After the Cold War

George F. Kennan

From Foreign Affairs, October 1972

Article preview: first 500 of 6,650 words total.

Summary:  In the years since the end of the Second World War, American foreign policy has consisted primarily of the effort to cope with two immensely difficult problems which the events of that war brought into being, neither of which had been adequately anticipated and which the discussions among the victor powers at the end of the war failed to solve. One was the question of how should be filled the great political vacuums created by the removal of the hegemonies recently exercised by Germany and Japan over large and important areas of the Northern Hemisphere. The uncertainty and emerging disagreement over the attendant questions concerned not only much of Central and Eastern Europe but also parts of East Asia that had been overrun by the Japanese, including-alas-Indochina; and the settlement of the Asian aspects of the problem came to involve not only the United States and the Soviet Union and the inhabitants of the affected territories themselves but also, with the completion of the Chinese Revolution, the new communist power in China.

AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY IN THE 1970S

In the years since the end of the Second World War, American foreign policy has consisted primarily of the effort to cope with two immensely difficult problems which the events of that war brought into being, neither of which had been adequately anticipated and which the discussions among the victor powers at the end of the war failed to solve. One was the question of how should be filled the great political vacuums created by the removal of the hegemonies recently exercised by Germany and Japan over large and important areas of the Northern Hemisphere. The uncertainty and emerging disagreement over the attendant questions concerned not only much of Central and Eastern Europe but also parts of East Asia that had been overrun by the Japanese, including-alas-Indochina; and the settlement of the Asian aspects of the problem came to involve not only the United States and the Soviet Union and the inhabitants of the affected territories themselves but also, with the completion of the Chinese Revolution, the new communist power in China.

The second great problem with which American policymakers of the postwar period had to struggle was one for which they were equally unprepared: what to do now, in time of peace, with the fearful new weapon of mass destruction they had created during the war and had used, at the end of the struggle, against the Japanese. The problem was effectively without precedent. It might well be argued (the writer himself adheres to this school of thought) that it should not have taken the nuclear weapon to persuade people that war, as a method for resolving conflicts among industrially advanced great powers, had become inordinately costly, dangerous and self-destructive. The First World War, one might say, should have been adequate evidence of this. But the nuclear weapon involved a change in degree of destructiveness so great as to be in effect a change in kind; and the questions as to how-or whether-it should be fitted into national arsenals, and what relation it should bear to traditional concepts of the role of weaponry, had never been faced before. It fell to the United States, as the first to develop this weapon, to take the lead in seeking solutions to the problem; and the subsequent agonies of decision-whether to base defense plans on the new weapon; what to do about sharing control of it; whether to magnify the problem along the way by proceeding to the manufacture of the hydrogen bomb; and how, finally, to react to the acquisition by a political antagonist of a comparable capability, along with adequate means of long-range delivery: these agonies of decision were all no more than stages in the effort to find correct solutions to the problem as a whole.

It remains to be noted that these two great bewilderments of the postwar period (if one may call them that) were mutually interconnected and interreacting. The political conflicts arising over the problem of the filling of the vacuums threatened-in the eyes, at least, of a world public conditioned to viewing war as the logical outcome of serious conflict among great powers-to lead to hostilities. It thus accentuated the significance of weaponry generally. The tendency, on the other hand, ...

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