X Article
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The X Article, formally titled "The Sources of Soviet Conduct", was published in Foreign Affairs in July 1947. Though signed pseudonymously by "X," it was well known at the time that the true author was George F. Kennan, the deputy chief of mission of the United States to the USSR from 1944 to 1946, under ambassador W. Averell Harriman. The article was an expansion of a well-circulated State Department cable called the Long Telegram and became famous for setting forth the doctrine of containment.
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[edit] Background
Kennan had been stationed at the US Moscow embassy from 1944 as minister-counselor. Although he was highly critical of the Soviet system, the mood within the US State Department was one of friendship towards the Soviets, since they were considered an important ally in the war against Nazi Germany.
In February 1946 the US Moscow embassy got a question from the United States Treasury asking why the Soviets were not supporting the newly created World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
In response, Kennan wrote his Long Telegram outlining his views of the Soviets, which arrived in Washington on February 22, 1946. Among its most remembered parts was that while Soviet power was "impervious to the logic of reason," it was "highly sensitive to the logic of force."
[edit] The Long Telegram
In writing the Long Telegram, Kennan was profoundly aware of the issues at stake in his answer, as the preface of the Long Telegram relates:
Answer to Dept’s 284, Feb. 3,11 involves questions so intricate, so delicate, so strange to our form of thought, and so important to analysis of our international environment that I cannot compress answers into single brief message without yielding to what I feel would be dangerous degree of oversimplification. I hope, therefore, Dept will bear with me if I submit in answer to this question five parts... I apologize in advance for this burdening of telegraphic channel; but questions involved are of such urgent importance, particularly in view of recent events, that our answers to them, if they deserve attention at all, seem to me to deserve it at once.
Kennan then proceeded (in his first two sections) to lay out concepts that would become the bedrock of American Cold War policy:
- The Soviet Union perceived itself to be at eternal war with capitalism;
- Socialism and social democracy were perceived as enemies, not allies;
- The Soviet Union would use controllable Marxists in the capitalist world as allies;
- Soviet aggression was not fundamentally aligned with the Russian people's views or with economic reality, but rather in historic Russian xenophobia and paranoia;
- The structure of the Soviet government prohibited an objective or accurate picture of either internal or external reality.
In sections three and four, Kennan accurately predicted most of the tactics and strategies that the Soviet Union would employ during the Cold War.
Section five, the most controversial part of the Long Telegram, laid out Soviet weaknesses and proposed US strategy. Kennan argued that the Soviet Union would be sensitive to force; that the Soviets were weak compared to the united Western world; that the Soviets were vulnerable to internal instability; and that Soviet propaganda was primarily negative and destructive. Kennan advocated sound appraisal; public education; solidarity with the rest of the world; constructive efforts to build a more positive world society; and faith in the superiority of the Western way of life. These ideas were not the sum total of the policy of containment but outlined many of its key aspects. The term "containment" was not used in the telegram.
[edit] Impact of the Long Telegram
The Long Telegram was heavily circulated in the State Department in 1946, and reached the White House and Defense Departments by 1947. It was a major spur to the development of U.S. Cold War policy as set forth in NSC-68 (1950). The Long Telegram did not actually lead to the Cold War policy adopted via NSC-68. NSC-68 provided for a distinctly different type of containment than that laid out in the Long Telegram. The Long Telegram called for economic pressures against the USSR, whereas NSC-68 called for militaristic pressures. Kennan believed that it was acceptable for communism to spread to certain nations, but NSC-68 dictated that all losses to communism were bad. They are two very separate policies that use two very different means to achieve two very different ends.
[edit] Publication as the X Article
One of the prime tenets of the Long Telegram was the education of America (and, indeed, the world) about the perceived nature of the Soviet Union and their irrational desire for world domination. Accordingly, Kennan produced a civilian form of the Long Telegram for publication in Foreign Affairs. The article followed the same threads of thought as the Long Telegram but included background information that Kennan had assumed the readers of the Long Telegram (high-level State Department officials) would be familiar with.
Because Kennan was still a senior diplomat, and the conclusions described were most undiplomatic with regard to appraisal of the Soviet Union, Kennan published anonymously as "X". This was merely a cover for maintaining diplomatic goodwill; the entire American government, and presumably a number of Soviet officials as well, either knew or deduced Kennan's identity rapidly.
[edit] See also
- Cordon sanitaire (French historian André Fontaine argued that the Cold War had started immediately after the 1917 October Revolution)
[edit] External links
- "The Sources of Soviet Conduct"
- The 'Long Telegram'
- NSC-68: U.S. Objectives and Programs for National Security, NSC-68 was submitted directly to President Harry Truman in 1950 by an ad hoc interdepartmental committee under its Policy Planning head, Paul Nitze.
