THE MOST famous modern instance of the United States consciously adopting a grand strategy was the concept of “containment” against the Soviet Union, devised by the diplomat and Russian area specialist George Kennan in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Yet a look at how Kennan’s idea evolved, how it was adopted, and how it played out over time, indicates that it was no cut-and-dry affair; that it was adopted mainly in a negative sense; that it provided relatively little guidance during the long Cold War decades; and that it appeared prescient—romantic even—particularly in retrospect once the Cold War had ended.

American foreign policy elites have adopted a partial myth about containment in order to worship at the altar of grand strategy before declaring that such a sweeping approach is no longer possible. Both propositions are false and are driven partially by nostalgia—for a simpler era that was not so simple at all. In truth, Kennan’s theory codified the conventional wisdom of his colleagues who agreed only about what not to do. Moreover, achieving such a negative consensus is certainly possible today—if not in the larger foreign policy community scattered along the East Coast with all its divisions and “global” rather than “American” outlook, then at least within the community of defense experts centered around the Pentagon. By refusing to mythologize the past, the defense community can, on its own, better construct a framework about preparing for the middle decades of the twenty-first century.

ON FEBRUARY 9, 1946, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin made a speech at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, at the conclusion of an “election” campaign for the Supreme Soviet. The election was rigged, of course. But the purpose of the campaign, as Stalin’s speech would make clear, was to rejuvenate the country’s revolutionary spirit following the victory in the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany. The speech concentrated the minds of the State Department’s Soviet experts: rather than constituting a turning point for them, it helped confirm their gelid views about Stalin’s intentions. At the Bolshoi Theater, the Soviet tyrant did not mention historic Russia and the Russian people, which the Kremlin had been stressing throughout the war (and which Stalin had extolled only the previous May upon the Allied victory). Instead, Stalin now spoke only of the victory of “our Soviet system,” and for the first time since 1941 made little mention of gratitude to the quondam Western Allies. The Soviet leader blamed “modern monopoly capitalism” as the root cause of the war, and implied that Nazism was merely a part of that larger category. This was not new—Stalin had spoken in a similar vein in the 1930s. But now it turned out that the grueling and titanic struggle for survival against Adolf Hitler, which had cost well over twenty million lives inside the Soviet Union, had changed nothing in Stalin’s prewar thinking. Stalin, moreover, stressed in his speech that the Communist Party and its ideology were to be further fortified, and that from now on there would be much less talk of patriotism and of historic Russia. There would also be no mention of the marshals and generals responsible for winning the war. Personalities—individuals, that is—no longer counted, except for Stalin himself. As the late British historian Hugh Thomas wrote, summing up the speech, “Russia had determined to return to being the Soviet Union, the capital of world Communism, not the great ally.”

Kennan was deputy head of the U.S. mission in Moscow. But his superior, Ambassador W. Averell Harriman, had left Moscow and encouraged Kennan to henceforth express himself in cables exactly as he saw fit, with no one higher up in the embassy to edit him. Meanwhile, Kennan’s superiors in Washington wanted guidance from him regarding Stalin’s February 9 speech. Kennan, bedridden with a bad cold, decided that sick or not, “nothing but the whole truth would do.” Surrounded by a small group of aides in his upstairs bedroom at the embassy, Kennan dictated an analysis of Soviet behavior. It was sent on February 22, George Washington’s birthday, and became known as “the Long Telegram,” the most influential cable in American diplomatic history.

Kennan contended that the Marxist rhetoric and, essentially, conspiracy theories about the goals of the Western capitalist nations, constituted what was deep down a neurosis originating in a “traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity.” Marxism was a “fig leaf” to rationalize a closed society and police-state tactics, and also to express an inchoate Russian fear of the outside world. Soviet foreign policy, he said, would not change—and had not changed despite everything that had happened in World War II—because it was rooted deep inside the irrational aspects of the Russian character and the “archaic” form of Russian rule, itself partially determined by geography and history: in which an agricultural people living on an exposed plain without natural barriers had converted vulnerability into paranoia. Marxism-Leninism, in other words, despite the pseudo-scientific rhetoric, was merely a rhetorical figleaf for centuries-old Russian fears and nationalism. Nothing the West would do, positive or negative, could change Stalin’s mind.

This was the sort of deterministic analysis that led to the belief that reason would not work with the Soviets as much as force would; or at least the threat of force. Kennan actually did not mean to go quite that far. (He continually complained that others failed to understand him as he understood himself.) In Kennan’s mind, he was merely explaining what lay behind Stalin’s speech, especially Stalin’s return to full-bore Marxist-Leninist basics after the detour of the Great Patriotic War. After all, Kennan was careful to write that Stalin had “no fixed timetable, was not inclined to take unnecessary risks, and would, when resisted, retreat.” Moreover, the Soviet Union was weaker than the West, and had no established procedure for replacing its leaders. Thus, the United States should not despair. Crucially, the word “containment” did not appear in the telegram at all. The Long Telegram had concentrated on an explanation for Soviet ideology and behavior, and only in the most rudimentary form laid out a plan for exactly how to deal with it.

The path of acceptance for Kennan’s telegram was paved by events at the time. A few days after Washington’s birthday, Stalin refused to honor a March 2 deadline to withdraw troops from a part of Iran the Soviet Union had occupied during the war. Then came a speech that Winston Churchill—now leader of the British opposition—delivered less than two weeks after Kennan had sent his telegram. At Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, Churchill declared, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent [of Europe].” From that, Churchill said, an Anglo-American alliance against the Soviet Union must naturally follow.

Kennan had caught the zeitgeist. As an example of how much impact the telegram had, James Forrestal, the secretary of the Navy at the time, made it required reading for thousands of senior officers throughout the armed services. In April, an abridged version appeared in Time magazine. As with other seminal essays, here was a case of a writer pushing on an open door and articulating what was already in the minds of colleagues, both among the community of Russia experts and in the State Department, as well as President Harry Truman himself.

Indeed, by 1946, in the same time frame as Kennan’s telegram, Harriman and Charles E. Bohlen, another American diplomat and Russia expert with ground-level experience in Moscow, had concluded that there was no hope for any evolution in the Soviet Union. “It isn’t a question of wisdom,” Harriman explained. “It’s a question of having been exposed to the disease.” The hope that Stalin, endearingly called “Uncle Joe” by the late President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, would evolve into a more reasonable leader as a result of the critical help he had received from the Western Allies during the war, had long been fading fast. For example, Stalin’s rejection of the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement had already closed the door on postwar American economic assistance. Keep in mind that those at the U.S. embassy in Moscow knew the situation better than most because of their close-up view of Soviet life and suspicions. The dream of a grand postwar alliance including the Soviet Union was certainly dead by the beginning of 1946. It remained for Stalin’s speech to finally punctuate it, and for Kennan’s telegram to put into words the half-realized, less-articulate thoughts of his colleagues.

THE COLD War was now quickly taking shape. And Kennan’s writings merely reflected the era rather than breaking wholly new ground. In August, 1946, the Soviet Union demanded bases in the Dardanelles. Stalin backed down only when Truman dispatched the Sixth Fleet into the eastern Mediterranean. Then, in February, 1947, the British government suddenly informed the State Department that, burdened by postwar recovery, it lacked the means to provide military and economic assistance to Greece and Turkey. A month after that, the Truman Doctrine was officially born in a speech by the president to Congress, under which the United States would eventually fill the gap left by Great Britain in the eastern Mediterranean.

In the midst of these developments, Kennan began working on an essay for the journal Foreign Affairs that was meant as a formal version and elaboration of his Long Telegram. But he was pulled away by an assignment from Secretary of State George C. Marshall to come up with a plan for postwar European reconstruction. The Marshall Plan was subsequently announced in June, 1947. Its intent was to rejuvenate Western Europe and the Mediterranean in order to serve as a bulwark against Soviet expansion.

By July, 1947, when Kennan, writing under the anonymous name of Mr. X (because he was about to become the first head of the State Department’s policy planning staff), published his famous article in Foreign Affairs, entitled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” the Cold War was already up and running, with the United States actively taking steps to halt further Soviet expansion. In the article, Kennan bore down on his theme from the Long Telegram, emphasizing that the Soviets recognized “no restrictions, either of God or man, on the character of their methods.” Yet, partly because of Russian history and partly because the Soviets’ very methods were bound to produce a backlash, they would never feel secure.

Nevertheless, as Kennan went on in his Foreign Affairs article, “The theory of the inevitability of the eventual fall of capitalism has the fortunate connotation that there is no hurry about it.” As Kennan’s biographer John Lewis Gaddis put it: “Like the church, the Kremlin could afford to wait.” Moreover, as Kennan went on, because the Soviet system “bears within it the seeds of its own decay … a policy of containment,” in which the United States competed with the Soviet Union for influence throughout the world might eventually, given enough time, prove successful. But Kennan did not rule out that containment at some point might involve a military conflict with the Soviet Union itself. Containment was not necessarily a wholly peaceful doctrine. Indeed, Kennan wrote of “firm containment” employing “unalterable counter-force at every point.”

Reader’s Digest and Life printed excerpts of the Mr. X article. Kennan was famous. His idea of “containment,” utilized as a grand strategy, was the roughest of guides only. Kennan himself at this nascent stage of the Cold War was even ambivalent about whether it would include military force or not against the Soviet Union. And some of the biggest moves in the Cold War that were to come—the CIA-instigated coups in Iran and Guatemala, the Vietnam War—were policy actions that Kennan would come to deeply regret. And Kennan’s article in Foreign Affairs did not completely lead the way, as both the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan came about before the article was even published, though Kennan had played a very significant role in their formulations.

Most crucially, containment arose out of negatives: out of what a consensus of the inner circle of policymakers had agreed would not work. As Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas imply in The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made, Charles Bohlen and Dean Acheson more-or-less agreed that going to war against the Soviets—or, at the other extreme, retreating into isolationism—were simply not viable. Such policies would not, in any case, gain support from an American public, which, following World War II and the sacrifices it entailed, were tired of military conflict; yet, also because of the war and the dispatch of millions of men and women to Europe and Asia, the American people understood that the United States had a vigorous role to play in international affairs. Containment was an obvious middle path: through diplomacy, foreign aid, and the movement of troops and warships, limit or contain Soviet expansion. Wait them out, in other words, since their system at heart was more brittle than America’s.

KENNAN’S CONCEPT was brilliant. Especially in politics, very few ideas, after all, are completely original, and many good ideas emerge from what is, in fact, obvious. It is just that a good theorist sees more clearly what is obvious than others do. Kennan had clearly become the master of grand strategy. But as we shall see, grand strategy, even when successful, can provide little direction when it comes to making one searing decision after another over decades.

Most philosophers and theorists are sooner or later misunderstood, and their ideas become bowdlerized. Kennan felt that this is what happened to containment. In a word, he had meant to inject more nuance into his Long Telegram and Foreign Affairs article, and therefore was a bit shocked when they were used as ammunition for defending a particular hardline strategy against the Soviets. For example, Walter Lippman wrote fourteen columns for the New York Herald Tribune about the X article, proclaiming that Kennan had created a “strategic monstrosity” that would exhaust the United States and force it to rely on a ramshackle assemblage of weak and disorderly states in order to compete with the Soviet Union. By the late 1940s, however, Kennan had come to assess that negotiating and living in peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union was possible. There was a myriad of other choices and details to be worked out besides war with the Soviet Union at one extreme and appeasement of it at the other. And containment offered not that much of a guide as to what those other choices were. Significantly, Kennan saw the possibility of a change in Soviet behavior. When the Korean War suddenly broke out in 1950, Kennan worried about “the militarization of thinking” that was now taking place, which would make “any discriminate estimate of Soviet intentions” on our part “unwelcome and unacceptable.”

Indeed, Kennan’s original idea was so broad that in the course of the Cold War it would become subject to different interpretations. For example, whereas Kennan is today lionized by the liberal foreign policy establishment while Dwight D. Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, is often disparaged by that same liberal establishment as having been too hardline (associated as Dulles is with the CIA-sponsored coups in Iran and Guatemala), Dulles was merely applying containment as he had understood it.

Because containment was so broad, Kennan himself got big things wrong. He was opposed to the creation of West Germany, which he believed would become a stage-set for German nationalism and irredentism. Such a state, he said, would “be neither friendly nor frank nor trustworthy from the standpoint of the Western occupiers.” Of course, West Germany turned out to be exactly the opposite: for decades carving out a role as stable, friendly, trustworthy, and dedicated to submerging German national identity within an embryonic pan-European identity.

As Kennan and West Germany demonstrate, even the most successful grand strategy in modern history does not provide answers to everything or even to most things. Moreover, it does not guard against mistakes, blunders, bloody and misbegotten wars, and plain bad judgement. Containment served America well. It was better than nuclear war or isolationism. But the history of America’s involvement in the Cold War is, nevertheless, one punctuated with tragic mistakes. That is not the fault of containment. Grand strategy of even the best sort has severe limits.

NINE PRESIDENTS, from Harry Truman to George H.W. Bush, navigated the United States through the treacherous waters of the Cold War. Kennan’s containment strategy would emerge triumphant at the end, with the ascent of a Soviet leader who saw with penetrating clarity the decrepitude of the system he had inherited, and, in seeking to reform the system, actually ended up dismantling it—thus bringing an armed truce of forty-four years in Central Europe to a peaceful conclusion. Yet, for long periods between Stalin’s speech at the Bolshoi Theater and the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the concept of containment receded into near-invisibility as one American president after another agonized over wars and other nerve-wracking crises. Containment was so broad a guide that in the crucible of decisionmaking it was barely a guide at all. It was organized common sense at the most elemental level. And common sense, even when organized, does not always prevail. Passion, intrigue, and other Shakespearean factors, in addition to competing visions of common sense itself, often get in the way.

Though the Cold War began with Stalin’s speech and Soviet threats against Iran and the eastern Mediterranean—and accelerated with the Communist victory on mainland China—from the viewpoint of the American public the Korean War was the first truly bloody and memorable event. On January 12, 1950, at the National Press Club in Washington, Truman’s secretary of state, Dean Acheson, included Japan and the Philippines inside the U.S. defense parameter in Asia but did not explicitly include South Korea. As the Washington conventional wisdom went, South Korea was not necessarily a vital chess piece, nor was it seen to be in unequivocal danger. Containment, as a general principle, provided no exact answer to this question. Yet, as the historian James L. Stokesbury writes, “It was one thing to decide rationally that South Korea was not vital to American interests. It was quite a different thing to watch it sink before a tide of Communist invasion” when 100,000 North Korean troops, supported by Stalin, crossed the 38th parallel into South Korea on June 25. “The [American] government that had ‘lost China’ had to do something…”

The South Korean capital of Seoul fell on June 28 and the North Koreans continued to advance south, finally repulsed in September when General Douglas MacArthur staged a bold amphibious landing behind enemy lines at Inchon. But MacArthur, officially commanding UN forces, pressed north across the 38th parallel into North Korea itself, approaching the Yalu River frontier with China. This triggered a Chinese invasion, which drove American-led forces all the way south back over the 38th parallel to Seoul, which Chinese and North Korean forces recaptured in January 1951, before UN forces again liberated it in March.

In April, Truman relieved MacArthur of command for refusing to fight a limited war. A limited war, in which American-led forces did not chase the North Koreans back north across the 38th parallel, was clearly in the spirit of containment. But MacArthur’s outsized ego had intervened, something that often happens in history and which Shakespeare’s historical dramas are replete with. Which is why history, including the Cold War, often does not go according to some preconceived plan or grand strategy. As it would turn out, now that the Chinese were deeply involved in the fighting thanks to MacArthur’s original misjudgment, hostilities continued for another two years before an armistice was concluded, with the 38th parallel once again set as the border between the two Koreas. Little had been accomplished except for over 33,000 American dead. True, the spread of communism had been halted, but not peacefully, as the original theory of containment implicitly hoped for.

CONTAINMENT CONSTITUTED an expectation that war could be avoided. And an all-out nuclear war would be avoided for over four decades. But the United States would still have to cope with middle-sized wars that carried a steep blood cost.

It was under President Eisenhower that the armistice was concluded. Eisenhower had vowed during his 1952 campaign against Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson II that, “I shall go to Korea,” in order to end the inconclusive war that Truman had become burdened with. Eisenhower biographer Jim Newton of the Los Angeles Times observes that when Eisenhower made his trip to the Korean Peninsula after being elected president (but before his inauguration), none of the big questions about the Cold War in Asia had been settled. “Was the enemy North Korea, China, or the Soviet Union? Was America’s goal to repel [a] North Korean invasion, to unify Korea under democratic rule, or to topple Chinese Communism?” There was no agreement on the answers and little grand strategy to draw upon, especially since Communist rule in China was only a few years old then, and thus still seen as quite vulnerable.

Eisenhower, as it happened, settled for the armistice that would give neither side a victory. It was a clue to how he—arguably much more than Kennan—decided the trajectory for the coming decades of the Cold War. Eisenhower’s “middle way,” an organic outgrowth of his character and personality, rejected the advice of generals who believed that in this early phase of the conflict both the Soviet Union and China could be militarily defeated. Eisenhower also rejected the advice of those who believed that the likes of Nikita Khrushchev, Mao Zedong, and Fidel Castro were genuinely sincere in their calls for international peace. Kennan’s containment theory was in the back of Eisenhower’s mind, but it was a mind that was driven by an innate caution regardless.

In the mid-1950s and again in the late-1950s, Eisenhower nearly committed to launching nuclear attacks on China over the fate of Quemoy and Matsu, islands in the Taiwan Strait held by the Nationalists and claimed by the Communists. Eisenhower, in the end, would hold back from using nuclear weapons several times: when they might have ended the Korean War in circumstances more favorable to the United States, when they might have saved the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam in 1954, and when they might have quelled Soviet threats to Berlin. Again and again, his advisers, who clearly were not motivated by containment as it is today understood, urged Eisenhower to use his nuclear arsenal. But Eisenhower always hesitated. In his 1953 inaugural address, he had committed to both security and prudence, and not to forcing America’s values on others. He even refrained from threatening force to defend others who were demanding their own freedom: witness the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. The 1950s were at once extremely dangerous and tumultuous. They are remembered with nostalgia as a safely dull decade only because the true genius of leadership is not to make good things happen, but to prevent bad things from happening. On the whole, as the Eisenhower presidency makes clear, Kennan would be lucky in his Cold War presidents.

But Kennan, it must be said, also helped his own luck. In 1953, at the beginning of his presidency, Eisenhower convened a large group of advisers to devise a new Cold War strategy. Known as Project Solarium, because it began in the Solarium Room of the White House, it came up with Eisenhower’s “New Look” approach to the Cold War. New Look saw the struggle with the Soviet Union and China as long and practically unending, so that Eisenhower committed to aggressively rolling back Communism whenever possible. Nevertheless, containment would still influence the sensibility of Eisenhower’s approach as events unfolded, mainly because Kennan was one of the key advisers for Project Solarium. The Long Telegram and Mr. X’s “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” required help from not only wise presidents, but also from Kennan himself, as he continued to make his voice heard.

Kennan also got help from thermonuclear bombs. Eisenhower was the first president to have an arsenal of atomic bombs and not use them. This was not fated in advance. If America had another somewhat more impulsive president at the time—and we have had such—Hiroshima and Nagasaki may not have constituted the only places to suffer nuclear destruction. Furthermore, it was during Eisenhower’s administration that both superpowers deployed hydrogen bombs in vast numbers. A direct military confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union suddenly became much harder to contemplate, for fear it might escalate into a nuclear exchange. Therefore, the negative reasons on which containment originally rested became much more compelling: since a U.S.-Soviet war was becoming unthinkable and outright isolationism in a nuclear age was simply irresponsible.

The most dangerous chapter of the Cold War would turn out to be the first, between Stalin’s Bolshoi Theater speech and the Cuban Missile Crisis, by which time John F. Kennedy was president. After the United States learned in October 1962 that the Soviets had transferred nuclear warheads atop missiles to Cuba, ninety miles from Florida, Kennedy ordered a naval blockade of Cuba. Neither side budged as one day followed another, both sides contemplating that the next step by either of them might actually be the use of nuclear weapons. The Soviets finally withdrew the missiles from Cuba in November, while the United States secretly agreed to withdraw nuclear warheads from Turkey that had been aimed at the Soviet Union.

During those fateful days in October, the two superpowers stared into the abyss for the first time, and neither side liked what it saw. Thermonuclear annihilation had journeyed from the somewhat abstract to the real and vivid. In the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, both sides agreed to establish a “hotline” to communicate more directly with each other. This was followed by a nuclear test ban treaty and other measures, including regular summit meetings, that taken together both ordered and set parameters to the Cold War. The Cold War went on still, but now it had rules that it hadn’t had before. The world, thanks to the nerve and the restraint of both Eisenhower and Kennedy, had become a little less dangerous. Containment was part of this recipe, but only a part.

CONTAINMENT WAS ambiguous when it came to Southeast Asia. Kennan’s theory envisioned the United States holding the line against communist advances in the third world, even as Kennan himself was skeptical of the critical importance of Vietnam to U.S. strategy. And later, in pursuing actual war in Vietnam, Kennan, according to Gaddis, believed that the United States “appeared to be sacrificing its own best traditions of constitutional and moral responsibility.” Still, we are talking here about the history of a grand strategy, as encased in the Long Telegram and the X article, more than we are talking about Kennan’s various views of U.S. foreign policy as they evolved over the decades. The fact is, communism seemed to be on the march in Indochina in the 1950s and early 1960s, and containment as elucidated as a grand strategy in 1946 and 1947, at the very beginning of the Cold War, did not answer the questions about when, how, and at what level—if at all—the United States should intervene.

Little is fated to happen. In this sense, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, like the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, which probably delayed the achievement of civil rights in the South for decades, was a tragic event. Kennedy, who was a genuine war hero and scion of a high-powered, supremely arrogant, and rather wealthy family, even as he had been rattled by the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs and hardened by the Cuban Missile Crisis, was a man not about to be intimidated by the Pentagon brass and its civilian leadership, especially after the U.S.-inspired coup against South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem in early November 1963 had ended so bloodily. It is hard to believe that the Vietnam War would have evolved in the way that it did, were Kennedy president and not Lyndon B. Johnson—a foreign policy neophyte who gave the Pentagon hawks little pushback.

The larger point is that the Vietnam War, arguably the most indelible and tragic event for the United States during the entire Cold War, played out with little support or hindrance from Kennan’s 1946–1947 grand strategy. Both the proponents and the skeptics of going to war could have used containment as a basis for their belief. Though strictly speaking, containment, as in containing the territorial spread of communism, proved disastrous in Indochina; it led, in fact, to the break-up of the very bipartisan foreign policy establishment that Kennan personified. What was needed in the case of Vietnam was less a grand strategy than a genuine appreciation of the local terrain itself—geographical, cultural, and military. Eisenhower’s intrinsic caution was here absent, as was his suspicion about fighting a land war in Asia. Vietnam was a matter of presidential personalities as much as it was about politics and strategy.

Enter President Richard M. Nixon and his national security advisor (and later secretary of state), Henry Kissinger. Kissinger may have epitomized the spirit of containment better than any other American Cold War statesman. But Kissinger’s acceptance of Kennan’s theory was a consequence of Kissinger’s own historical and philosophical understanding of the Cold War world, which owed much more to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinkers and strategists such as Edmund Burke and Klemens von Metternich than to George Kennan. In his first book written as a Harvard graduate student, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-1822, Kissinger notes, “the most fundamental problem of politics … is not the control of wickedness but the limitation of righteousness.” Fighting evil is an easy choice, in other words; the hard part is controlling one’s own sense of a perfect morality. For freedom, quoting Metternich, is only a “goal.” And the “point of departure” for that goal is “order.” Order, thus, in Kissinger’s estimation, must come before freedom. And because, as Kissinger implies, with longevity comes legitimacy, communist states—however evil, like the Soviet Union and China—had to be tolerated as legitimate members of an international order, in which America’s idea of world freedom was a goal that was only a point of orientation, requiring considerable patience. This, of course, was the perfect accompaniment to the spirit of Kennan’s long-term strategy of containment.

And by moving closer to China in order to balance against the Soviet Union, while conducting a policy of détente with the Soviet Union at the same time, Kissinger brilliantly improvised on Kennan’s theory while not really requiring it as an inspiration. Kissinger’s realpolitik concerning the Communist powers naturally enraged the moralists of the political Right and Left. But without Nixon’s and Kissinger’s successful manipulations, which allowed the United States to geopolitically overcome the catastrophe of Vietnam, Ronald Reagan may not have had the luxury of his Wilsonianism, which would end up making Kennan look very good indeed.

THE HELSINKI Process, which followed the Conference for Security and Co-operation in Europe in 1972, began the culmination of the Cold War, though nobody could know it at the time. Helsinki was one of those cases where unintended consequences carried the day. The process, which culminated in the Final Act signed on August 1, 1975, was initiated by Soviet leaders in the period of détente. It was at first met with suspicion by leaders in the United States and Western Europe, who feared it would only formalize the division between East and West in Central Europe and the Balkans, and thus validate Soviet imperialism. But as it turned out, by encouraging discussions on human rights and economic development, and by accepting the eventual unification of Germany, it moved the needle in the other direction, providing dissident groups in the East Bloc with a new and critical layer of legitimacy. The Helsinki Accords were signed under President Gerald Ford, with Kissinger still as secretary of state. President Jimmy Carter employed them to push harder rhetorically on the theme of human rights in Europe and beyond. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev “could not repudiate it without causing even greater damage to his own reputation and to the legitimacy of the Soviet system,” observes historian Michael Cotey Morgan. This was all in the spirit of containment operating as a hidden hand: emphasize patience and your own values to help the opposing system either crumble or transform from within. Kennan’s theory may not have been nearly as influential throughout crucial junctures of the Cold War as many might now assume, but it did encompass an inspired element of prophecy. It wasn’t the usual linear projection of the future which forecasting firms offer up today.

When Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency in January 1981, neither Helsinki nor Kennan were quite seen in this light. For there would not be for almost another decade a strong indication that the Cold War would end in such a triumph for the West. At first, Kennan was a bit terrified of Reagan, seeing the new president’s rhetoric as an oversimplification of reality regarding the Soviet Union. Kennan, moreover, had become a passionate opponent of the nuclear arms race that Reagan intensified. Kennan, as an area specialist and policy intellectual, saw nuances and limitations; whereas Reagan was a man of black-and-white instincts on a few grand issues. Normally, the former type proves wiser than the latter. But this was a case where a U.S. president knew and believed only a few things, but they turned out to be the right things to know and believe at the right time in history. Yet, as Gaddis writes, “if Kennan could have read NSDD-75, the [Reagan] administration’s first top-secret review of policy toward the Soviet Union,” approved in 1983, he would have found “echoes” of Mr. X: “To contain and over time reverse Soviet expansionism by competing on a sustained basis with the Soviet Union … particularly in the overall military balance…”

The 1980s would see a resurgence of interest in Kennan himself. In 1986, journalists Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas published their bestseller about the architects of the post-World War II era, The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made. One of the six was, of course, Kennan. And in April 1989, The Atlantic Monthly published a cover story, “The Last Wise Man,” about Kennan. This trend was helped in the middle of the decade by the ascension of Mikhail Gorbachev, the first Soviet leader who demonstrably admitted the unsustainable inadequacies of the Communist system—another echo of Kennan—and set about to try to reform it.

But what really anointed Kennan as the grand strategic visionary was President George H.W. Bush, who, in the footsteps of Eisenhower, proved that greatness was a negative virtue: it was about preventing bad things from happening, and about deliberately avoiding action rather than taking it. Bush the elder was the last American aristocrat to be president of the United States. Like Isaacson’s and Thomas’ Wise Men, he was well-born and brought up, with a long and substantial resume of government service. He had excellent judgement rather than brilliance, and judgement in a leader is more important. Bush, rather than loudly cheer the anti-communist uprisings in Eastern Europe during the autumn of 1989, and rather than conduct a victory tour of Eastern Europe immediately afterwards, remained fairly reticent. The result was that the Soviet regime felt less humiliated than it normally might have, given the turn of events, and this helped allow its empire to disintegrate peacefully.

Kennan foresaw in 1946–1947 that the Soviet Union internally had less staying power than the United States. But he did not foresee the steely caution of the Eisenhower presidency in the 1950s; nor the development and mass production of hydrogen bombs in the same decade that ironically kept the Cold War relatively restrained. He did not foresee how the high drama of the Cuban Missile Crisis would lead afterwards to a stabilization of the U.S.-Soviet conflict. And he did not foresee the particular genius of Nixon and Kissinger in stabilizing the relationships with both the Soviet Union and China to America’s advantage—in the wake of a looming U.S. military defeat in Vietnam, no less. Again, we expect too much of a grand strategy, even when it works.

IS GRAND strategy of Kennan’s dimension, however much it was helped by individual leaders and events, still possible?

In the first place, Kennan’s containment theory was more or less adopted by the governing elite of his time with basically little resistance. This was because the elite of the immediate postwar era was both small and homogeneous. They had similar backgrounds, being white, Protestant, and financially well-off. They had gone to similar prep schools and universities, had served in the armed forces, were in similar professions, and had all just been through the crucible of World War II. They were bipartisan and tight-knit. Furthermore, the challenge posed by a leader like Stalin was stark and unambiguous. Thus, they had the same assumptions about the world. Kennan’s Long Telegram and X article were a summation and clear articulation of their views at a decisive juncture.

Even after the divisions created by the Vietnam War, unity on certain issues across parties and administrations was still possible. For example, from the time of Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 and the ascension of Donald Trump as president in 2017, a period just shy of half-a-century, the American approach towards China and the Far East, in general, was more or less uniform, no matter which party was in power and no matter the divergence on other foreign policy issues. President Bill Clinton during his first term experimented with a more assertive human rights policy towards Beijing, but eventually he retreated toward the elite consensus: which was a go-along, get-along Business Roundtable interpretation of realpolitik, given all the investment opportunities that a post-Mao China was offering.

The Chinese reality encouraged this consensus. China, though still nominally communist, was in the latter decades of the twentieth century becoming increasingly less repressive, with more collegial rule at the top. It was becoming the geographic, demographic, and economic organizing principle of the Far East: a nuclear power, no less, as well as an ancient civilization now reasserting itself. It required absolute seriousness in policy and the post-Vietnam remnants of the establishment rose to the occasion. Policy towards East Asia just did not fluctuate from one administration to the next the way it did towards the Middle East, or even the way it did towards Europe, where Republicans were markedly less fervent regarding human rights than were the Democrats. (It wasn’t an accident that the humanitarian interventions in the Balkans occurred under a Democratic administration.)

However much the China consensus wobbled, it held—until the Trump administration broke it. Trump signaled that U.S. policy toward China had been far too accommodating. And thus a deep fissure emerged between foreign policy centrists in the United States, who supported the status quo, and those on both the Right and the Left, who blamed China and its alleged manipulation of globalization for the American workers’ loss of income and position.

The end of a unified foreign policy elite heralded by the Trump administration has been a long time coming. The American-led alliance system of almost seventy-five years was a grand success. But it had, in the course of that success, naturally built-up problems and incongruities, as allies did not always rise to the challenge in providing for their own defense, even as standards of living and the quality of life in their own countries, in quite a few cases, surpassed that of the United States.

The American foreign policy elite is now more or less divided between activists and neo-isolationists (or put another way, between interventionists and non-interventionists), and more broadly between internationalists and nationalists. The very expanded size of the present policy class has also created a divide between a comfortable establishment oriented around the Council of Foreign Relations and edgy intellectuals writing in small journals, clawing from the outside at the guardrails of this establishment. There is not even agreement on Russia, a great power rival of the United States whose previous incarnation as the Soviet Union had united the American foreign policy elite for many decades. Liberal Democrats tend to believe the Russia threat is practically existential; conservative Republicans tend to believe it has been exaggerated. Rarely in recent times has the domestic partisan divided entangled itself so in foreign policy.

Then there is the creeping advance of “they,” when referring to Americans, rather than “we.” An increasing number of institutions—particularly leading media and analytical firms in New York that service and influence the opinions of the foreign policy establishment—now tell their employees that their particular media organ or firm is no longer “American,” but “global.” I have personally experienced such guidance.

GIVEN ALL of this, the possibilities of creating unity around a grand strategy tied to American national interests are rather small. Kennan’s clubby world is gone forever. However, there does exist a substantial community of defense and security experts oriented around the Pentagon, that still use “we” instead of “they” when referring to Americans. This defense community is sufficiently homogeneous in its goals and values, despite the many differences of opinion within it, because there is an overriding assumption in this community that U.S. interests should be primary and that America faces a variety of new and old threats that must be countered. In Kennan’s day, the primary threat was the Soviet Union and world communism. In this new era, the primary threat is China and its particular brand of authoritarianism, mixed as it is with high-technology surveillance and economic and military aggression. China has gone from a post-Mao enlightened authoritarianism which the American business, policy, and media establishments tolerated and were somewhat comfortable with, to becoming a sharp-edged dictatorship under one man, Xi Jinping, armed with a cult of personality. The dream of gradually luring China into a post-Cold War, made-in-America system of globalization is over. This new China represents a stark and unambiguous threat. Like Kennan’s Long Telegram and X article, a successful grand strategy towards China should describe the root of the problem, the sources of Chinese regime behavior, and lay out a plan emphasizing what not to do. Concentrating on what not to do will eliminate extreme viewpoints, and identify practical constraints on our China policy: constraints originating, as with Kennan’s containment theory, with an implicit understanding of what the American people can tolerate and what they can afford.

Robert D. Kaplan holds the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. He is the author of nineteen books on foreign affairs, including The Good American, The Return of Marco Polo’s World, The Coming Anarchy, Asia’s Cauldron, The Revenge of Geography, and Balkan Ghosts. For thirty years he was a foreign correspondent for The Atlantic. He served on the Defense Policy Board and the Chief of Naval Operations’ Executive Panel.

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