Reconsiderations: Containment: A Reassessment

John Lewis Gaddis

From Foreign Affairs, July 1977

Summary:  "I felt like one who has inadvertently loosened a large boulder from the top of a cliff and now helplessly witnesses its path of destruction in the valley below, shuddering and wincing at each successive glimpse of disaster." So George F. Kennan described the consequences of having published in this journal, 30 years ago this month, the article which introduced the term "containment" to the world. Attributed only to a "Mr. X" in order to protect the author's position as Director of the State Department's new Policy Planning Staff, the article, entitled "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," was nonetheless quickly revealed by Arthur Krock as having come from Kennan's pen. Ironically, its very anonymity assured it a conspicuousness Kennan's subsequent efforts to clarify his views never attained.

John Lewis Gaddis is Professor of History at Ohio University, currently on two-year leave as Visiting Professor of Strategy at the Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island. He is the author of The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947.

"I felt like one who has inadvertently loosened a large boulder from the top of a cliff and now helplessly witnesses its path of destruction in the valley below, shuddering and wincing at each successive glimpse of disaster."1 So George F. Kennan described the consequences of having published in this journal, 30 years ago this month, the article which introduced the term "containment" to the world. Attributed only to a "Mr. X" in order to protect the author's position as Director of the State Department's new Policy Planning Staff, the article, entitled "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," was nonetheless quickly revealed by Arthur Krock as having come from Kennan's pen. Ironically, its very anonymity assured it a conspicuousness Kennan's subsequent efforts to clarify his views never attained.

No article in the history of Foreign Affairs has been more frequently reprinted; none, it would also appear safe to say, has lent itself to more variant interpretations. "Containment" has been defined as a global commitment to resist communism everywhere; as a passive, negative condemnation of millions to enslavement behind the iron curtain; as a blueprint for the domination of the world by American imperialism, and as the short-sighted acquiescence of a dutiful giant in the process of being nibbled away by midgets. Its critics have ranged from Robert A. Taft and John Foster Dulles to Walter Lippmann and J. William Fulbright; it has been invoked to justify such diverse enterprises as the Marshall Plan, NATO, the Korean "police action," the Eisenhower Doctrine, and, to its inventor's most intense discomfort, the war in Vietnam.

Historians have argued for years over what Kennan meant to say in the "X" article, and Kennan himself has attempted to resolve this issue in his Memoirs. But recollections are, of necessity, selective; critics have charged as well that elements of self-justification entered into Kennan's account.2 Within the past few years, however, thanks to the declassification of National Security Council and Policy Planning Staff documents from the 1947-1949 period and the partial opening of the Kennan Papers, it has become possible to compare what Kennan said publicly and in his Memoirs with the positions he was taking inside the government at the time. These sources confirm Kennan's assertion that the "X" article was an incomplete and misleading reflection of his views. They also suggest that "containment," properly understood, is by no means an outmoded concept; that aspects of it bear striking relevance to problems the Carter Administration is likely to confront as it enters the fourth decade of what we may still regard, with some qualifications, as the cold war.

II

One of several paradoxes associated with the "X" article is that it was taken at the time, and continues to be remembered, as a work of prescription. Such was not its primary emphasis. Rather, Kennan devoted most of the piece to an explanation of Soviet hostility toward the West. Of the article's 17 pages, only three contained what might be considered recommendations for action by the United States, and these were couched only in general terms. For a document hailed as providing a new strategic concept for the postwar world, the "X" article in fact said remarkably little about strategy.

Kennan attributed Soviet hostility to a deep and brooding sense of uneasiness on the part of Kremlin leaders. This phenomenon reflected, to some extent, historical experience: lacking protective geographical barriers and subject, throughout its history, to recurrent invasion, the Russian state had never enjoyed the luxury of free security Americans had always taken for granted. Partly, the tendency arose also out of the conspiratorial habits formed by Bolshevik organizers during years in the underground: survival, for them, had come to depend on trusting no one. It was these two forms of insecurity - historical and organizational - which accounted for the peculiar and difficult behavior of the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin.

Ideology, in Kennan's scheme of things, performed several functions. It served to legitimize an illegitimate regime: if one could not claim to rule by the will of God, as had the Russian tsars, then ruling by the will of history, in the form of the Marxian dialectic, was the next best thing. It also provided justification for the repression without which Soviet leaders, unimaginative as they were, did not know how to rule: as long as most of the world was capitalist, harsh measures could be portrayed as necessary to protect the leading communist state. Finally, ideology was significant because it associated the Soviet Union with revolutionary aspirants in other countries, thus giving the Kremlin, through the international communist movement, an instrument with which to project influence beyond its borders.

But Kennan did not see ideology as a determinant of Soviet policy. The body of doctrine which made up communism was so amorphous that it required an intermediary to relate and apply it to the real world. This circumstance placed that intermediary - the Soviet government - in a position to say what ideology was at any given moment. "The leadership is at liberty," Kennan wrote,

to put forward for tactical purposes any particular thesis which it finds useful to the cause at any particular moment and to require the faithful and unquestioning acceptance of that thesis by the members of the movement as a whole. This means that truth is not a constant but is actually created, for all intents and purposes, by the Soviet leaders themselves. It may vary from week to week, from month to month. It is nothing absolute and immutable.

Communism, then, was not so much a guide to action as a justification for action already decided upon. It was true, Kennan implied, that Stalin might not feel secure until he had come to dominate the entire world, but that attitude grew out of the dictator's own unfathomable sense of insecurity, not out of any principled commitment to the goal of an international classless society.