George F. Kennan : an American life

and his advisers had “tossed about on the horns of this dilemma, hoping that they could avoid a final impalement”—that was why Molotov had appeared briefly in Paris with his bevy of economic experts. Soon enough, though, the “iron logic” of the situation became clear, and the Soviet delegation fled “in the middle of the night.” In ordering them to do so, Stalin divided Europe, an outcome he had hoped to avoid: it was, however, the lesser of the evils he now confronted. The Marshall Plan had forced him to choose between cooperating with a program whose success would discredit communism, or openly seeking that program’s failure—a course that could, by a different route, produce the same result. It was a no-win situation: “The repercussions of it are still reverberating through the Kremlin.”¹⁰

One became apparent in late September, when the Soviets convened a conference of East European, French, and Italian communists in Poland. In his opening address, Leningrad party boss Andrey Zhdanov acknowledged Europe’s division into “socialist” and “capitalist” camps: all communists everywhere must now work for the triumph of the former over the latter. To facilitate that task, the old Communist International or Comintern—abolished during the war—would be revived as the Communist Information Bureau, or Cominform.¹¹

What this meant, Kennan advised Lovett, was a tightening up of discipline within the Soviet bloc, regardless of its effects in “the left-wing liberal world.” To do otherwise was to run the risk that communist parties in Western Europe, as well as in the Eastern European satellites, might evolve into a series of nationalist movements with which Moscow would eventually come into conflict. As a result, it now saw greater dangers than opportunities in European communism: “We should be able to capitalize effectively on this situation.”¹²

But how? Kennan went back to the war college to work out an answer. He spoke there three times in five weeks after returning from Paris, using his lectures—still mostly extemporaneous—to clarify in his own mind what policy toward the Soviet Union should now be. He also took the opportunity to reply, off the record, to a conspicuous critic. “Our speaker this morning is Mr. X,” the students were told on the first of these occasions, “the man who made Walter Lippmann famous.”

Containment, Kennan insisted, did not mean preparation for war, because “it is not Russian military power which is threatening us; it is Russian political power.... Since it is more than a military threat, I doubt that it can effectively be met entirely by military means.” But containment was not diplomacy either, because the United States and the Soviet Union shared no common interests: no Soviet diplomat was likely to return to Moscow and say, “I have just talked to these fellows and I think they have a case.” Nor did containment require the “application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and man?uvres of Soviet policy”—the language Kennan had used in the “X” article that had so aroused Lippmann.

Instead, Kennan now spoke of selectively applied “counter pressure”—of deploying strengths against weaknesses with a view to producing a psychological change in the mind of the adversary. It would be like playing chess, disposing of pawns, queens, and kings “in such a way that the Russian sees it is going to be in his interests to do what you want him to do.” The game would require patience as well as perseverance, but “[i]f they see that you are sufficiently determined, that you are sufficiently collected, and that you know exactly where you are going, you can sometimes put the fear of God in their hearts; and they will move.”

Soviet leaders were less confident than they looked. They knew that their empire in Eastern Europe was unstable: why otherwise would they tighten their control over it? They would do so next, Kennan predicted, in Czechoslovakia, still a relatively free country from which Western influences could spread if allowed to take root. But was it really plausible to believe that 140 million Russians, who already had a third that number of minorities within their own country, would be able to take over and handle indefinitely an additional 90 million in Eastern and Central Europe?

Another reason for unease in the Kremlin went back to the differences Kennan had long perceived between Stalin’s regime and the people it ruled. Three decades after the Bolshevik Revolution, the country remained what it had been for centuries, “a sea of mud and poverty and cruelty.” The Russians didn’t talk about this because it was dangerous to do so. They didn’t do much about it, because that was even more dangerous. “But they know it in their hearts; and they are not happy about it. That I can assure you.”

What, then, should the United States expect? Not that Russia would become a democracy: Americans who hoped for that were “quixotic fools,” because it would never happen. But a change in the Soviet Union’s international behavior could very well take place if it “gets its knuckles sharply rapped.” That could stabilize the international system until—in a more distant future—Russians overthrew communism for failing to keep its promises. They were “still potentially our friends.... I believe we still have a possibility of bringing [them] over to our side.”¹³

By the end of October, Kennan could see some correspondence between his planning and the results American policy had begun to produce. Whatever difficulties the Paris conferees were having in drafting an aid request that would satisfy Washington, the very fact that the effort was under way and that Moscow could make no competitive offer had shifted the gravitational field in Europe. The center of attraction now lay in the West, a contingency for which Stalin’s planners had made no provision: in time, Kennan suggested, it could pull not only European communists and satellite states from the Soviet Union’s orbit, but ultimately the Russian people themselves. By persuading Marshall that he should invite all Europeans, east and west, to decide how Americans should spend their money, Kennan had pulled off a classic Clausewitzian maneuver: a minimal effort— the making of a single short speech—had reversed expectations in what Lippmann was calling the “Cold War,” with consequences that, if managed wisely, might well determine its outcome.

IV.

On November 4, 1947, Marshall asked Kennan to prepare a brief resume of the world situation for his use at a cabinet meeting three days later. Completed on the sixth, PPS/13 turned out to be the first comprehensive statement of U.S. grand strategy since the end of World War II. Marshall was impressed enough to read a summary aloud when the Cabinet convened on the seventh, and President Truman, in turn, requested a copy of the full paper. Kennan’s views on American policy had now made their way to the top.

PPS/13 began with a lesson in geopolitics. The simultaneous defeats of Germany and Japan had left power vacuums into which the Soviet Union had tried to move, with a view to extending its “virtual domination over all, or as much as possible, of the Eurasian land mass.” That offensive had now come to a standstill, partly because the postwar radicalism that fueled it was diminishing, but mostly because the United States had surprised the Kremlin by delaying its own military withdrawal from former enemy territories, by offering economic assistance to demoralized Europeans, and by using the United Nations to rally resistance. The question now was what to do next.

Kennan’s answer was less, not more, for these accomplishments had “stretched our resources dangerously far in several respects.” Americans still occupied portions of Germany, Italy, Austria, and Korea, as well as all of Japan: that task could only become more difficult as time went on. However effective the Marshall Plan was proving to be, it set no precedents: it was probably the last major effort of that kind that the United States should make.

[I]t is clearly unwise for us to continue the attempt to carry alone, or largely single-handed, the opposition to Soviet expansion. It is urgently necessary for us to restore something of the balance of power in Europe and Asia by strengthening local forces of independence and by getting them to assume part of our burden.

That meant making allies of defeated enemies: to continue punishing the Germans and the Japanese would