February 1946

During a speech in Moscow in February 1946, Joseph Stalin declared that due to “the present capitalist conditions of world economic development,” future “catastrophic wars” would be impossible to avoid. The American public and the American government found Stalin’s speech alarming. Was it a threat? Less than a year from the end of the second world war, was a war with the Soviet Union now inevitable? Unsure what to make of Stalin’s saber-rattling, Secretary of State James Byrnes sent a telegram to George Kennan, the U.S. chargé d'affaires in Moscow, requesting an analysis: “We should welcome receiving from you an interpretive analysis of what we may expect in the way of future implementation of these announced policies.” Keenan’s response would become one of the most famous and influential documents in American diplomatic history and would become the foundation of American Cold War foreign policy.

Kennan’s 5,000-word response to Byrnes’ request is known to history as the “Long Telegram,” a title it earned by being the longest telegram in the history of the U.S. State Department. A 42-year-old career foreign service officer who grew up in Milwaukee, Kennan was an expert on Russian affairs. In the telegram Kennan emphasized Russia’s “traditional and instinctive sense of insecurity,” and “neurotic” worldview. Russia has no genuine expectation of living peaceably with the West, Kennan wrote, and even while appearing to participate in international diplomacy, the Soviets would pursue clandestine efforts to undermine capitalist countries and stimulate disunity.

Kennan’s Long Telegram created a sensation in Washington and was soon generally acknowledged to be an accurate representation of Soviet intentions. The following year Kennan submitted an article to the journal Foreign Affairs titled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.” Because the State Department permitted him to publish the article only if he did so anonymously, the author was identified only as “X.” Like its predecessor the Long Telegram, the “X Article” had an enormous impact on U.S. Cold War policy.

In the X Article Kennan argued that the Soviet Union was inherently expansionist, but that because their Marxist ideology anticipated that capitalism would eventually collapse on its own, the Soviets were not likely to try to overthrow capitalist countries by force. Instead, they would seek to fill “every nook and cranny” of the world where they could enter without great danger and would back away from places where met with strong opposition. The policy of the United States should be to “confront the Russians with unalterable counter-force at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world.” “Soviet pressure against free-world institutions,” he wrote, “cannot be charmed or talked out of existence.” Rather, Kennan concluded, “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.” A policy of containment, Kennan predicted, would lead to “the break-up or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power.” And thus was born the Cold War foreign policy of “containment.”

Over the rest of his long and distinguished career, which would include a Pulitzer Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a stint as ambassador to the Soviet Union, Kennan would insist that his analysis had been misconstrued to see the Soviets as a primarily military threat and that his conclusions had been misused by the military industrial complex to justify the arms race. Nevertheless, his conclusion that the Soviet Union should “be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and maneuvers of Soviet policy,” became the bedrock foundation of American Cold War foreign policy.

George F. Kennan was born on February 16, 1904, one hundred nineteen years ago today. He died in March 2005 at age 101, survived by four children and his wife of 74 years and widely regarded as the most influential diplomat of the 20th century.