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Business News/ Opinion / Online Views/  Mr X in Washington: the enigma of George Kennan
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Mr X in Washington: the enigma of George Kennan

George Kennan foresaw the Soviet Union spreading its influence in the developing world

A file photo of George F. Kennan. Photo: Wikimedia Commons (Wikimedia Commons)Premium
A file photo of George F. Kennan. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
(Wikimedia Commons)

On this day, 1 July, 66 years ago, an article called The Sources of Soviet Conduct appeared in the prestigious journal Foreign Affairs. The author did not reveal his identity, signing the piece as only “X". It was possibly the 20th century’s most important commentary on strategic affairs, for it laid the foundation for Western policy towards the Soviet Union and the communist bloc for over four decades. In other words, X’s article officially inaugurated the Cold War, which would end only with the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Those born in the 1980s and afterwards would have little memory of a bipolar world and the intense ideological debates intrinsic to it; the countless lives lost—from Africa and Latin America, to East Europe, Vietnam and Afghanistan; the days in 1962 when the world stood a heartbeat away from nuclear war over the Cuban missile crisis. Yet, the Cold War shaped the world as we know it today, and not only in terms of national borders. Without the Cold War, we would not have had today’s BMWs and Japanese and South Korean consumer electronics, humans would possibly have got into space exploration much later (the space race between the US and the USSR was very much a part of the Cold War), and the Internet would certainly have been invented far later than it was (it was originally developed by the US Department of Defense to be able to communicate securely across the world even if large parts of the planet was devastated by nuclear war).

X was George F. Kennan, a career US diplomat, and he achieved two goals in his Foreign Affairs piece. One, he revealed the geopolitical reality of the post-World War II world, that the Soviet Union was rushing to expand its influence over war-ravaged Europe. Two, he proposed that the US should adopt the strategy of “containment"—not conventional warfare, but, through playing hardball at every diplomatic level, subversive tactics, and building economic and military alliances, make sure that the Soviet Union did not get an inch more than what it had already grabbed. This remained US strategy for four decades, till simple historical and economic logic caused the Soviet sphere to implode, with a little nudging from the US administration under Ronald Reagan.

In February 1945, US President Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Churchill and Soviet supremo Stalin met at the Black Sea resort of Yalta to map out the grand design for a post-war world. The wording of the final agreement brimmed with commitment to the best of humanistic principles. The victors would make sure that the “liberated nations" of Europe held free elections for democratic governments that reflected the will of the people. Trouble was, terms like “free elections", “democracy" and “will of the people" meant rather different things to Roosevelt and Stalin. Churchill was sceptical, but went along with Roosevelt.

Within months, the Allied Forces and Soviet forces captured separate sections of Berlin. Kennan, then posted in the US embassy in Moscow, was cabling his bosses in Washington DC that Stalin wanted his own sphere of influence in Europe, and the US should have one too. Washington retorted that “foreign policies of that kind cannot be made in democracy. Only totalitarian states can make and carry out such policies." But by the end of 1945, the Soviets had managed to hold “free elections" in countries like Poland, Bulgaria and Romania and installed puppet governments, and was sniffing at Turkey and Greece.

On 22 February 1946, Kennan wrote what has come to be known in history as “the long telegram"—a 5,300-word cable to the US State Department, elaborating the nature of Soviet ambition and calling on the US to resist tooth-and-nail all Soviet expansionist attempts. “There can be no permanent peaceful co-existence (with the Soviet Union)," he argued, mentioning that as far back as 1927, Stalin had said that in the future, “there will emerge two centres of world significance: a socialist centre…and a capitalist centre…Battle between these two centres for command of world economy will decide fate of capitalism and of communism in entire world." He had in fact explicitly said that Soviet efforts must be directed toward deepening and exploiting of differences and conflicts between capitalist powers. If these eventually deepen into an “imperialist" war, this war must be turned into “revolutionary upheavals within the various capitalist countries". Kennan foresaw the Soviet Union first taking control of neighbouring countries, and then spreading its influence in the developing world—the term he used was “colonial areas and backward or dependent peoples", and weaken Western influence among such peoples. The Soviet Union, Kennan predicted, would use a wide variety of bodies to penetrate and dominate the polity and public mood of these countries: “labour unions, youth leagues, women’s organizations, racial societies, religious societies, social organizations, cultural groups, liberal magazines, publishing houses, etc".

Kennan recommended that the US government must educate the public about the “realities of the Russian situation". There was no risk to the US facing up to the Soviet Union because “we have here no investments to guard, no actual trade to lose, virtually no citizens to protect, few cultural contacts to preserve. Our only stake lies in what we hope rather than what we have…We must formulate and put forward for other nations a much more positive and constructive picture of sort of world we would like to see than we have put forward in past. It is not enough to urge people to develop political processes similar to our own. Many foreign peoples, in Europe at least, are tired and frightened by experiences of past, and are less interested in abstract freedom than in security. They are seeking guidance rather than responsibilities. We should be better able than Russians to give them this. And unless we do, Russians certainly will."

The “long telegram" was photostated extensively within the US State Department and passed around. The following year, Kennan reworked the telegram to publish it anonymously in the July edition of Foreign Affairs. The Cold War had begun. (Those interested can view the full telegram and read it at the President Truman Library website)

In 1948, the US launched the Marshall Plan, pumping in billions of dollars to reconstruct western Europe and keep it out of Soviet influence. The same was done in Japan and later in South Korea. In 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) came into being. Everything was happening just as Kennan had recommended.

For four decades, the US and the Soviet Union stood eyeball-to-eyeball, financing coups and shoring up dictators across the world, subverting democracies and smashing people’s movements. In the end, the claims to moral superiority made by both sides were equally hollow. If the US had its Vietnam, the Soviet Union had Afghanistan, and the world is still living with the deadly after effects of the proxy war the US fought in that country with the Soviets (The US itself has paid dearly for it). For every despot that the Soviet Union propped up in Eastern Europe and Africa, the US had its own—from the Shah of Iran to Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. It is a rare country which inadvertently became a battlefield for the two superpowers that has had a happy ending for its common people.

In India, even before Independence, Jawaharlal Nehru was thinking about what the country’s foreign policy framework should be. He was determined that India should stay neutral in the Cold War, equidistant from the Western Bloc and the Soviets. He described non-alignment as a bold expression of India’s determination to “maintain our independence of opinion and independence of action".

Nehru, President Nasser of Egypt and Marshall Tito of Yugoslavia would form the triumvirate leading the non-aligned movement (NAM). Meeting in Brioni in Yugoslavia in 1956, they declared that peace should not be sought by dividing the world but by enlarging the sphere of freedom and preventing the domination of one country over another. But that same year, NAM faced its first credibility crisis. When Nasser nationalized the company that managed the Suez Canal, Anglo-French forces attacked Egypt. NAM condemned the attack. But a month later, when Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest, crushed a democratic upsurge and put a client government in charge in Hungary, NAM, especially Nehru, remained silent. Increasingly, NAM came to be seen by Western powers as a proxy organization of the Soviet Bloc.

Misguided US foreign policy towards India, and domestic political opportunism led Indira Gandhi to continue strongly with NAM (anyway, when US President Nixon and she met, they took an intense personal dislike to each other), but when Cuba, run by a totally Soviet-backed regime, became an enthusiastic member of NAM, it seemed that all masks were off. The 1983 NAM Summit at New Delhi (where Cuban boss Fidel Castro kissed Mrs Gandhi on stage, perhaps the only instance when she blushed in public) was perhaps the movement’s last hurrah.

By the late 1980s, after making millionaires out of thriller writers as diverse as Ian Fleming, Robert Ludlum, John le Carre and Tom Clancy, the Soviet Union was plummeting towards bankruptcy, trying to keep pace with the US defence spending, while the productivity of its own economy was hitting its nadir. When the German people brought down the Berlin Wall in November 1989, the game was, for all practical purposes, up. It was just a matter of time before the Soviet experiment collapsed spectacularly.

The US revealed for a few years in what it perceived as a unipolar world. But that too has turned out to be an illusion. In fact, as an eminent historian (now deceased) once told me, we probably live in a more uncertain world than during the Cold War years, where the battle lines were clearly drawn, and there was a certain stability—you could choose sides and stick with them.

And what about X, who gave a philosophical, ideological and strategic foundation to the role of the US in the Cold War, indeed gave his country the final push it needed to plunge in and get its hands dirty? Kennan, who lived to be 101, and passed away in 2005, was a very strange man indeed. He hated American materialism, what he saw as his country’s moral corruption, and strongly believed that women, immigrants and coloured people should not have the right to vote. The only country he felt at home at, he wrote, was Russia, and the only people he loved were the Russian people. Indeed, it seems fairly clear that his intense loathing for the Communist regime in Russia was due at least partly to his affection for the average Russian. History moves in strange ways, and the men who make history are often even stranger.

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Published: 01 Jul 2013, 02:32 PM IST
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