Worldmaking (47 page)

Lippmann was of course duly thwarted. On June 4, 1947, while delivering a commencement address at Harvard, Secretary of State Marshall presented the broad sweep of a plan designed to assist the recovery and reconstruction of Europe. During the planning stage, the State Department had decided that creating the impression of a European-requested endeavor would have stretched credulity a little too far. The bulk of the speech was drafted by Kennan's friend Charles Bohlen, and it drew on Kennan's and Lippmann's insights as well as those from other State Department sources, William Clayton most notably. The Marshall Plan, as it became known, had a broad purpose tailored to the chaotic economic circumstances of the time:

It is logical that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace. Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine, but against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.
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At the end of the month, Molotov and some eighty advisers, including a retinue of hopeful representatives from Eastern Europe, attended a conference in Paris to discuss Marshall's offer. Lippmann was delighted by this promising news; Kennan, aghast. Fortunately, Molotov behaved as expected in declining Washington's offer, taking the leaders of Moscow's unhappy satellites back east with him. Marshall's seemingly gregarious observation that U.S. “policy is not directed against any country, but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos” did not dupe Vyacheslav Molotov. Superpower rivalry was ideological, above all, and accepting the Marshall Plan also meant accepting the superiority of capitalism over communism. There was not enough cash in the world to sweeten that pill.

Over the next four years, $12.4 billion in aid was disbursed to the sixteen nations of the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation—including Great Britain, France, Italy, West Germany, and Austria—freshly created to administer the Marshall Plan from the recipient end. Lippmann had floated an early rationale and played his usually significant role in respect to guiding and illuminating public opinion. But this was George Kennan's achievement, perhaps his finest policy hour. The Marshall Plan was the perfect realization of logic contained in the Long Telegram. (Few policies henceforth came close to satisfying Kennan.) It was also successful in achieving its declared goals. Tottering on shaky economic and political foundations in 1947, Western Europe regained its footing following Marshall's speech and embarked upon a remarkable period of sustained growth. The Marshall Plan also presaged closer European economic and political cooperation—in the fashion that Lippmann and Kennan anticipated. Historians and economists continue to debate the actual utility of the plan. The $12.4 billion figure was not vast in the wider scheme of things; America's GDP in 1948 was $258 billion. Western Europe had greater latent economic potential than any other region on earth. But one need not enter this scholarly debate to observe that the Marshall Plan made an enormous contribution—psychologically at the least and economically transformative at the most—to the rehabilitation of Western Europe. It instilled hope and unity of purpose, which was enough.

*   *   *

A few months before the creation of the Marshall Plan, the editor of
Foreign Affairs
, Hamilton Fish Armstrong, invited Kennan to redraft the Long Telegram for publication. Here was an ideal opportunity for Kennan to reach a much larger audience than the National War College lectern could provide.
Foreign Affairs
was not the
International Herald Tribune
, but its readership was influential and its circulation respectable. Kennan replied with a caveat: “I really cannot write anything of value on Russia for publication under my own name. If you would be interested in an anonymous article, or one under a pen name, I would be glad to know this.” An undeterred Armstrong replied that “the interest of the projected article more than outweighs from our point of view the disadvantage of anonymity. This letter is an invitation to you, then, to put into the form of an article the ideas you expressed so well in your memorandum and in your talk here at the Council.”
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An article titled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” by an author identified as “X” appeared in July's
Foreign Affairs
. Nothing published in that journal since—and that includes seminal pieces by Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon, Samuel Huntington, Paul Wolfowitz, and many others—has had a comparable impact.
The New York Times
and
Newsweek
reported on the article's meaning and wider significance, and mused on the likely identity of its author—“X” was intriguing, an unintended marketing masterstroke.
Reader's Digest
and
Life
printed long excerpts, riling Kennan with their brutal editing, which he believed damaged the article's integrity. It took less than a month for Arthur Krock to reveal X's identity in the
Times
. Perturbed by this media storm, George Marshall summoned Kennan for a dressing down, growling in admonishment that “planners don't talk.” Kennan protested that he had secured all necessary clearances, which mollified Marshall.
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The secretary of state and others understood that the publicity could serve a useful purpose. James Forrestal, for one, was thrilled that the X Article had secured such a large readership, and that its connection to U.S. policy had been established. The danger posed by the Soviet Union would, he hoped, become evident to all who read the article. The making of a resolute, and costly, foreign policy would become simpler if the public and their political representatives understood the stakes involved in containing Moscow.

“The Sources of Soviet Conduct” covered much of the same ground as the Long Telegram. It begins by re-creating Stalin's warped perspective on diplomacy: that there could be no meaningful collaboration between the Soviet Union and “powers which are regarded as capitalist.” “This means,” Kennan wrote, “that we are going to continue for a long time to find the Russians difficult to deal with.” It is impossible to engage meaningfully with a totalitarian regime because “truth is not a constant but is actually created, for all intents and purposes, by the Soviet leaders themselves.” Russian history, additionally, provides ample evidence that communist “precepts are fortified by … centuries of obscure battles between nomadic forces over the stretches of a vast fortified plain.” Assaulted in various eras by Mongol hordes from the east, and Napoleon's and Hitler's formidable land armies from the west, Russia had a complicated relationship with the outside world, to say the least. Invading armies had visited death and destruction on Russia on a scale experienced by no other nation on earth. In these circumstances, the coupling of Russian history and Marxism-Leninism had real chemistry.

To ensure that this abused child was restrained in the extent of abuse it could mete out, Kennan crafted a seminal strategic concept:

In these circumstances it is clear that the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansionist tendencies … It will be clearly seen that the Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the Western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and maneuvers of Soviet policy, but which cannot be charmed or talked out of existence.

The next eight presidents would all subscribe to variations on this policy. The containment of Soviet expansionism was designed to ensure that the free world remained inoculated from Marxist contagion. In the meantime, the Soviet Union would wither on the vine:

Russian communists who speak of the “uneven development of capitalism” should blush at the contemplation of their own national economy … It is difficult to see how these deficiencies can be corrected at an early date by a tired and dispirited population working largely under the shadow of fear and compulsion … The possibility remains (and in the opinion of this writer it is a strong one) that Soviet power, like the capitalist world of its conception, bears within it the seeds of its own decay, and that the sprouting of these seeds is well-advanced.

If the United States remained resolute and kept its head, the Soviet Union would not pose as serious a challenge as promised by Stalin's and Molotov's bluster. “For no mystical, messianic movement—and particularly not that of the Kremlin—can face frustration indefinitely without eventually adjusting itself in one way or another to the logic of that state of affairs.”
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Kennan's article evoked a strong reaction in Walter Lippmann. Aware of the article's vast potential impact, he wrote twelve successive “T&T” columns, all of which appeared in the late summer of 1947, criticizing X's rationale, prescriptions, and predictions. Lippmann accused X of making some egregious errors: downplaying Russia's history at the expense of Marxist ideology, proposing a strategy so broad in application that it would lead to perpetual conflict in areas of marginal significance, and misplaced confidence in the fallibility of the Soviet system. In the most damning indictment, Lippmann accused Kennan of authoring a “strategic monstrosity” that was likely to cause geopolitical exhaustion: “The Americans would themselves probably be frustrated by Mr. X's policy long before the Russians were.” The articles were published collectively as a book titled
The Cold War
in the fall. With “the Cold War” and “containment,” Kennan and Lippmann had provided the language that defined the postwar era.

Lippmann's twelve-stage critique of Kennan's article was brilliant at times and garnered a lot of publicity. His first column impugned X for observing that Soviet power “bears within itself the seed of its own decay.” “Do we dare to assume as we enter the arena and get set to run the race,” asked Lippmann sarcastically, “that the Soviet Union will break its leg while the United States grows a pair of wings to speed it on its way?”
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In Lippmann's mind, the Soviet Union was an established fact that was here to stay. Both assessments had some merit, but Kennan more accurately identified the process through which the Marxist-Leninist experiment would unravel; Lippmann had been duped by a Soviet economic and political system that resembled a Potemkin village. Containment was entirely appropriate because Russian communism would prove evanescent. The Soviet Union's economic virtues bore no serious comparison to those of the United States and the West; Moscow's reluctant empire was not likely to remain quiescent.

Lippmann was on surer ground in following through on the faulty logic contained in Kennan's advocacy of the “adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points.” “The Eurasian continent is a big place,” wrote Lippmann, “and the military power of the United States, though it is very great, has certain limits which must be borne in mind if it is to be used effectively.” Of particular concern to Lippmann was containment's apparently broad application, unencumbered in presentation by any clearly established hierarchy of American interests. This made the Third World a battleground of dubious worth: “The policy can be implemented only by recruiting, subsidizing and supporting a heterogeneous array of satellites, clients, dependents and puppets.” The problem with lavishing resources, and vesting credibility, on such areas and regimes is that “satellite states and puppet governments are not good material out of which to construct unassailable barriers. We shall have either to disown our puppets, which would be tantamount to appeasement and defeat and loss of face, or must support them at incalculable cost on an unintended, unforeseen and perhaps undesirable issue.”
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With this observation, Lippmann had peered into the future.

In the last of the twelve articles, Lippmann identified a continuity of aims between X and the authors of the Truman Doctrine. All had been foolishly driven by Wilsonianism, disregarding the Mahanian tradition in American diplomatic history that understood that certain values do not travel well. Washington policymakers should protect the security and interests of the nation and its closest strategic partners—not treat the world as a single battleground on which the champions of John Locke should be pitted against those of Karl Marx. Any poor nation should be free to opt for the latter just as it might prefer the former. Their decision was irrelevant, as weak and peripheral nations did not affect the West's core economic and security interests. And fighting proxy wars in such places was foolish on multiple levels:

Our aim will not be to organize an ideological crusade. It will not be to make Jeffersonian democrats out of the peasants of eastern Europe, the tribal chieftains, the feudal lords, the pashas, and the warlords of the Middle East and Asia, but to settle the war and to restore the independence of the nations of Europe by removing the alien armies—all of them, our own included … Alien armies are hateful, however well behaved, just because they represent an alien power and are, therefore, a perpetual reminder that the people on whom they are quartered are not masters of their own destiny.
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Lippmann's polemic was highly impressive. In fact, Kennan mostly agreed with him, which made its ferocity harder to dismiss or absorb.

Of course, Kennan's first reaction was anger. He too abhorred the Truman Doctrine but was unable to vent his frustrations to millions of avid readers in the way Lippmann could. After Lippmann's first article went to press, Kennan asked permission to publicly respond, which Marshall denied. Kennan was annoyed that Lippmann had emphasized the perils of containment's military application, when its author in fact viewed war as an absolute last resort. Kennan began to wonder whether he had made his meaning clear, eventually conceding that the ambiguities and gaps contained in the article had invited Lippmann's critique. In his memoirs he confessed his “failure to make clear what I was talking about when I mentioned the containment of Soviet power was not the containment by military means of a military threat, but the political containment of a political threat.” In identifying a “series of constantly shifting geographical and political points,” Kennan had erred in proposing a strategy that was “at best ambiguous, and lent itself to misinterpretation.” This led him to identify another “great deficiency”—his “failure to distinguish between various geographic areas, and to make clear that the ‘containment' of which I was speaking was not something which I thought we could, necessarily, do everywhere successfully, or even needed to do everywhere successfully, in order to serve the purpose I had in mind.” In April 1948, Kennan composed a long letter to Lippmann, from his sickbed at Bethesda Naval Hospital (it should be noted here that Kennan, who lived to 101, was more robust than his complaints suggest):