Why does Kennan believe the Soviet Union poses a threat to the United States? Why is the Soviet Union so suspicious of the outside world and how do these suspicions shape Soviet foreign policy? What actions are the Soviets likely to take and how should the United States respond? Does Kennan believe the United States should go to war against the Soviet Union?
How similar are the policies proposed by Kennan to those proposed in Truman and "United States Objectives and Programs for National Security?" How do Kennan, Truman and "United States Objectives and Programs for National Security" show the “containment” of communism becoming the centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy? In what ways does Lyndon Johnson use containment as a justification for U.S. action in South Vietnam in his "Special Message to the Congress on U.S. Policy in Southeast Asia" and "Peace Without Conquest"? How do Dulles and the Students for a Democratic Society criticize containment?
Introduction
U.S. diplomat, scholar, and public intellectual George Kennan (1904 – 2005) was one of the nation’s most perceptive observers of the Soviet Union during the early Cold War. Kennan entered the Foreign Service in 1926. Fluent in Russian, he was stationed in Latvia prior to the U.S. diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union in 1933. He served on the embassy staff in Moscow before and after World War II.
In February 1946, Kennan authored a lengthy analysis commonly called the Long Telegram. (To cable a message more than 5,000 words long from Moscow to Washington was highly unusual, showing the urgency of the report). Kennan had been asked to explain why the Soviet Union was opposed to the newly formed World Bank and International Monetary Fund, but he also took the opportunity to offer a perceptive, wide-ranging essay about the methods and motives of Soviet communism and how the United States should respond. This was the policy of containment, which Kennan described in detail in an article entitled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” published in Foreign Affairs in 1947. Its essence, as Kennan phrased it in that article, was that “the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.”
Containment became the keystone of America’s Cold War policies. Secretary of State George Marshall appointed Kennan the first director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, a position he held from 1947 – 1948. However, the diplomat’s finer points were soon forgotten. The Truman Doctrine all but promised that the United States would resist each and every instance of Soviet expansion. Kennan had advised that the United States must carefully choose its points of resistance, based upon a dispassionate measure of the nation’s long-term global aims. While Kennan had explained that containment could take many forms, by 1950 containment had been militarized by NSC 68. A close reading and comparison of these three documents – the Long Telegram, the Truman Doctrine, and NSC 68 – is an excellent way to trace the creation and rapid evolution of containment.
—David Krugler
Source: The Chargé in the Soviet Union (Kennan) to the Secretary of State, February 22, 1946 [Document 475], The Foreign Relations of the United States, 1946, Vol. VI, Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, 1969).
Answer to Dept’s 284, Feb 3 [telegram]1 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 dangerous degree of over-simplification. I hope, therefore, Dept will bear with me if I submit in answer to this question five parts, subjects of which will be roughly as follows:
(1) Basic features of post-war Soviet outlook.
(2) Background of this outlook.
(3) Its projection in practical policy on official level.
(4) Its projection on unofficial level.
(5) Practical deductions from standpoint of US policy.
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. There follows
Part 1: Basic Features of Post War Soviet Outlook, as Put Forward by Official Propaganda Machine, Are as Follows:
(a) USSR still lives in antagonistic “capitalist encirclement” with which in the long run there can be no permanent peaceful coexistence. As stated by Stalin in 1927 to a delegation of American workers:
“In course of further development of international revolution there will emerge two centers of world significance: a socialist center, drawing to itself the countries which tend toward socialism, and a capitalist center, drawing to itself the countries that incline toward capitalism. Battle between these two centers for command of world economy will decide fate of capitalism and of communism in entire world.”
(b) Capitalist world is beset with internal conflicts, inherent in nature of capitalist society. These conflicts are insoluble by means of peaceful compromise. Greatest of them is that between England and US.
(c) Internal conflicts of capitalism inevitably generate wars. Wars thus generated may be of two kinds: intra-capitalist wars between two capitalist states, and wars of intervention against socialist world. Smart capitalists, vainly seeking escape from inner conflicts of capitalism, incline toward latter [that is, wars against socialist nations] . . .
So much for premises. To what deductions do they lead from standpoint of Soviet policy? To following:
(a) Everything must be done to advance relative strength of USSR as factor in international society. Conversely, no opportunity must be missed to reduce strength and influence, collectively as well as individually, of capitalist powers.
(b) Soviet efforts, and those of Russia’s friends abroad, must be directed toward deepening and exploiting of differences and conflicts between capitalist powers. If these eventually deepen into an “imperialist” war, this war must be turned into revolutionary upheavals within the various capitalist countries.
(c) “Democratic-progressive” elements abroad are to be utilized to maximum to bring pressure to bear on capitalist governments along lines agreeable to Soviet interests . . .
Part 2: Background of Outlook
Before examining ramifications of this party line in practice there are certain aspects of it to which I wish to draw attention.
First, it does not represent natural outlook of Russian people. [Russians] are, by and large, friendly to outside world, eager for experience of it, eager to measure against it talents they are conscious of possessing, eager above all to live in peace and enjoy fruits of their own labor. Party line only represents thesis which official propaganda machine puts forward with great skill and persistence to a public often remarkably resistant in the stronghold of its innermost thoughts. But party line is binding for outlook and conduct of people who make up apparatus of power – party, secret police and Government – and it is exclusively with these that we have to deal.
Second, please note that premises on which this party line is based are for most part simply not true. Experience has shown that peaceful and mutually profitable coexistence of capitalist and socialist states is entirely possible. . . . At bottom of Kremlin’s2 neurotic view of world affairs is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity . . . they have always feared foreign penetration, feared direct contact between Western world and their own, feared what would happen if Russians learned truth about world without or if foreigners learned truth about world within. And they have learned to seek security only in patient but deadly struggle for total destruction of rival power, never in compacts and compromises with it.
It was no coincidence that Marxism [that is, communism], which had smoldered ineffectively for half a century in Western Europe, caught hold and blazed for first time in Russia [where] . . . in the name of Marxism they sacrificed every single ethical value in their methods and tactics. Today they cannot dispense with it. It is fig leaf of their moral and intellectual respectability. Without it they would stand before history, at best, as only the last of that long succession of cruel and wasteful Russian rulers who have relentlessly forced country on to ever new heights of military power in order to guarantee external security of their internally weak regimes . . .
Part 3: Projection of Soviet Outlook in Practical Policy on Official Level
We have now seen nature and background of Soviet program. What may we expect by way of its practical implementation? . . .
(a) Internal policy devoted to increasing in every way strength and prestige of Soviet state: intensive military-industrialization; maximum development of armed forces; great displays to impress outsiders; continued secretiveness about internal matters, designed to conceal weaknesses and to keep opponents in dark.
(b) Wherever it is considered timely and promising, efforts will be made to advance official limits of Soviet power. For the moment, these efforts are restricted to certain neighboring points conceived of here as being of immediate strategic necessity, such as Northern Iran, Turkey . . .
(e) Russians will strive energetically to develop Soviet representation in, and official ties with, countries in which they sense strong possibilities of opposition to Western centers of power. This applies to such widely separated points as Germany, Argentina, Middle Eastern countries, etc. . . .
Part 4: Following May Be Said as to What We May Expect by Way of Implementation of Basic Soviet Policies on Unofficial, or Subterranean Plane . . . for Which Soviet Government Accepts no Responsibility . . .
(a) To undermine general political and strategic potential of major western powers. Efforts will be made in such countries to disrupt national self confidence, to hamstring measures of national defense, to increase social and industrial unrest, to stimulate all forms of disunity. All persons with grievances, whether economic or racial, will be urged to seek redress not in mediation and compromise, but in defiant violent struggle for destruction of other elements of society. Here poor will be set against rich, black against white, young against old, newcomers against established residents, etc.
(b) On unofficial plane particularly violent efforts will be made to weaken power and influence of Western Powers [on] colonial backward, or dependent peoples. On this level, no holds will be barred. Mistakes and weaknesses of western colonial administration will be mercilessly exposed and exploited. Liberal opinion in Western countries will be mobilized to weaken colonial policies. Resentment among dependent peoples will be stimulated . . .
(c) Where individual governments stand in path of Soviet purposes pressure will be brought for their removal from office. This can happen where governments directly oppose Soviet foreign policy aims (Turkey, Iran), where they seal their territories off against Communist penetration (Switzerland, Portugal), or where they compete too strongly . . .
(d) In foreign countries Communists will, as a rule, work toward destruction of all forms of personal independence, economic, political or moral . . .
(e) Everything possible will be done to set major Western Powers against each other . . .
(f) In general, all Soviet efforts on unofficial international plane will be negative and destructive in character, designed to tear down sources of strength beyond reach of Soviet control. This is only in line with basic Soviet instinct that there can be no compromise with rival power and that constructive work can start only when communist power is dominant . . .
Part 5: [Practical Deductions From Standpoint of US Policy]
In summary, we have here a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with US there can be no permanent modus vivendi,3 that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure. This political force has complete power of disposition over energies of one of world’s greatest peoples and resources of world’s richest national territory, and is borne along by deep and powerful currents of Russian nationalism . . . this is admittedly not a pleasant picture . . . but I would like to record my conviction that problem is within our power to solve – and that without recourse to any general military conflict. And in support of this conviction there are certain observations of a more encouraging nature I should like to make:
(1) Soviet power, unlike that of Hitlerite Germany, is neither schematic nor adventuristic. It does not work by fixed plans. It does not take unnecessary risks. Impervious to logic of reason, and it is highly sensitive to logic of force. For this reason it can easily withdraw – and usually does when strong resistance is encountered at any point. Thus, if the adversary has sufficient force and makes clear his readiness to use it, he rarely has to do so. If situations are properly handled there need be no prestige-engaging showdowns.
(2) Gauged against Western World as a whole, Soviets are still by far the weaker force. Thus, their success will really depend on degree of cohesion, firmness and vigor which Western World can muster. And this is factor which it is within our power to influence.
(3) Success of Soviet system, as form of internal power, is not yet finally proven. It has yet to be demonstrated that it can survive supreme test of successive transfer of power from one individual or group to another . . .
(4) All Soviet propaganda beyond Soviet security sphere is basically negative and destructive. It should therefore be relatively easy to combat it by any intelligent and really constructive program.
For those reasons I think we may approach calmly and with good heart problem of how to deal with Russia. As to how this approach should be made, I only wish to advance, by way of conclusion, following comments:
(1) Our first step must be to apprehend, and recognize for what it is, the nature of the movement with which we are dealing. We must study it with same courage, detachment, objectivity, and same determination not to be emotionally provoked or unseated by it . . .
(2) We must see that our public is educated to realities of Russian situation. I cannot over-emphasize importance of this. Press cannot do this alone. It must be done mainly by Government, which is necessarily more experienced and better informed on practical problems involved . . . I am convinced that there would be far less hysterical anti-Sovietism in our country today if realities of this situation were better understood by our people . . .
(3) Much depends on health and vigor of our own society. World communism is like malignant parasite which feeds only on diseased tissue. This is point at which domestic and foreign policies meet. Every courageous and incisive measure to solve internal problems of our own society, to improve self-confidence, discipline, morale and community spirit of our own people, is a diplomatic victory over Moscow . . .
(4) We must formulate and put forward for other nations a much more positive and constructive picture of sort of world we would like to see than we have put forward in past. It is not enough to urge people to develop political processes similar to our own. Many foreign peoples, in Europe at least, are tired and frightened by experiences of past, and are less interested in abstract freedom than in security. They are seeking guidance rather than responsibilities. We should be better able than Russians to give them this. And unless we do, Russians certainly will.
(5) Finally we must have courage and self-confidence to cling to our own methods and conceptions of human society. After all, the greatest danger that can befall us in coping with this problem of Soviet communism, is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping.
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