antagonism” throughout the Muslim world over many years. That could endanger military base rights and access to oil, which might in turn threaten the success of the Marshall Plan. The Soviet Union, whether it supported the Arabs, the Jews, or both at once, could only gain as a result. Unless this policy was reversed, Kennan added in his diary a week later, there would be no alternative to taking over major military and police responsibility for maintaining a state of affairs in Palestine “violently resented by the whole Arab world.” Americans could not be “the keepers and moral guardians of all the peoples in this world.”29
Here, too, Kennan prevailed, although not easily. Dean Rusk, director of the State Department’s Office of United Nations Affairs, thought him too pessimistic about partition. Marshall and Lovett advised caution, aware of the objections supporters of Zionism would make to any change in policy. Kennan persisted, however, and on February 11 he produced a revised staff paper that boiled the options down to three: full support for partition, whatever the international consequences; a shift to neutrality, which would make it hard to justify existing commitments in Greece and Italy; or some form of international trusteeship for an undivided Palestine, a decision that would preclude the formation of a Jewish state but “would regain in large measure our strategically important position in the area.” Boxed in by unpalatable alternatives, Marshall took the third recommendation to Truman, who approved it early in March—or, at least, appeared to have done so.30
With respect to Italy, Greece, and Palestine, then, Kennan maneuvered skillfully. He fought off pressures to send troops to these regions, while showing how the careful expansion of American naval and air capabilities might cause the Soviet Union to restrain the activities of local communists. He encouraged the CIA to develop its own covert means of countering those activities, while arranging to supervise how this would be done. And he retained throughout the Marshall Plan’s focus on economic recovery as the principal instrument of containment. It was—or, at least, it seemed to be at the time—an impressive performance.
VII.
There was, nevertheless, an improvisational character to most of the Policy Planning Staff’s work in 1947. Because it had inherited existing crises in Western Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Near East, there had not been time, Kennan acknowledged, to “come up for air, look around us, and attempt to take stock of America’s world position as a whole.”31 He tried to do that hastily in the global survey he prepared for Marshall in November, but the first region for which the staff was able to initiate its own planning was East Asia, a part of the world not yet fully caught up in the emerging Soviet-American rivalry. Once again Kennan dominated the planning process, but the process refined his own thinking as it progressed.
When Kennan wrote of the need to develop independent power on the Eurasian landmass as quickly as possible, he was echoing an anxiety felt by British and American strategists since the completion of the Trans- Siberian Railway in the early twentieth century: the possibility that a single hostile state—whether German or Russian—might someday control all the territory from the English Channel to the Pacific Ocean. That would neutralize the advantages maritime strength had long given Great Britain and the United States. It was one of the reasons Kennan worried so much about the war having left power vacuums along the periphery of the Soviet Union.32 But as he thought more about this, he began to see that not all such vacuums were dangerous. The critical issue was how territory might be used, not how much an enemy might rule.
Kennan came to this view by way of China, which he regarded as more likely to suck in power than to be a base from which to project it. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had called, in June 1947, for a major effort to rescue Chiang Kai- shek: Mao Zedong’s forces were “tools of Soviet policy,” the chiefs insisted, and if the Truman Doctrine was to be effective, the administration must apply it consistently wherever Soviet expansionism was occurring. Skeptical but still sensitive about his mediation mission in China having failed, Marshall took no position on the proposal, suggesting instead that Truman send General Albert C. Wedemeyer, who had served as an aide to Chiang during the war, to assess his current prospects. Upon his return, Wedemeyer endorsed the chiefs’ views, so Kennan volunteered to have the Policy Planning Staff do its own study. Marshall, with relief, accepted the offer.33
On November 3, Kennan advised him that while a Chinese Communist victory would be a serious setback, it would “not be a catastrophe.” Mao could hardly rule all of China while deferring to Moscow; and only massive American assistance—more than was contemplated for all of Western Europe—could save the Nationalists. China was not the place, then, to confront the Soviet Union, despite the fact that Chiang’s highly vocal supporters in the United States would demand doing so. The Truman administration should extend only the aid necessary to appease these domestic critics and, if possible, to prevent any immediate collapse of the Nationalist regime. It should not go beyond that point.34
Marshall presented this recommendation to Truman, who quietly accepted it. Early in 1948 the president asked Congress for $570 million in nonmilitary assistance for China, only slightly more than what he had requested a year earlier for Greece and Turkey, and much less than the $17 billion he was seeking for the Marshall Plan. After reducing the appropriation still further, Congress approved the China Aid Act in April. Kennan’s role in cutting off aid to the Chinese Nationalists—for that was what these decisions amounted to—had been pivotal. He seized the initiative after Marshall passed it to him, he stood up to the Joint Chiefs and to Wedemeyer, and in doing so he carried his opposition to the Truman Doctrine from the realm of theory into that of policy. Most important, he did it with Truman’s approval.35
Kennan’s rationale for what he admitted was a “plague on both your houses” strategy reflected a new calculation: that hostility, divorced from capability, posed no danger. The United States must never again be threatened from Asia, he told a Pentagon audience in January. But only the industrial regions of Siberia, Manchuria, northern China, and northern Korea could provide bases from which to mount an attack. All were already under actual or probable Soviet control. Politically immature, economically desperate, no other mainland peoples— including the rest of the Chinese—could, by themselves, pose any danger. The Truman administration could, therefore, safely abandon Chiang Kai-shek. It could even remove American occupation forces from southern Korea unless that territory was deemed “of sufficient strategic importance to retain.” Kennan doubted that it would be.
Japan, however, was different. It had shown itself to have dangerous capabilities, but these were now under American control. Disarming this former enemy was of course necessary, but it was just as vital to see that a demilitarized Japan did not fall within a Soviet sphere of influence: that would require “a stable, internally strong Japanese government.” Current occupation policies had focused too much on punishment and not enough on what was to follow. Adjustments were therefore necessary: the United States should commit itself to defending the country while strengthening its economy. It should “dispense with bromides about democratization” in Japan and in “the island world generally.”36
Herein lay the origins of what later became known as the “defensive perimeter” strategy: that the United States would use its air and naval strength to hold islands, while liquidating positions on the Asian mainland. “[W]e are greatly over-extended . . . in that area,” Kennan explained in PPS/23, a comprehensive review of commitments he completed for Marshall in February 1948. Americans had clung too long to the idea of remaking China, an end far beyond their means. The Policy Planning Staff should determine what parts of East Asia are “absolutely vital to our security,” and the United States should then ensure that these remain “in hands which we can control or rely on.”
Kennan framed this recommendation within the need to choose between universal and particularist approaches in foreign policy. Universalism sought to apply the same principles everywhere. It favored procedures embodied in the United Nations and in other international organizations. It smoothed over the national peculiarities and conflicting ideologies that confused and irritated so many Americans. Its appeal lay in its promise to “relieve us of
