(3) Its projection in practical policy on official level. (1) Basic features of post-war Soviet outlook. I hope, therefore, Dept will bear with me if I submit in answer to this question five parts, subjects of which will be roughly as follows: Department of State, Office of the Historian, 1969).Īnswer to Dept’s 284, Feb 3 1 involves questions so intricate, so delicate, so strange to our form of thought, and so important to analysis of our international environment that I cannot compress answers into single brief message without yielding to what I feel would be dangerous degree of over-simplification. VI, Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Source: The Chargé in the Soviet Union (Kennan) to the Secretary of State, Febru, The Foreign Relations of the United States, 1946, Vol. A close reading and comparison of these three documents – the Long Telegram, the Truman Doctrine, and NSC 68 – is an excellent way to trace the creation and rapid evolution of containment. While Kennan had explained that containment could take many forms, by 1950 containment had been militarized by NSC 68. Kennan had advised that the United States must carefully choose its points of resistance, based upon a dispassionate measure of the nation’s long-term global aims. The Truman Doctrine all but promised that the United States would resist each and every instance of Soviet expansion. However, the diplomat’s finer points were soon forgotten. Secretary of State George Marshall appointed Kennan the first director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, a position he held from 1947 – 1948. Its essence, as Kennan phrased it in that article, was 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.”Ĭontainment became the keystone of America’s Cold War policies. This was the policy of containment, which Kennan described in detail in an article entitled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” published in Foreign Affairs in 1947. Kennan had been asked to explain why the Soviet Union was opposed to the newly formed World Bank and International Monetary Fund, but he also took the opportunity to offer a perceptive, wide-ranging essay about the methods and motives of Soviet communism and how the United States should respond. (To cable a message more than 5,000 words long from Moscow to Washington was highly unusual, showing the urgency of the report). In February 1946, Kennan authored a lengthy analysis commonly called the Long Telegram. He served on the embassy staff in Moscow before and after World War II. diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union in 1933. Fluent in Russian, he was stationed in Latvia prior to the U.S. Kennan entered the Foreign Service in 1926. diplomat, scholar, and public intellectual George Kennan (1904 – 2005) was one of the nation’s most perceptive observers of the Soviet Union during the early Cold War.
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