George F. Kennan: “Long Telegram”

Impact

For the next two and a half years, Kennan was one of the most influential people in American foreign policy. It was not an outwardly auspicious time to be an American diplomat. The Soviet Union extended its control over Eastern European states, threatened war over the status of Berlin and launched a blockade of supplies to the city, exploded its own atomic bomb, and added China, the world's most populous nation, as an ally.

In response, Kennan was one of the principal architects of the European Recovery Program, colloquially known as the Marshall Plan after Secretary of State George Marshall. The United States sent $12 billion in grant money as aid to European states as they recovered from World War II between 1948 and 1952, to allow them to repair their economic infrastructures so they could rebuild world trade and financial systems. Aid was offered to all European states, regardless of whether they were democratic or Communist, and Stalin was embarrassed to have to refuse Marshall aid for his allies, exactly as Kennan had hoped. Western Europe returned to economic prominence in record time, in particular, West Germany, which experienced an economic “miracle” owing to the Marshall Plan. In the 1950s, following up on Kennan's logic in terms of containment, the Truman administration encouraged France and West Germany to bind together their economies further in order to avoid the sort of conflicts that had brought about the previous three European wars and to stand united in the face of the Communist threat. The long-term result was the creation of the European Economic Community, the basis for today's European Union. Economic strength, peaceful cooperation, belief in the efficacy of liberal democratic institutions—these were the hallmarks of Kennan's ideas on what containment was all about, and they worked perfectly here.

The problem was that the results of such policies were long in gestation. In the short term, between 1947 and 1950, what voters in the United States saw was tax money shipped out of the country while Communists seemed to be advancing to challenge American power and hegemony all over the world, and successfully too. Worse, a series of spy scandals inside the United States produced a hysterical overreaction, leading to a search for Communists infiltrating American government and undermining democratic institutions in the name of the Soviet Union's alleged promulgation of a worldwide Communist revolution. As Kennan urged, in speeches and over diplomatic tables, Stalin was too worried about maintaining his own power in Moscow to prioritize the spread of Communism abroad. Few people were listening anymore, especially when Republicans condemned the Democratic Truman administration for being soft on Communism.

In 1949, George Marshall resigned as secretary of state owing to ill health and was replaced by Dean Acheson. Acheson accordingly replaced Kennan as the head of the Policy Planning Staff with Paul Nitze, Kennan's former deputy and a far more hawkish foreign policy expert for whom Kennan was both a friend and a rival. Where Kennan believed that Stalin's Soviet Union had little interest in the spread of Communism to the rest of the world as anything other than a reduction in potential enemies, Nitze thought that the Soviets were determined to challenge U.S. power in the world and would stop at nothing to prepare to win a future nuclear war. Likewise, where Kennan was more focused on using American principles and economics to persuade other states in the world to resist the call to go Communist, Nitze believed the only proper preparation to take on the Soviets in the world was military as opposed to political or economic.

In 1950, Nitze drafted a National Security Council policy paper, referred to as NSC-68 (and formally titled “United States Objectives and Programs for National Security”), that advocated for the dedication of a fifth of the entire budget of the United States to the preparation for war around the world, both conventional and nuclear, in order to contain Nitze's version of the Soviet threat. While Kennan's idea of containment was more practical in terms of the maintenance of the U.S. diplomatic reputation in the world in the long run, Nitze's idea of containment was hands on and immediately demonstrative to the American voter that the government was doing something to counter the threat of a Soviet takeover of the world. Containment took on a militaristic caste, much to Kennan's dismay, and for the rest of the Cold War, the United States would apply military (and covert espionage) solutions to the spread of Communism. In later years, Nitze said that Kennan “always thought that I hijacked our Cold War policy of containment away from him. And I did, of course.”

The United States eventually won the Cold War, owing to the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union, which Kennan had predicted as far back as 1933. In some respects, his advocacy of cultural and economic challenges to Soviet power were revisited in the 1980s when Ronald Reagan funded the Strategic Defense Initiative, a laser-guided missile defense system that the Soviets could not afford to research, and in Reagan's championing of American values in opposition to what he called the “evil empire.” (This was a term Kennan despised as much as he despised Reagan's nuclear policy. Only in generous, though realistic hindsight could such policies be termed a version of containment as Kennan saw it.) Still, the policy of containment would retain a military focus through the end of the Cold War, spawning American military interventions in Korea and Vietnam and, even more damaging, CIA interventions in Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, the Congo, Iraq, Chile, Argentina, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan.

To the end of his life at the age of 101, George Kennan pleaded not to be associated with such actions, as they did not reflect his intentions when he wrote the “Long Telegram.” He would be lauded and appreciated as a diplomatic visionary for the rest of his life. Yet he would almost never make his way again out of the halls of academia into the offices of embassies and negotiating conferences, much to his chagrin. He died believing himself misunderstood and underappreciated. Containment continues to be associated with his name as its progenitor, whatever his wishes.