Dying by the Sword by Monica Duffy Toft

Author:Monica Duffy Toft
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2023-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Cold War Grand Strategy

Containment was not one specific grand strategy. Instead, it was an overarching framework that subsequent US administrations during the Cold War interpreted in different ways according to their changing situations, ideologies, and policy preferences. As political scientist Nina Silove argues, containment “did not mandate a specific set of means to be mobilized for particular ends.”3 John Lewis Gaddis, the leading chronicler of US grand strategy during the Cold War, emphasizes that there were “strategies of containment” during this period,4 but containment as an organizing principle held these together and led them to success: “The United States and its allies sustained a strategy that was far more consistent, effective, and morally justifiable than anything their adversaries were able to manage.”5

The containment strategy was the result of a string of events and the work of several people, but George Kennan stands out as its chief architect.6 “George Kennan came as close to authoring the diplomatic doctrine of his era as any diplomat in our history,” writes Henry Kissinger.7 Kennan, a junior diplomat at the time, was serving as the Chargé d’Affaires of the American embassy in Moscow, when he authored the Long Telegram in February 1946, which came to be the foundational document for the new strategy. “Despite its verbosity, the cable’s central theme was relatively succinct: ‘At the bottom of the Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs is [a] traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity,’ ” writes historian James Chace.8 He continued, “Kennan stressed a program based not on military adventurism but on rehabilitating the ‘health and vigor of our own society,’ so that the Russians would be met at all contested points by the only thing they understood—strength.”9 The Long Telegram gave a new direction to US Soviet policy and propelled Kennan’s career forward. “The Long Telegram undoubtedly had an impact on the thinking of senior policymakers in Washington . . . Kennan’s message helped construct the intellectual supports for the already developing disposition of firmness towards the Soviet Union.”10

In May 1947, incoming Secretary of State George Marshall appointed Kennan to be the first director of the new Policy Planning Staff, charged with formulating America’s new foreign policy and grand strategy.11 Foreign Affairs magazine published Kennan’s article, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” under the pseudonym X because of Kennan’s official government position in July 1947. Although the article’s anonymity was supposed to prevent it from being seen as a reflection of official thinking within the administration, Kennan’s name was soon leaked, and the article came to be considered the blueprint for the new US strategy vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. In the article, Kennan argued that “it must invariably be assumed in Moscow that the aims of the capitalist world are antagonistic to the Soviet regime,” and 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.”12

Drafted somewhat hastily, Kennan’s article was quickly misunderstood to advocate for US opposition to Soviet communism wherever it reared its head.

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