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The American Paradox
A History of the United States Since 1945

v4.0 Steven M. Gillon

Chapter 1 The Specter of Appeasement: The Cold War, 1945–1949

On February 22, 1946, the State Department’s telex machine began clattering with a secret eight-thousand-word telegram from Moscow. The cable, written by George Frost Kennan, a forty-two-year-old Soviet specialist in the U.S. embassy, tried to explain Soviet aggression to puzzled officials in Washington. Since the end of World War II, U.S. policymakers had grown increasingly alarmed as the Soviets violated wartime agreements and tightened their military grip over Eastern Europe. Worried officials were all asking the same questions: What were Soviet intentions? And how should the United States respond to them? They turned to Kennan for the answers.

Kennan laid out a frightening picture of an aggressive Soviet Union intent upon world domination. The Soviets, he wired, were driven by a “neurotic view of world affairs” that emerged from an “instinctive Russian sense of insecurity.” They compensated for their insecurity by going on the attack “in patient but deadly struggle for total destruction of rival power, never in compacts and compromises with it.” Moscow, he suggested, was “highly sensitive to logic of force. For this reason it can easily withdraw—and usually does—when strong resistance is encountered at any point.” According to  Kennan’s analysis, the Soviets were solely to blame for international tensions, negotiations and compromise had reached an impasse, and only military and economic pressure could tame the Russian bear.

Kennan’s telegram caused a sensation in Washington. “Splendid analysis,” exclaimed Secretary of State James Byrnes. The following year, Kennan published an expanded public version of the telegram in an article written under the pseudonym “Mr. X.” The Soviets, he argued, saw the world divided into hostile capitalist and Communist camps, between which there could be no peace. He recommended a U.S. foreign policy based on the “long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.” From Kennan’s essay a word emerged to characterize a new experiment in American foreign policy: containment.

Primary Source 1.1: The Sources of Soviet Conduct

George Kennan, a student of Russian language and history, served in the American embassy in Moscow from 1933 to 1937 and again from 1944 to 1946. His understanding of Soviet policy led to his warning in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs under the pseudonym “Mr. X.”

The political personality of Soviet power as we know it today is the product of ideology and circumstances: Ideology inherited by the present Soviet leaders from the movement in which they had their political origin, and circumstances of the power which they have now exercised for nearly three decades in Russia. . . .

It is difficult to summarize the set of ideological concepts with which the Soviet leaders came into power. Marxian ideology . . . has always been in process of subtle evolution. . . . But the outstanding features of Communist thought as it existed in 1916 may perhaps be summarized as follows: (a) that the central factor in the life of man, the fact which determines the character of public life and the “physiognomy of society,” is the system by which material goods are produced and exchanged; (b) that the capitalist system of production is a nefarious one which inevitably leads to the exploitation of the working class by the capital-owning class and is incapable of developing adequately the economic resources of society or of distributing fairly the material goods produced by human labor; (c) that capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction and must, in view of the inability of the capital-owning class to adjust itself to economic change, result eventually and inescapably in a revolutionary transfer of power to the working class; and (d) that imperialism, the final phase of capitalism, leads directly to war and revolution. . . .

These considerations make Soviet diplomacy at once easier and more difficult to deal with than the diplomacy of individual aggressive leaders like Napoleon and Hitler. On the one hand it is more sensitive to contrary force. . . . On the other hand it cannot be easily defeated or discouraged by a single victory on the part of its opponents. And the patient persistence by which it is animated means that it can be effectively countered not by sporadic acts which represent the momentary whims of democratic opinion but only by intelligent long-range policies on the part of Russia’s adversaries—policies no less steady in their purpose, and no less variegated and resourceful in their application, than those of the Soviet Union itself.

In these circumstances it is clear 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. It is important to note, however, that such a policy has nothing to do with outward histrionics: with threats or blustering or superfluous gestures of outward “toughness.” While the Kremlin is basically flexible in its reaction to political realities, it is by no means unamenable to considerations of prestige. Like almost any other government, it can be placed by tactless and threatening gestures in a position where it cannot afford to yield even though this might be dictated by its sense of realism. The Russian leaders are keen judges of human psychology, and as such they are highly conscious that loss of temper and of self-control is never a source of strength in political affairs. They are quick to exploit such evidences of weakness. . . .

In the light of the above, it will be clearly seen that the Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the Western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and maneuvers of Soviet policy, but which cannot be charmed or talked out of existence. The Russians look forward to a duel of infinite duration, and they see that already they have scored great successes.

The “Long Telegram” and the “Mr. X” article provided the ideological justification for a new “get-tough” approach with the Soviets. The strategy of containment fundamentally transformed American foreign policy. It ripped the United States from its isolationist roots, imposed new international obligations on the American people, and created a massive national security state. World War II had reconfigured the international environment and America’s place in it, but it had failed to produce a corresponding change in American attitudes toward the world. Once the war ended, most American soldiers planned to return home and most policymakers planned to reduce the nation’s military commitments abroad. At the same time, victory raised expectations of a peaceful postwar world shaped by American commerce and influenced by American values. As a result, the Cold War confronted America with a paradox: How could the nation assume its new position of world power, and justify the dramatic enlargement of the national security state, while also being true to its democratic faith in limited government?