The most comprehensive American strategic design in the Cold War was put forward by a then-obscure Foreign Service officer, George Kennan, serving as head of the Political Section of the American Embassy in Moscow. No Foreign Service officer has ever shaped the U.S. debate over America’s world role to such an extent. While Washington was still basking in the wartime euphoria based on belief in Stalin’s goodwill, Kennan predicted a looming confrontation.
The Strategic Vision of George Kennan
The United States, he asserted in a personal letter to a colleague in 1945, needed to face the fact that its Soviet ally would, after the war, turn into an adversary: A basic conflict is thus arising over Europe between the interests of Atlantic sea-power, which demand the preservation of vigorous and independent political life on the European peninsula, and the interests of the jealous Eurasian land power, which must always seek to extend itself to the west and will never find a place, short of the Atlantic Ocean, where it can from its standpoint safely stop.
Kennan proposed an explicitly strategic response: to “gather together at once into our hands all the cards we hold and begin to play them for their full value.” Eastern Europe, Kennan concluded, would be dominated by Moscow: it stood closer to Russian centers of power than it did to Washington and, however regrettably, Soviet troops had reached it first.
Hence the United States should consolidate a sphere in Western Europe under American protection—with the dividing line running through Germany—and endow its sphere with sufficient strength and cohesion to maintain the geopolitical balance. This prescient prediction of the postwar outcome was rejected by Kennan’s colleague Charles “Chip” Bohlen on Wilsonian grounds that “foreign policy of that kind cannot be made in a democracy. Only totalitarian states can make and carry out such policies.” Washington might accept a balance of power as a fact, but it could not adopt it as a policy.
In February 1946, the American Embassy in Moscow received a query from Washington as to whether a doctrinaire speech by Stalin inaugurated a change in the Soviet commitment to a harmonious international order. Kennan, at that time deputy chief of mission, was given an opportunity many Foreign Service officers dream of to present their views directly to high levels without requiring ambassadorial approval. Kennan replied in a five-part telegram of nineteen single-spaced pages. The essence of the so-called Long Telegram was that the entire American debate over Soviet intentions needed to be re-conceived. Soviet leaders saw East-West relations as a contest between antithetical concepts of world order. They had taken a “traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity” and grafted onto it a revolutionary doctrine of global sweep.
The Kremlin would interpret every aspect of international affairs in light of Soviet doctrine about a battle for advantage between what Stalin had called the “two centers of world significance,” capitalism and Communism, whose global contest was inevitable and could end with only one winner. They thought the battle was inevitable, and thus made it so. The next year, Kennan, now head of the Policy Planning Staff in the State Department, went public in an article in Foreign Af Airs published anonymously by “X.” On the surface, the article made the same point as the Long Telegram:
Soviet pressure on the West was real and inherent, but it could be “contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points.” Theodore Roosevelt would have had no difficulty endorsing this analysis. But when outlining his idea of how the conflict might end, Kennan reentered Wilsonian territory. At some point in Moscow’s futile confrontations with the outside world, he predicted, some Soviet leader would feel the need to achieve additional support by reaching out beyond the Party apparatus to the general public, which was immature and inexperienced, having never been permitted to develop an independent political sense.
But if “the unity and efficacy of the Party as a political instrument” was ever so disrupted, “Soviet Russia might be changed overnight from one of the strongest to one of the weakest and most pitiable of national societies.” This prediction—essentially correct—was Wilsonian in the belief that at the end of the process, democratic principles would prevail, and that legitimacy would trump power. This belief is what Dean Acheson, the model and seminal Secretary of State to many of his successors (including me), practiced. From 1949 to 1953 he concentrated on building what he called “situations of strength” via NATO; East-West diplomacy would more or less automatically reflect the balance of power.
During the Eisenhower administration, his successor, John Foster Dulles, extended the alliance system through SEATO for Southeast Asia (1954) and the Baghdad Pact for the Middle East (1955). In effect, containment came to be equated with the construction of military alliances around the entire Soviet periphery over two continents. World order would consist of the confrontation of two incongruent superpowers—each of which organized an international order within its sphere.
Both secretaries of state viewed power and diplomacy as successive stages: America would first consolidate and demonstrate its power; then the Soviet Union would be obliged to cease its challenges and arrive at a reasonable accommodation with the non-Communist world. Yet if diplomacy was to be based on positions of military strength, why was it necessary to suspend it in the formative stages of the Atlantic relationship? And how was the strength of the free world to be conveyed to the other side? For in fact, America’s nuclear monopoly coupled with the war’s devastating impact on the Soviet Union ensured that the actual balance of power was uniquely favorable to the West at the beginning of the Cold War. A situation of strength did not need to be built; it already existed.
Winston Churchill recognized this in a speech in October 1948, when he argued that the West’s bargaining position would never be stronger than it was at that moment. Negotiations should be pressed, not suspended: The question is asked: What will happen when they get the atomic bomb themselves and have accumulated a large store? You can judge yourselves what will happen then by what is happening now. If these things are done in the green wood, what will be done in the dry? … No one in his senses can believe that we have a limitless period before us. We ought to bring matters to a head and make a final settlement… The Western Nations will be far more likely to reach a lasting settlement, without bloodshed, if they formulate their just demands while they have the atomic power and before the Russian Communists have got it too.
Truman and Acheson undoubtedly considered the risk too great and resisted a grand negotiation for fear that it might undermine Allied cohesion. Above all, Churchill was the leader of the opposition, not Prime Minister, when he urged an at least diplomatic showdown, and the incumbent Clement Attlee and his Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, would surely have resisted a design invoking the threat of war. In this context, the United States assumed leadership of the global effort to contain Soviet expansionism—but as a primarily moral, not geopolitical, endeavor. Valid interests existed in both spheres, yet how they were described tended to obscure attempts to define strategic priorities.
Even NSC-68, which codified Truman’s national security policy as a classified document and was largely written by the hard-line Paul Nitze, avoided the concept of national interest and placed the conflict into traditional moral, almost lyrical, categories. The struggle was between the forces of “freedom under a government of laws” (which entailed “marvelous diversity, the deep tolerance, the lawfulness of the free society … in which every individual has the opportunity to realize his creative powers”) and forces of “slavery under the grim oligarchy of the Kremlin.” By its lights, America was joining the Cold War struggle not as a geopolitical contest over the limits of Russian power but as a moral crusade for the free world. In such an endeavor, American policies were presented as a disinterested effort to advance the general interests of humanity. John Foster Dulles, a shrewd operator in crises and a tough exponent of American power, nonetheless described American foreign policy as a kind of global volunteer effort guided by principles different from any other historic state’s approach.
He observed that though it was “difficult for many to understand,” the United States was “really … motivated by considerations other than short-range expediency.” America’s influence would not restore the geopolitical balance, in this view, but transcend it: “It has been customary, for so many centuries, for nations to act merely to promote their immediate self-interest, to hurt their rivals, that it is not readily accepted that there can be a new era when nations will be guided by principle.” The implication that other nations had “selfish interests” while America had “principles” and “destiny” was as old as the Republic. What was new was that a global geopolitical contest in which the United States was the leader, not a bystander, was justified primarily on moral grounds, and the American national interest was disavowed. This call to universal responsibility underpinned the decisive American commitment to restoring a devastated postwar world holding the line against Soviet expansion. Yet when it came time to fight “hot” wars on the periphery of the Communist world, it proved a less certain guide.