CONTAINMENT: 40 Years Later : Containment Then and Now

George F. Kennan

From Foreign Affairs, Spring 1987

Summary:  What the author had in mind when he used the word "containment" in 1946 was averting not a military threat but an ideological-political one. He was trying to say: "Make it clear to [the Soviets] that they are not going to be allowed to establish any dominant influence in Europe and in Japan if there is anything we can do to prevent it. When we have stabilized the situation in this way, then perhaps we will be able to talk with them about some sort of a general political and military disengagement in Europe and in the Far East--not before."

Editor's Note. This article is adapted from a speech presented at the National Defense University in 1985; it was published in Containment: Concept and Policy, edited by Terry L. Deibel and John Lewis Gaddis, pp. 23-31. Portions appeared in the Los Angeles Times, December 29, 1985 Copyright © 1985 by George F. Kennan.

The word "containment," of course, was not new in the year 1946. What was new, perhaps, was its use with relation to the Soviet Union and Soviet-American relations. What brought the word to public attention in this connection was its use in an article that appeared in 1947, in this magazine, under the title of "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," and was signed with what was supposed to have been an anonymous X. This piece was not originally written for publication; it was written privately for our first secretary of defense, James Forrestal, who had sent me a paper on communism and asked me to comment on it. It was written, as I recall, in December 1946, in the northwest corner room on the ground floor of the National War College building. At the time I was serving as deputy commandant for foreign affairs at the college. I suppose it is fitting that I, for my sins, should try to explain something about how the word "containment" came to be used in that document, and what it was meant to signify.

One must try to picture the situation that existed in that month of December 1946. The Second World War was only a year and some months in the past. U.S. armed forces were still in the process of demobilization; so, too, though to a smaller extent (because the Russians proposed to retain a much larger peacetime establishment than we did), were those of the Soviet Union.

In no way did the Soviet Union appear to me, at that moment, as a military threat to this country. Russia was at that time utterly exhausted by the exertions and sacrifices of the recent war. Something like 25 million of its people had been killed. The physical destruction had been appalling. In a large portion of the territory of European Russia, the devastation had to be seen to be believed. Reconstruction alone was obviously going to take several years. The need for peace, and the thirst for peace, among the Russian people was overwhelming. To have remobilized the Soviet armed forces at that time for another war effort, and particularly an aggressive one, would have been unthinkable. Russia then had no navy to speak of and virtually no strategic air force. It had never tested a nuclear weapon. There was uncertainty over when Russia would test one, and there was even more uncertainty over when, or whether, it would ever develop the means of long-range delivery of nuclear warheads. The United States itself had not yet developed such delivery systems.

In these circumstances, there was no way that Russia could appear to me as a military threat. It is true that even then the Soviet Union was credited -- and credited by some of my colleagues at the War College -- with the capability of overrunning Western Europe with its remaining forces, if it wanted to do so. But I myself regarded those calculations as exaggerated (I still do); and I was convinced that there was very little danger of anything of that sort. So when I used the word "containment" with respect to that country in 1946, what I had in mind was not at all the averting of the sort of military threat people talk about today.

What I did think I saw -- and what explained the use of that term -- was what I might call an ideological-political threat. Great parts of the northern hemisphere -- notably Western Europe and Japan -- had just then been seriously destabilized, socially, spiritually and politically, by the experiences of the recent war. Their populations were dazed, shell-shocked, uncertain of themselves, fearful of the future, highly vulnerable to the pressures and enticements of communist minorities in their midst. The world communist movement was at that time a unified, disciplined movement, under the total control of the Stalin regime in Moscow. Not only that, but the Soviet Union had emerged from the war with great prestige for its immense and successful war effort. The Kremlin was, for this and for other reasons, in a position to manipulate these foreign communist parties very effectively in its own interests.

As for the intentions of the Stalin regime toward the United States, I had no illusions. I had already served three tours of duty in Stalin's Russia -- had in fact just come home from the last of these tours when I came to the War College; and I had nothing but suspicion for the attitude of the Stalin regime toward us or toward the other recent Western Allies. Stalin and the men around him were far worse -- more sinister, more cruel, more devious, more cynically contemptuous of us -- than anything we face today. I felt that if Moscow should be successful in taking over any of those major Western countries, or Japan, by ideological-political intrigue and penetration, this would be a defeat for us, and a blow to our national security, fully as serious as would have been a German victory in the war that had just ended.

One must also remember that during that war, and to some extent into the post-hostilities period as well, the U.S. government had tried to win the confidence and the good disposition of the Soviet government by fairly extensive concessions to Soviet demands with respect to the manner in which the war was fought and to the prospects for the postwar international order. The United States had raised no serious objection to the extension of the Soviet borders to the west. Our government had continued to extend military aid to the Soviet Union even when its troops were overrunning most of the rest of Eastern Europe. We had complacently allowed its forces to take Prague and Berlin and surrounding areas even when there was a possibility that our forces could arrive there just as soon as theirs did. The Russians were refusing to give us even a look in their zone of occupation in Germany but were demanding a voice in the administration and reconstruction of the Ruhr industrial region in western Germany.

Now there seemed to be a danger that communist parties subservient to Moscow might seize power in some of the major Western European countries, notably Italy and France, and possibly in Japan. And what I was trying to say, in the Foreign Affairs article, was simply this: "Don't make any more unnecessary concessions to these people. Make it clear to them that they are not going to be allowed to establish any dominant influence in Western Europe and in Japan if there is anything we can do to prevent it. When we have stabilized the situation in this way, then perhaps we will be able to talk with them about some sort of a general political and military disengagement in Europe and in the Far East -- not before." This, to my mind, was what was meant by the thought of "containing communism" in 1946.

One may wish to compare that situation with the one the United States faces today, and to take account of the full dimensions of the contrast -- between the situation we then confronted and the one we confront today. I must point out that neither of the two main features of the situation we were confronting in 1946 prevails today; on the contrary, the situation is almost exactly the reverse.