The American diplomat and historian whose 1946 Long Telegram and X article laid the intellectual foundations of containment
'The main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies,' from the 1947 X article.
An American diplomat and historian who, in his 1946 'Long Telegram' from Moscow and his 1947 X article in Foreign Affairs, articulated the strategy of long-term, patient, and vigilant containment of Soviet expansion. As the first Director of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, he played a central role in designing the Marshall Plan and laid the intellectual groundwork for the Truman Doctrine, NATO, and the architecture of the early Cold War. Yet he spent the rest of his long life as a critic of what containment became: opposing the militarization of his ideas, the Vietnam War, and NATO enlargement, and insisting that the Soviet threat had always been political, not military.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1925Entered the U.S. Foreign Service
- 1933–1936Third Secretary, U.S. Embassy Moscow
- 1944–1946Deputy Chief of Mission, Moscow; sent the Long Telegram
- 1947–1949First Director of Policy Planning; designed Marshall Plan, published X article
- 1952Ambassador to USSR; declared persona non grata
- 1956–2005Professor, Institute for Advanced Study; wrote diplomatic history
- 1961–1963Ambassador to Yugoslavia
Related historical events
Opposition to NATO Enlargement After the Cold War
Kennan, the intellectual architect of Cold War containment, publicly opposed NATO's eastward expansion after the Cold War ended. In his February 5, 1997 New York Times op-ed "A Fateful Error," he declared that "expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era," warning that such a decision "may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking." He asked why, given the possibilities opened by the Cold War's end, East-West relations should center on "who would be allied with whom and, by implication, against whom." In a 1998 New York Times interview after the U.S. Senate ratified NATO's first round of expansion, he said "there was no reason for this whatsoever," and worried that Russians "will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies." To the claim that Russia was "dying to attack Western Europe," he replied that the Russian people had revolted to "remove that Soviet regime" and that their democracy was as far advanced as that of the countries then joining NATO. He called the enlargement "a strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions," opposed the Clinton administration's expansion of NATO and its war in Kosovo, and feared both would worsen relations with Russia. Having also opposed NATO's founding, he held a consistent realist position on the question.