George Kennan: The man who unwillingly helped create the Cold War.
The rise of Kennan
The year is 1941, George Kennan and a number of other American diplomats and journalists are being held under house arrest in Jeschke’s Grand Hotel in Eastern Germany as the Nazi’s officially declare war on the United States. As the senior ranking diplomat from the former US embassy in Berlin, Kennan was now responsible for the day to day well being of these United States citizens being detained in the hotel.
While war was ravaging the continent, Kennan was stuck listening to his fellow countrymen seek his help in addressing the lack of meat for dinner and other seemingly privileged complaints considering the current circumstances. It is easy to imagine that in this period he couldn’t help but reminisce about the Germany he had grown to love while living in Hamburg and Berlin just a little over a decade earlier.
He was stationed in Hamburg for a few years while working at the US consulate before being selected to study Russian Language and culture in Berlin. While Kennan was known to be quite pessimistic throughout his life, and rarely wrote about anything positive in the personal journals he kept between 1916–2004, he always referred to this period of time as the happiest he has ever been, and the happiest he ever will be.
By May 1942, after 6 months of being held under house arrest by the Nazi’s, and Kennan’s sanity at a serious risk of collapse. News came that all of the Americans being held were to be released and given safe passage out of Nazi Germany to Portugal. This would mark a big turning point in George Kennan’s political career as he would remain stationed in Lisbon negotiating with the Portuguese government about working with the Americans throughout the war.
As the State Department which officially was in charge of Kennan’s negotiations couldn’t seem to offer a coherent strategy in which to follow, George opened a direct communication channel with the white house and began to build a relationship with the executive office.
Fast forward to the end of World War Two in 1945 and George Kennan was now working directly with president Truman in developing a post-war strategy. Thanks to Kennan’s advanced understanding of Russian language and culture, as well as his experience working at the US embassy in Moscow between 1933–1937, he was appointed as deputy head of mission and sent back to the Soviet Union in 1945.
The taste of victory turns sour
While Russian culture and history were some of the few things Kennan genuinely enjoyed in life, his return to the Soviet Union was perhaps one of the most disappointing moments he had ever experienced.
Stalin’s purges had removed most of the intellectual and educated class which Kennan had befriended during his previous time in Moscow. And the people who remained were either too scared or physically prevented from freely socializing with diplomats and those associated with western governments.
On top of all that, the country still largely remained in ruins following the devastation carried out by the Germans over the previous four years.
George Kennan had long studied Communism and its philosophical underpinnings, but remained convinced it was nothing more than a friendlier sounding version of state run capitalism. In other words, he wasn’t a very big fan of the idea.
And while life in the Soviet Union in the early-mid 1930’s didn’t leave a profoundly hostile impression of Stalin’s regime upon Kennan. Surely this slap in the face forever changed the way he would view the spread of communism throughout the 20th century.
A new system emerges
By 1946, the cold war had already entered its early stages as the US and the Soviet Union began to establish their spheres of influence throughout Europe. This is when Kennan sent a telegram from the US embassy in Moscow back to Washington which would become the basis for US-Soviet relations up until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Quickly dubbed “the long telegram”, this document laid out what would become known as Soviet containment theory.
Containment theory initially described an ideological battle which should be waged in countries which were not yet already occupied by Soviet forces. Mainly that countries should be hostile to Communist ideology as they become exposed to the benefits of a Capitalist based society in terms of quality of life and the security that is provided by being under the American sphere of influence.
“We must formulate and put forward for other nations a much more positive and constructive picture of sort of world we would like to see than we have put forward in past. It is not enough to urge people to develop political processes similar to our own. Many foreign peoples, in Europe at least, are tired and frightened by experiences of past, and are less interested in abstract freedom than in security. They are seeking guidance rather than responsibilities. We should be better able than Russians to give them this. And unless we do, Russians certainly will.”
-George Kennan
This telegram was followed by a not-so-anonymous article written by Kennan in the journal “Foreign Affairs” in 1947 titled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” which describes Soviet containment theory in further detail.
While the long telegram attracted a lot of attention from officials in Washington, it was the more brazen and detailed description of containment theory in the Foreign Affairs article which began to shape US foreign policy.
Unbeknownst to Kennan, officials in Washington would take this concept of an ideological war literally and almost immediately began to use it as justification for military intervention as a means to counter Soviet influence.
Things get out of hand
While Kennan’s initial development of Soviet containment theory wasn’t aimed at all Socialist movements around the world, or present the idea that it should be countered with force. This was how it would be integrated into US foreign policy throughout the coming decades.
In fact, in the initial long telegram, Kennan even specified that Socialist movements could even coexist alongside the capitalist world.
“Experience has shown that peaceful and mutually profitable coexistence of capitalist and socialist states is entirely possible”
-George Kennan
The long telegram actually mentions that non-Soviet Socialist movements are seen by the Soviet Union as a bigger threat than Capitalists as they may detract other Socialists from gravitating towards Soviet influence and creating an entirely separate global Socialist power.
However, the anti-Soviet hysteria in the US which would give rise to McCarthyism would create the militaristic approach to Soviet containment which dominated the rest of the 20th century. The use of force would become the new approach to countering Socialist movements around the world.
The unintentional creation of an unstoppable force
Kennan realized the danger that physical military engagement between proxy forces could present, as they had the potential of turning into a real war and would make the possibility of easing relations almost impossible. As he began to express his worries, he was met with hostility and opposition by others in the State Department.
In Korea, he warned against pushing too far north and installing a regime openly hostile to the Soviet Union for fear of Chinese and Soviet reprisal. His warnings went unheard and his predictions came true as the Chinese poured across the border into North Korea and pushed UN forces back into South Korea.
He warned that the French war in Vietnam was hopeless, and that western forces had no possibility of winning both militarily or ideologically. He interpreted Ho Chi Minh as a Communist-Nationalist who had no intention of bowing to Moscow or Beijing. Thus, it would be against US interests to invade, but rather a diplomatic relationship would be more favorable in a similar sense to how the US treated Yugoslavia at the time.
This led George Kennan to become deeply dissatisfied with life in the Foreign Service entirely, and after a brief stint as Ambassador to Yugoslavia (1961–1963), he spent the rest of his career in the world of Academia.
While Kennan may have invented Soviet containment theory, he was also its biggest critic. He would go on to regret both the long telegram and the Foreign Affairs article for the rest of his life, becoming one of the most esteemed critics of US foreign policy.
In 2005, George Kennan passed away at the age of 101. Although he is not the most talked about figure in 20th century history, he certainly remains one of the most influential.
