Transcript
No sooner did the Second World War end than a new Cold War began between the United States and the Soviet Union. It was not a war of bullets and battlefields but of words and ideas, doctrines and ideology. That Cold War became the dominant feature of international relations in the 1940’s and 1950’s. And it was during that 1940’s that a remarkable man, George Kennan, who was a State Department diplomat in Moscow, as well as an expert on Russian history and Soviet ideology, became the creator of the strategy that American presidents thereafter adopted in managing this Cold War with the Soviet Union.
In 1946 George Kennan, at the behest of the Secretary of State, generated what came to be called The Long Telegram, a very lengthy analysis of the Soviet Union, Soviet communism, and Josef Stalin. Therein he argued that Soviet communism was animated by a Leninist ideology that called for it exerting constant pressure against the nations of the world that practiced democratic capitalism, such as the United States, and to try to infiltrate those nations with the ideas and ideals of communism.
Kennan then argued that the only was for the United States to thwart the expansionist ideological tendencies of communism was not to go to war but to develop a policy of persistent, firm, counter-pressure, what he called “Containment” aimed at containing the Soviet Union and its communist ideology and preventing it from expanding into other countries. It was this concept of containment that both the Secretary of State and President Truman adopted during the 1940’s as the foundational strategic concept behind American foreign policy.
Here was the problem: George Kennan’s language in his analyses of Soviet Communism talked about containment, but what he meant was containment by exerting political and economic pressure against the Soviet Union. He was not talking about military pressure against the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, President Truman and later presidents came to interpret containment as primarily a military doctrine around the world. That in turn led to more and more conflicts and flashpoints around the world between communist insurgencies and rebellions and the American effort to ensure that communism did not emerge to take the place of other governments.
And so, in some respects, Kennan was the architect of containment. Unfortunately, as he came to acknowledge late in his life, American presidents and diplomats had frequently misinterpreted his intentions.
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