Reflections on Containment

Henry A. Kissinger

From Foreign Affairs, May/June 1994

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Summary:  George Kennan?s "X" article, published in these pages more than 45 years ago, outlined for the United States a "doctrine of perpetual struggle" against communist ideology. The "containment" strategy optimistically assigned the American people the task of redeeming their Soviet rival. As long as the Kremlin remained wedded to its ideology, negotiation was futile. The struggle could only end with the collapse and conversion of the Soviet system. Critics assailed the policy as too global, reactive and moralistic for a nation possessed of no authority to undertake a crusade. Containment nonetheless guided American policy, and Kennan came closest, and earliest, in his prediction of the fate that would befall Soviet power.

Henry A. Kissinger was National Security Adviser and Secretary of State in the Nixon and Ford administrations. This essay is adapted from his eleventh book, Diplomacy, published by Simon and Schuster, with whose permission this essay appears.

THE SUCCESS AND PAIN OF THE STRATEGY

No matter what Wilsonian-minded American statesmen called them, by late 1945 spheres of influence were emerging across Europe, and they were to remain in place until the collapse of communism four decades later. Under U.S. leadership, the Western occupation zones of Germany were consolidated, while the Soviet Union turned the countries of Eastern Europe into its appendages. The erstwhile Axis Powers, Italy, Japan and, after 1949, the Federal Republic of Germany, gradually moved toward alliance with the United States. The Soviet Union cemented its dominance over Eastern Europe by means of coercion. At the same time, the Kremlin tried its utmost to interrupt the process of Western consolidation by fostering a guerrilla war in Greece and by encouraging mass demonstrations by West European communist parties, especially in France and Italy.

American leaders concluded that they had to resist further Soviet expansion. But their national tradition caused them to seek to justify this resistance on nearly any basis other than as an appeal to the traditional balance of power. In doing this, American leaders were not being hypocritical. When they finally came to recognize that Franklin D. Roosevelt?s vision of a peaceful globe guarded by the four policemen (the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and China) could not be implemented, they preferred to interpret this development as a temporary setback on the way to an essentially harmonious world order. Here they faced a philosophical challenge. Was Soviet intransigence merely a passing phase, which Washington could wait out? Were the Americans, as former Vice President Henry Wallace and his followers suggested, unwittingly causing the Soviets to feel paranoid by not adequately communicating their pacific intentions to Stalin? Did Stalin really reject postwar cooperation with the strongest nation in the world? Did he not want in the end to be America?s friend?

As the highest policymaking circles in Washington considered those questions, a document arrived on February 22, 1946, from an expert on Russia, one George Kennan, a relatively junior diplomat at the American embassy in Moscow, that was to provide the philosophical and conceptual framework for interpreting Stalin?s foreign policy. Rarely does an embassy report by itself reshape Washington?s view of the world, but what later came to be known as the "Long Telegram" emphatically did. Kennan maintained that the United States should stop blaming itself for Soviet intransigence; the sources of Soviet foreign policy lay deep within the Soviet system itself. For Kennan, communist ideology was at the heart of Stalin?s approach to the world. Stalin regarded the Western capitalist powers as irrevocably hostile. The friction between the Soviet Union and America was therefore not the product of some misunderstanding or faulty communication between Moscow and Washington but was inherent in the Soviet Union?s perception of the outside world.

From time immemorial, argued Kennan, the Russian tsars had sought to expand their territory. They had sought to subjugate Poland and to turn it into a dependent nation. They had regarded Bulgaria as ...

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