. Kennan, confined to his bed with a bout of influenza, sent a five-thousand-word telegram to the State Department in Washington D.C., urging America to respond to the growing threat of Soviet expansionism.
Having spent the last twenty-years in the Foreign Service feeling ignored and overshadowed, Kennan’s “voice now carried.” His policy of containment would soon become the cornerstone of American Cold War Foreign policy, swelling uncontrollably throughout the 1960s to a force so large, that even Kennen would later fear its impact.
Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to a relatively upper-class family, Kennan’s childhood was plagued by loneliness and melancholy; his mother died from a suspected ruptured appendix when he was just two-months old, yet he believed that she had died in the aftermath of his birth. The blame he felt for his mother’s death, combined with his tense relationship with his father ‘Kent’ and his stepmother Louise Wheeler, instilled in Kennan shy and awkward tendencies, unlike that of a revered Foreign Diplomat.
What Kennan lacked in confidence and happiness; he made up for in intellect. His father sent him to St John’s Military Academy – where his sensitive and quiet nature made him a prime target for bullying – and later, Princeton. Kennan also displayed natural language skills. At the age of eight, he was sent to Germany to see his stepmother and mastered an ability of the German language over this trip. Over the course of his Foreign Service career, he mastered French, Polish, Norwegian, Czech, Polish, Portuguese, and Russian.
After leaving Princeton in 1925, he joined the Foreign Service, which was surprising for someone who had felt shy and isolated throughout his childhood and time at university. Over his twenty-five years of diplomatic service, Kennan would become one of the most notable members of the United States Foreign Service (former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger later described him as the “best Foreign Service office in the history of the State Department.”)
In 1928, he was chosen for a specialist language training program, and between 1929 and 1931 he studied Russian at the University of Berlin. He was then posted to Latvia, as the third secretary to the Russian section of the legation in Riga, where the United States could carefully watch the actions of the Soviet Union.
Over the next decade, Kennan found himself in Moscow, Lisbon, Prague, and Berlin, until he eventually returned to Moscow in July 1944 as Ambassador Averell Harriman’s deputy chief of mission. As he immersed himself “deeper into Russia,” he pushed the Truman administration to acknowledge and confront Soviet domination in Eastern Europe.
His determination to be heard by Washington was demonstrated on February 22nd, 1946, when Kennan wrote the most consequential document of his career: a 5,540-word telegram painting the Soviet Union as a looming existential threat and calling for the containment of communism.
Whilst Kennan was relaying the “evil, hostile, and menacing” nature of the Soviet Union to Washington, Stalin was attempting to use the Eastern Europe satellite states as a barrier against another invasion from the West. On February 9th, 1946, Stalin delivered a speech to a Meeting of Voters in Moscow, declaring a wartime alliance with the United States a bygone and announcing his five-year plans to rapidly industrialise the Soviet Union. Kennan’s telegram was an amalgamation of the anxieties, frustrations and ambitions he’d experienced witnessing the end of World War II and realising that the Soviet Union could no longer be counted on as a post-war collaborator.
A year later, Kennan’s ‘X’ article, entitled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” appeared in the July edition of Foreign Affairs under the pseudonym ‘X.’ The X article was, in essence, a rewritten version of the long telegram, which once again portrayed the Soviet Union as cold and unapproachable, although it did not mention Kennan’s views like the telegram did. The article’s containment thesis, which argued for a “a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies,” became a centre of extreme controversy.
Kennan had a strict definition of containment, one which could be later manipulated by his successors, leading to the escalation of US involvement in Vietnam, Laos and Korea. Firstly, containment was a strategy, not an ideology. Whilst the US should favour democracy, they should tolerate all types of government unless they appear threatening. Secondly, containment was a political, not a military strategy; the real threat posed by the Soviet Union was not a sudden invasion, but the growing strength of Kremlin-controlled communist parties within the Soviet Union itself. Lastly, and most importantly, containment did not apply everywhere. Understanding that communism in the Soviet Union was unique to Eastern Europe, according to Kennan, would prevent the US from getting involved every time a communist threat popped up across the globe.
Kennan’s containment thesis was undeniably controversial. Walter Lippman, a widely respected American reporter and political commentator, published fourteen columns in the New York Herald Tribune arguing that containment was an overly ambitious policy that the US would struggle to commit to. By committing to containment, Lippman feared that America would find itself continuously intervening in the affairs of other nations threatened by communism. Lippman’s warning against the US committing itself to anticommunism was one that echoed loudly as the Nixon administration withdrew US forces from Vietnam in 1973.
Despite critics of Kennan’s containment policy, 1946-1948 emerged as his Golden Years. The X article landed Kennan his dream job as the State Department’s director for Policy Planning, which involved the construction of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. In the post-war world, containment quickly became the cornerstone of America’s Cold War Foreign Policy, with US advisors adopting the ‘toughness’ mindset which assumed that America had the ability to tackle threatening ideologies across the globe.
A key criticism against containment was that the US simply could not afford to actively fight against communist forces every time threats emerged across the globe. This argument was quickly disbanded in 1949 by Leon Keyserling, the new head of the Council of Economic Advisers, who denied that the US economy was fragile. The following spring, Kennan’s successor, Nitze, produced NSC 68, a document declaring that the US should increase defence spending. A month later, the Korean War broke out, spurring MacArthur’s forces to begin racing to the 38th parallel. Just four years after Kennan sent his long telegram, his containment policy was being manipulated; Kennan had explicitly defined containment as a political rather than a military strategy, something which did not require a boost of $48 billion in military spending.
As the Cold War raged on, US Foreign policy spun further away from Kennan’s original recommendations. After years of escalation under Eisenhower and Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson finally sent American troops to Vietnam on 8 March 1965. As Peter Beinhart identified, this dispatch of troops was a clear sign of the self-assured hubris among US foreign policy officials that America was strong enough to defeat communism in Asia – in fact, Johnson fired MacNamara in 1967 after he suggested the war could not be won. However, this hubris of toughness was shattered in 1968 during the Tet Offensive, which exposed to the US public the horrors of Vietnam and the weakness of the South Vietnamese. The decision to directly intervene in Vietnam was born in containment doctrines in the 1950s, particularly NSC 68 which bolstered the belief that the US could feasibly defeat all communist guerillas everywhere every time they advanced. Five years later, Carter completely removed all American forces from Vietnam, symbolising a post-toughness age.
As Trump commits himself to negotiations with Putin, his ‘Make American Great Again’ approach may be better defined as ‘Make America Tough Again.’ Trump’s potential deal with Ukraine which would allow the US preferential access to Ukraine’s raw material reserves without providing any security guarantees, sets the precedent for Trump’s aggressive approach to foreign policy. Combined with his efforts to acquire Greenland and the Panama Canal, Trump’s need to exert influence across the globe emphasises a return to this toughness mindset which convinced America they were capable of destroying communism in Korea, Vietnam and Laos.
This expansion of American influence abroad was precisely what Kennan had warned about when the US intervened in Vietnam and Iraq. What set Kennan apart from his successors was that Kennan had developed a deep, intricate knowledge of Moscow’s foreign policy, and understood that communism in the Soviet Union was unlike communism elsewhere in the world. An understanding of Southeast Asia, as deep as Kennan’s understanding of Russia, could have convinced America that communism in Asia could not be approached in the same way as Soviet communism.
As Trump rushes to end the war in Ukraine, Europe warns against a peace deal that would reward Russia instead. In the same way Kennan warned against a haphazard end to American intervention in Vietnam, a rushed end to the Russia-Ukraine war could potentially do a disservice to future global peace.
Bibliography
Beinart, Peter. The Icarus Syndrome. Chicago: Independent Publishers Group (Chicago Review Press), 2010.
Robert C. Tucker. “The Long Telegram: An Act of Political Leadership.” The Princeton University Library Chronicle 66, no. 2 (2005): 295–98. https://doi.org/10.25290/prinunivlibrchro.66.2.0295.
Ben Wright, C. “Mr. ‘X’ and Containment.” Slavic Review 35, no. 1 (1976): 1–31. https://doi.org/10.2307/2494817.
Costigliola, Frank. Kennan: A Life between Worlds. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023. https://doi-org.eux.idm.oclc.org/10.1515/9780691189307
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