X Article - The Long Telegram

The Long Telegram

In writing the Long Telegram, his reply to the U.S. Treasury Department, Kennan was profoundly aware of the matters at stake; its preface says:

Answer to Dept’s 284, Feb. 3,13 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 a 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 described dealing with Soviet Communism as “undoubtedly greatest task our diplomacy has ever faced and probably greatest it will ever have to face”. In the first two sections, he posited concepts that became the foundation of American Cold War policy:

• The USSR perceived itself at perpetual war with capitalism;
• The USSR viewed left-wing, but non-communist, groups in other countries as an even worse enemy of itself than the capitalist ones;
• The USSR would use controllable Marxists in the capitalist world as allies;
• Soviet aggression was fundamentally not aligned with the views of the Russian people or with economic reality, but rooted in historic Russian nationalism and neurosis;
• The Soviet government's structure prohibited objective or accurate pictures of internal and external reality.

According to Kennan, the Soviet Union did not see the possibility for long-term peaceful coexistence with the capitalist world. It was its ever-present aim to advance the socialist cause. Capitalism was a menace to the ideals of socialism, and capitalists could not be trusted or allowed to influence the Soviet people. Outright conflict was never considered a desirable avenue for the propagation of the Soviet cause, but their eyes and ears were always open for the opportunity to take advantage of “diseased tissue” anywhere in the world.

In Section Five, Kennan exposited Soviet weaknesses and proposed U.S. strategy, stating that despite the great challenge, “my conviction that problem is within our power to solve—and that without recourse to any general military conflict.” He 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, solutions of the internal problems of U.S. society, proposing for other nations a positive picture of the world the U.S. would like to see, and faith in the superiority of the Western way of life over the collective ideals of Soviet Communists.