(2 of 3)
Keep Out of Our Way. Kennan thoroughly demolishes the argument, put forward by a growing school of New-Leftist "revisionists," that the U.S., not Russia, was to blame for the cold war. When the Red army stopped at the Vistula River in 1944 and folded its arms while the Nazis bloodily put down the Warsaw uprising, and when Stalin refused to allow the U.S. even to airlift supplies to the dying Polish Resistance, it was obvious, says Kennan, that Stalin meant to swallow Poland, "lock, stock and barrel."
Within months after V-E day, Stalin's "dream" of acquiring a buffer zone along Russia's western border had come true. Kennan dismisses as absurd the notion that Stalin's expansionist appetite was fed by fears of the U.S. or anger at not being offered enormous sums of American aid. He recalls what a Soviet friend told him in 1944: "This is something you should bear in mind about the Russian. The better things go for him, the more arrogant he is. When we are successful, keep out of our way."
Washington Subconscious. Abruptly, in 1946, Washington began heeding Kennan's alarums. For months, he recalls, "I had done little else but pluck people's sleeves," warning them of Russia's intentions, but it was "like talking to a stone." Then, in an 8,000-word telegram to Washington—"neatly divided, like an 18th century Protestant sermon, into five separate parts"—Kennan reiterated all that he had said before, and everybody began listening. Precisely why is unclear. The subconscious motivations of official Washington, he believes, are as intricate "as those of the most complicated of Sigmund Freud's erstwhile patients."
After Kennan returned to Washington in 1946, first as deputy for foreign affairs at the newly established National War College and then to head the State Department's new Policy Planning Staff, he succeeded in influencing the shape of the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and the designs for rebuilding Japan's economy. But then the pendulum began swinging too far the other way. From "the clumsy naïveté" of its wartime cozying-up to Moscow, Washington moved to the opposite extreme and adopted an unbending, monolithic attitude toward the Communist countries. Kennan believes that U.S. policy has been "bedeviled" for two decades by this approach.
The Vital Areas. As Kennan sees it, there are "only five regions of the world—the United States, the United Kingdom, the Rhine Valley with adjacent industrial areas, the Soviet Union and Japan—where the sinews of modern military strength could be produced in quantity." These, he argues, should be the vital areas of U.S. concern; all the others must be secondary. Since one of the areas is under Communist control, the first task for U.S. policy since World War II has been to see to it that "none of the remaining ones fell under such control." Accordingly, he sees no application of the containment policy to Viet Nam.
Kennan thinks it was a mistake for the U.S. ever to have become involved there. As he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a precipitate withdrawal would be an even greater mistake. His advice: quit escalating and give diplomacy a chance to settle the war.