The Ulster-Scot who became a key influence over US Cold War policy

GORDON LUCY remembers how diplomat George Kennan helped shape tactics in dealing with the Soviet Union

Between 1943 and his death in April 1945 President Roosevelt believed that the United States and the USSR would shape the post-war world, which was a not an unrealistic expectation.

However, FDR’s belief that the US and the USSR were two great liberal and reformist powers was delusional.

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The Red Army introduced Moscow-trained secret policemen into every country in Eastern Europe, installed communists in control of national radio stations and dismantled the institutions of civil society. They arrested, murdered or deported people who they believed were hostile to the Soviet Union.

George Kennan, the West’s greatest Kremlinologist, was of Ulster-Scots heritage. His Scotch-Irish ancestors had originally settled in Connecticut and Massachusetts in the 18th century. George was born in Milwaukee in 1904, graduated from Princeton, joined the US Foreign Service in 1926 and served as a diplomat in a variety of European countries.

In 1929 he immersed himself in the study of Russian history, politics, culture and language at the University of Berlin. By 1946 he had achieved a formidable expertise on the Soviet Union but he still exercised only minimal influence on US foreign policy. In the words of Peter Grose, he spent the war years in Moscow ‘bombarding the lower levels of Washington bureaucracy with analyses of communist evil’ but to no avail.

This all changed just as his posting as chargé d’affaires in the US Embassy in Moscow was drawing to a close in 1946.

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The US Treasury Department, perplexed by the USSR’s unwillingness to support the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, requested an explanation from the State Department.

Kennan’s response was the so-called ‘Long telegram’ (8,000 words), described by Clark Clifford, a key aide to President Truman, as ‘probably the most important, and most influential message ever sent by an American diplomat to Washington’. It became ‘the lodestar of US foreign policy during the Cold War’.

Kennan explained that the USSR was an aggressive and expansionist power that would test and probe, take advantage of any and every opportunity and seek to exploit any weakness in the West.

The USSR would continue to use governments or groups willing to work with the Soviets to gain control over other countries. Kennan believed that it was impossible to negotiate or placate the Soviets. The US must respond by making it clear to the Soviets that they would not be allowed to swallow up any more territory and that the US would respond with force if necessary. As the USSR was fundamentally weak, it would retreat if the West acted with determination.

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Pessimists gloomily believed the West had only two options: becoming embroiled in a third world war with a country that already occupied eastern Europe or appeasement which had failed to work with Hitler in 1930s.

Kennan advanced a third option: ‘containment’ of Soviet expansionism. Stalin, unlike Hitler, did not possess a timetable for aggression. Although he wished to dominate Europe and aspired to global domination, he was in no hurry about it.

If the US and its allies could be patient and contain Soviet expansionism without war or appeasement over a sufficiently long period of time the Russians would change their priorities. This third path would potentially lead to a settlement with the USSR or even, because of internal contradictions of the Soviet system, to its break-up.

The ‘Long telegram’ and his anonymous article ‘The Sources of Soviet Conduct’ were the inspiration behind the ‘Truman Doctrine’ of March 12, 1947.

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Between 1947 and 1950 Kennan was director of the State Department Policy Planning Staff. He advocated political and economic strategies to achieve ‘containment’, notably the Marshall Plan (which he played a leading role in drafting). However, he opposed – unsuccessfully – the ‘over-militarisation’ of policy as evidenced by the establishment of NATO, the hydrogen bomb and National Security Council Document #68 (which advocated rapid expansion of conventional forces and the nuclear arsenal).

As there was no meeting of minds between Kennan and Dean Acheson, who had succeeded George Marshall as secretary of state, he left the State Department in 1950 and, apart from brief spells as US Ambassador to the USSR (1952) and to Yugoslavia (1961-63), he played no direct role in the formulation of US foreign policy. However, he remained influential. For example, he offered support to the policy of détente pursued by President Nixon and Henry Kissinger.

Kennan died at the age of 101 on March 17, 2005. Because the Cold War ended exactly as he had predicted, you might well think that he derived great satisfaction from seeing his analysis comprehensively vindicated in the 1980s and early 1990s but not so. Despite the fact that Ronald Reagan was the US president who came closest to implementing his strategy, he regarded President Reagan as the most dangerous leader of the Cold War era. Of the fall of the Berlin Wall and German unification, he thought nothing good could come of it.

You might also imagine that his insight into why Western patience would pay off was derived from his study of the Soviet economy or Russian history. After all he had a long and distinguished career as a historian at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton, but actually he attributed it to his deep love of the greats of Russian literature, especially Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov.

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John Lewis Gaddis elaborated in his Pulitzer-Prize biography of Kennan.

The Bolshevik revolution, Kennan believed, had not fundamentally changed the Russian national character, reflected in their classic novels. The national character would eventually reassert itself to overthrow or subvert the Soviet system. When Kennan’s plane stopped to refuel in Omsk during his first visit to Siberia in June 1945, he stood under the wing and read Tolstoy aloud to an illiterate babushka (an old woman or grandmother) he had befriended in-flight. All the passengers gathered around to listen. This telling episode, when the Soviet system was at its zenith, underscored for him that something else co-existed in Russia, wholly alien to Marxism-Leninism.

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