Kennan, George (1904–2005)

Political analyst, adviser, and diplomat who played a critical role in developing U.S. national policy in the post–World War II period. Because of four tours of duty in the Soviet Union, including his experience as the U.S. ambassador in 1952, Kennan was regarded as an important authority on the Soviet Union.

Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, George Kennan was educated at Princeton University. He embarked upon a diplomatic career in 1927 in Geneva, Switzerland, and Hamburg, Germany, and in 1933, he began his first tour of duty in Moscow following official U.S. recognition of the Soviet Union. Kennan served in Moscow until 1937.

Eventually reassigned to Berlin, Kennan was in that city when the United States declared war on Nazi [Page 407]Germany, and he returned to the United States after several months of internment under the Nazis. Kennan retired from the Foreign Service in 1953, but was recalled into service by President John F. Kennedy in 1961. He then served two years of duty as ambassador to Yugoslavia.

As a foreign policy planner, Kennan gained reputation as the architect of U.S. Cold War policy. His call for containment of the Soviet Union in a famous article, which appeared anonymously in the journal Foreign Affairs in 1947, became the basis of the foreign policy of the administration of President Harry S. Truman. In the article, Kennan outlined a strategy for fighting the Cold War and keeping Soviet influence from expanding beyond its present geopolitical spheres of authority.

In the Foreign Affairs article, under which the author's name appeared simply as X, Kennan wrote, “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.” He added that “adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and maneuvers of Soviet policy” would counter Soviet force against Western institutions. Furthermore, Kennan predicted that such a policy would “promote tendencies which must eventually find their outlet in either the break-up or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power.”

In other words, the core logic of Kennan's containment policy was that a consistent and concrete posture of opposition by the West would eventually force a response by the Soviet Union. This response, Kennan calculated, would be the gradual abandonment of oppressive, authoritarian policies at home and a reflection of these trends in foreign affairs. Kennan's principle weapons in the struggle against communism were psychological warfare though overt propaganda, covert operations, and economic assistance. He viewed the conflict as political rather than military.

From the beginning, Kennan's article and stance on relations with the Soviet Union were controversial. Some critics attacked Kennan's position for failing to distinguish between vital and peripheral interests. Others complained that such a policy was too defensive, and that an aggressive strategy of confrontation and liberation of Eastern Europe was the only correct path to take against the communist menace.

Within the Truman administration, policy-makers interpreted the term counter-force to mean military action and called for a drastic expansion of the U.S. military. This reinterpretation of Kennan's original work also included the expansion of the theater of conflict. Rather than major centers of industrial power, as Kennan had proposed, the revised strategic view called for the defense against Soviet incursion politically or ideologically on a worldwide scale. “A defeat of free institutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere” became a slogan for successive administrations during the period of the Cold War.

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