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Foreign Affairs
Foreign Affairs is an American magazine and website on international relations and U.S. foreign policy published since 1922 by the Council on Foreign Relations six times annually...
magazine in July 1947. The article was written by George F. Kennan
George F. Kennan
George Frost Kennan was an American adviser, diplomat, political scientist and historian, best known as "the father of containment" and as a key figure in the emergence of the Cold War...
, the Deputy Chief of Mission
Deputy Chief of Mission
A Deputy Chief of Mission , is the number-two diplomat assigned to an embassy or other diplomatic mission. He or she is usually considered the second-in-command or top lieutenant to the Head of Mission...
of the United States to the USSR, from 1944 to 1946, under ambassador
Ambassador
An ambassador is the highest ranking diplomat who represents a nation and is usually accredited to a foreign sovereign or government, or to an international organization....
W. Averell Harriman
W. Averell Harriman
William Averell Harriman was an American Democratic Party politician, businessman, and diplomat. He was the son of railroad baron E. H. Harriman. He served as Secretary of Commerce under President Harry S. Truman and later as the 48th Governor of New York...
.
Background
G. F. Kennan had been stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow as minister-counselor since 1944. Although highly critical of the Soviet system, the mood within the U.S. State Department was friendship towards the Soviets, since they were an important ally in the war against Nazi Germany.In February 1946, the United States Treasury asked the U.S. Embassy in Moscow why the Soviets were not supporting the newly-created World Bank
World Bank
The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans to developing countries for capital programmes.The World Bank's official goal is the reduction of poverty...
and the International Monetary Fund
International Monetary Fund
The International Monetary Fund is an organization of 187 countries, working to foster global monetary cooperation, secure financial stability, facilitate international trade, promote high employment and sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty around the world...
. In reply, Kennan wrote the Long Telegram outlining his opinions and views of the Soviets; it arrived in Washington on February 22, 1946. Among its most-remembered parts was that while Soviet power was impervious to the logic of reason, it was highly sensitive to the logic of force.
The Long Telegram
In writing the Long Telegram, his reply to the U.S. Treasury Department, Kennan was profoundly aware of the matters at stake; its preface says:- Answer to Dept’s 284, Feb. 3,13 involves questions so intricate, so delicate, so strange to our form of thought, and so important to analysis of our international environment that I cannot compress answers into single brief message without yielding to what I feel would be a dangerous degree of oversimplification. I hope, therefore, Dept will bear with me if I submit in answer to this question five parts...I apologize in advance for this burdening of telegraphic channel; but questions involved are of such urgent importance, particularly in view of recent events, that our answers to them, if they deserve attention at all, seem to me to deserve it at once.
Kennan described dealing with Soviet Communism as “undoubtedly greatest task our diplomacy has ever faced and probably greatest it will ever have to face”. In the first two sections, he posited concepts that became the foundation of American Cold War policy:
- The USSR perceived itself at perpetual war with capitalism;
- The USSR viewed left-wing, but non-communist, groups in other countries as an even worse enemy of itself than the capitalist ones;
- The USSR would use controllable Marxists in the capitalist world as allies;
- Soviet aggression was fundamentally not aligned with the views of the Russian people or with economic reality, but in historic Russian nationalismNationalismNationalism is a political ideology that involves a strong identification of a group of individuals with a political entity defined in national terms, i.e. a nation. In the 'modernist' image of the nation, it is nationalism that creates national identity. There are various definitions for what...
and neurosisNeurosisNeurosis is a class of functional mental disorders involving distress but neither delusions nor hallucinations, whereby behavior is not outside socially acceptable norms. It is also known as psychoneurosis or neurotic disorder, and thus those suffering from it are said to be neurotic...
; - The Soviet government's structure prohibited objective or accurate pictures of internal and external reality.
According to Kennan, the Soviet Union did not see the possibility for long-term peaceful coexistence
Peaceful coexistence
Peaceful coexistence was a theory developed and applied by the Soviet Union at various points during the Cold War in the context of its ostensibly Marxist–Leninist foreign policy and was adopted by Soviet-influenced "Communist states" that they could peacefully coexist with the capitalist bloc...
with the capitalist world. It was its ever-present aim to advance the socialist cause. Capitalism was a menace to the ideals of socialism, and capitalists could not be trusted or allowed to influence the Soviet people. Outright conflict was never considered a desirable avenue for the propagation of the Soviet cause, but their eyes and ears were always open for the opportunity to take advantage of “diseased tissue” anywhere in the world.
In Section Five, Kennan exposited Soviet weaknesses and proposed U.S. strategy, stating that despite the great challenge, “my conviction that problem is within our power to solve—and that without recourse to any general military conflict.” He argued that the Soviet Union would be sensitive to force, that the Soviets were weak, compared to the united Western world, that the Soviets were vulnerable to internal instability, and that Soviet propaganda was primarily negative and destructive. Kennan advocated sound appraisal, public education, solutions of the internal problems of U.S. society, proposing for other nations a positive picture of the world the U.S. would like to see, and faith in the superiority of the Western way of life over the collective ideals of Soviet Communists.
The Clifford-Elsey Report
In July 1946, President Truman enlisted the services of one of his senior advisers, Clark CliffordClark Clifford
Clark McAdams Clifford was an American lawyer who served United States Presidents Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Jimmy Carter, serving as United States Secretary of Defense for Johnson....
, to prepare a report on Soviet relations that would provide detail on Soviet disregard for post-war agreements. The President, who was growing frustrated by Soviet actions, wanted “to be ready to reveal to the whole world the full truth about the Russian failure to honor agreements.” With the assistance of George Elsey
George Elsey
George Elsey was a military advisor to Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S Truman. A commander in the U.S...
, Clifford set out to write a report that would take the analysis of the Long Telegram and translate it into concrete policy recommendations. The pair solicited the input of senior officials in the Departments of State, War, and Justice, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Central Intelligence Group, and utilized the expertise of George Kennan and Charles Bohlen in writing their report.
The final report, entitled American Relations with the Soviet Union, was presented solely to the President on September 24, 1946, and it did not circulate beyond his desk. In fact, President Truman ordered that all copies of the report be delivered to him because the report was of great value to him “but if it leaked, it would blow the roof off the White House...we’d have the most serious situation on our hands that has yet occurred in my Administration.” The report would remain top secret and un-circulated until it appeared in Arthur Krock
Arthur Krock
Arthur Krock was a journalist and received the nickname "Dean of Washington newsmen". Born in Glasgow, Kentucky in 1887, he grew up with his grandparents, Emmanuel and Henrietta Morris...
’s Memoirs in 1968.
The report provided Truman with the background of wartime relations with the Soviet Union, insight into existing agreements, and most important, detail on Soviet violations of agreements with the United States. It also stressed the importance of a well-informed public because “only a well-informed public will support the stern policies which Soviet activities make imperative”.
The first mention of the concept of “restraining and confining
Containment
Containment was a United States policy using military, economic, and diplomatic strategies to stall the spread of communism, enhance America’s security and influence abroad, and prevent a "domino effect". A component of the Cold War, this policy was a response to a series of moves by the Soviet...
” the Soviet influence appeared in the Clifford-Elsey Report.
Origin of the article
The Sources of Soviet Conduct began as a private report prepared for Secretary of Defense James ForrestalJames Forrestal
James Vincent Forrestal was the last Cabinet-level United States Secretary of the Navy and the first United States Secretary of Defense....
in January 1947. It was never intended as a public document, but on the urging of Hamilton Fish Armstrong
Hamilton Fish Armstrong
Hamilton Fish Armstrong was a United States diplomat and editor.-Biography:He attended Princeton University, and started his journalistic activity at the New Republic. During the First World War, he was a military attaché in Serbia...
, editor of Foreign Affairs, Kennan obtained permission from Forrestal to publish the article under the pseudonym “X”. When published, the
article was not intended to be a statement of the government’s official views of the Soviet
situation. But when it was revealed that the author was George Kennan, the connection to official policy was made and some high ranking officials, including Secretary of State George C. Marshall, questioned the approval for the publication.
Kennan was heavily involved in the evolution of US policy toward the Soviet Union following World War II. Both his writing of the Long Telegram and his input into the Clifford-Elsey Report factored into the content of the article. When he wrote the Long Telegram, it was a review of the facts of how the Soviet Union saw the world. The Clifford-Elsey Report took those facts and interpreted how they affected the world and what the US should do about it. The X Article took the information presented in the two prior reports and constructed a road map for the Cold War. The article proved to be the public face of American foreign policy in the Cold War — even though Kennan himself has noted that he felt that he was misunderstood — in the statement that the “United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment
Containment
Containment was a United States policy using military, economic, and diplomatic strategies to stall the spread of communism, enhance America’s security and influence abroad, and prevent a "domino effect". A component of the Cold War, this policy was a response to a series of moves by the Soviet...
of Russian expansive tendencies.”
This policy was misinterpreted to mean that the US would contain the Soviet Union globally. Much of the meaning that was interpreted from the article, even within the government, was not the true meaning that Kennan intended. He admitted that there were serious deficiencies in the article and he was afflicted with ulcers over the response that the article received.
See also
- Cordon sanitaireCordon sanitaireCordon sanitaire — or quarantine line — is a French phrase that, literally translated, means "sanitary cordon". Though in French it originally denoted a barrier implemented to stop the spread of disease, it has often been used in English in a metaphorical sense to refer to attempts to prevent the...
(French historian André FontaineAndré FontaineAndré Fontaine is a French historian and journalist . He started working at Temps Présent, and then at Le Monde in 1947, at the official beginning of the Cold War. He became the newspaper's editor from 1969 to 1985, and director from 1985 to 1991. As of February 2007 he was still contributing...
argued that the Cold War had started immediately after the 1917 October RevolutionOctober RevolutionThe October Revolution , also known as the Great October Socialist Revolution , Red October, the October Uprising or the Bolshevik Revolution, was a political revolution and a part of the Russian Revolution of 1917...
)
External links
- "The Sources of Soviet Conduct"
- The 'Long Telegram'
- NSC-68: U.S. Objectives and Programs for National Security, NSC-68 was submitted directly to President Harry Truman in 1950 by an ad hoc interdepartmental committee under its Policy Planning head, Paul NitzePaul NitzePaul Henry Nitze was a high-ranking United States government official who helped shape Cold War defense policy over the course of numerous presidential administrations.-Early life, education, and family:...
.