George F. Kennan: “The Sources of Soviet Conduct”

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

One of the officials who took a profound interest in Kennan’s “Long Telegram” was Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, who asked Kennan in late 1946 to prepare a paper dealing with Marxism in relation to Soviet power. On January 31, 1947, Kennan submitted the paper, which discussed the nature of Soviet power in terms of the policy problems it presented. Forrestal wrote Kennan that he was impressed and was forwarding the paper to Secretary of State George Marshall. Kennan subsequently sought and obtained permission to publish a modified version of it in Foreign Affairs, which he did in the summer of 1947 under the byline “X,” in a vain attempt to hide the fact that he was the author.

The article lays out Kennan's understanding of the Soviet Union. In it he uses, for the first time, the word containment. He recapitulates several themes from the “Long Telegram,” including the need to understand the Soviets and their outlook. He reiterates that the Soviet leadership must be understood in terms of their ideology, which permitted no cooperation between capitalism and Communism and which served as the basis for their dictatorial rule. Kennan stresses the outward-focused nature of this ideology; given the party's success in stamping out capitalism within the USSR's borders, the perceived threat had to be shifted to an external capitalist foe. Everything that the USSR did on the international stage, he notes, would be premised and justified by this perception. Kennan is careful to depict the nature of the foe that he believes the United States faces in the USSR. The Soviets were going to be difficult to deal with, he says, but the United States should not act as though the USSR intended to destroy them at the first available opportunity. The leaders of the USSR believed that they would ultimately triumph and were willing to be as patient as necessary to see the conflict through, necessitating an equally patient approach on the part of the United States.

Kennan suggests that the United States needed to “contain” the Soviet Union, to prevent it from expanding beyond its current borders. By applying appropriate counterforce to any aggressive Soviet maneuvers, the United States would be able to keep the USSR in check long enough for the internal flaws within the Soviet system to ensure its collapse. The Soviets, he says, were wholly uninterested in cooperation and would seek to apply constant pressure against the capitalist states to try to cause their destruction; the American response should be a commensurately constant application of counter-pressure.

Kennan articulates two cogent and prescient insights. First, he observes that the United States did not possess the power by itself to bring about the destruction of the Soviet Union. Rather, the United States could make it continually and progressively more difficult for Moscow to operate as it wished. Second, he warns that while the Soviets would be inclined toward patience and withdrawing from confrontation, they would not do so at the expense of their prestige. He echoes a warning from the “Long Telegram,” where he cautioned that the USSR considered its standing of paramount importance. Putting the Soviets in a position in which they could not back down without losing face would provoke armed conflict between the two powers, even if the Soviets knew that it was in their interest to avoid war. The key, he says, would be to behave coolly and rationally and always make sure to give the Soviets a way to both back down and save face.

Despite the article's impact on U.S. policy—and indeed because of that impact—Kennan always regretted what he saw as the article's failings, particularly its lack of clarity regarding the type of counterforce that should be applied. Kennan viewed the cold war principally in economic and political, rather than military, terms and meant “containment” in this light—the application of the appropriate economic and political pressure at the right times. While Kennan's idea of containment drove U.S. cold war policy for decades, it resulted in military containment. Kennan also regretted not having been more specific about the geographic limitations of containment. He did not envision a constant and global response to any move that the Soviets might make, but instead the application of counterforce where it was most appropriate and necessary and also the most likely to have the desired effect—USSR withdrawal.