Uncontained.

• Author: Heilbrunn, Jacob
• Position: The Realist

Seventy-five years ago, George F. Kennan, who was charge d'affaires in the American embassy in Moscow, sent what has become known as the "Long Telegram" to the State Department. The frustration that Kennan had felt for years over what he believed was a naive and excessively concessive policy toward Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union welled up in him as he drafted an 8,000-word missive. In it, he ranged widely across history to warn about the Soviet threat. Kennan diagnosed a uniquely dangerous ideological amalgam of traditional Russian imperialism and Marxism-Leninism that had emerged after 1917 to constitute

a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with US there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted...the international power of our state be broken if Soviet power is to be secure. But Kennan was also careful to note that the Kremlin, or, to put it more precisely, Stalin, was no gambler and usually withdrew "when strong resistance is encountered at any point." The Soviet challenge to the international order could be checked but only if America mustered the gumption to recognize that it faced a dire adversary. Kennan's stark depiction of Soviet intentions had a cataleptic effect in Washington. Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, an anti-Soviet hawk par excellence, was riveted by the essay and disseminated it to President Harry S. Truman and his cabinet, as well as to senators and congressmen. A year later, Kennan expanded upon it at the behest of Forrestal, who had helped install him as head of the Policy Planning Staff, enunciating a new doctrine that he published under the byline "X" in Foreign Affairs. It was called containment.

No sooner did Kennan's essay appear than Walter Lippmann denounced it. In a series of newspaper columns that were subsequently published as a book called The Cold War, Lippmann, a firm realist thinker, deemed X's proposed containment policy a "strategic monstrosity"--one that would prove fiscally and militarily unsustainable. Kennan was mortified. In his memoirs, Kennan lamented that Lippmann had misconstrued his recommendations: "He interpreted the concept of containment in just the military sense I had not meant to give it." Perhaps. But with the North Korean invasion of the South, the die was cast. Under the guidance of Paul Nitze, who was Kennan's successor at the Policy Planning Staff, the Truman administration drafted NSC-68. It codified containment by...