by Benn Steil
In August, however, he probed again, this time demanding that Ankara accept joint control of the strategic Turkish Straits and Dardanelles, including provision for Soviet military bases. The ultimatum was a blatant contravention of Turkey’s sovereign rights in the waterways under the Montreux Convention of 1936.33 At Yalta, Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed, off the record, to Stalin’s demand to review the convention; he now took this assent as license to ignore it.
“What would Britain do if Spain or Egypt [could] close the Suez Canal?” Stalin had asked Churchill rhetorically in October 1944. “Or what would the United States Government say if some South American Republic [could] close the Panama Canal?” It was equally “impossible for Russia to remain subject to Turkey, who could close the Straits and hamper Russian imports and exports and even her defence.”34 These were waterways used by the French and British to lay siege to Sevastopol during the Crimean War. The Germans controlled them during two world wars. A Soviet military presence would provide Stalin’s largely landlocked empire with both security and unrestricted access to a global maritime route.
Back in Washington, Acheson watched Stalin’s actions with alarm. The eastern Mediterranean marked the intersection of his fears of British retrenchment and Soviet advance. The president, he was relieved to see, grasped the threat. Briefing him in the Oval Office, surrounded by top military brass, the under secretary was awed to see Truman take “a great big map” from his desk drawer and deliver “a ten-minute lecture on the strategic importance” of the region.
Truman had a passion for maps. Maps adorned his old Senate office, which he had used to follow the war. After moving into the White House, he was a regular visitor to the highly secure Map Room, where movements of ships and armies were constantly updated with colored pins. Using them as props, he impressed many under him, such as Acheson and chief of staff to the commander and chief Admiral William Leahy, with his autodidact’s knowledge of geography and military history.
With no hesitation, Truman told Acheson to inform the Soviet chargé d’affaires (an ambassadorial subordinate) of his full support for Turkish rights in the Straits and his intention to take any act of aggression to the Security Council. He backed it up by ordering a flotilla of military ships to the Mediterranean and, secretly, authorized plans for strategic air force operations in the region. Stalin, after his intelligence agents confirmed that Truman was prepared to fight for Turkey, dropped his demands on Ankara in late October 1946.35 The map meeting would be seminal in the political bonding between Truman and Acheson.
In spite of Britain’s weakening position and Stalin’s provocations in 1946, Washington was caught unprepared by Britain’s retrenchment in 1947. Stuck in a nineteenth-century diplomatic and military posture, the United States had neither a policy nor the immediate capacity for deterring a determined aggressor in a traditional British theater of imperial control. General Walter Bedell Smith, the newly appointed ambassador in Moscow, thought Turkey had “little hope of independent survival unless it [were] assured of solid long-term American and British support.”36 British retreat, now, was tantamount to “open[ing] three continents to Soviet penetration.”37
Reinstalled in Washington teaching Grand Strategy at the National War College, Kennan feared the Soviets would underestimate U.S. determination to prevent their further encroachment in the region, believing it raised the odds of war. Acheson, who unlike Kennan held no theory of Soviet conduct, was alarmed by the brute cartography of it. To his mind, the Kremlin’s efforts to establish naval bases in the Turkish Straits presaged domination of an enfeebled Turkey, to be followed by penetration into Greece and “the whole Near and Middle East.” The region would then be “cut off from the Western world,” encouraging the Russians to push on into India, from which British lines of passage would be cut. China would follow.
Two years prior, FDR’s State Department had been critical of Britain’s military support for the brutal Greek royalists in their fight against Communist rebels. But the geopolitical landscape had since changed. Greece, American ambassador Lincoln MacVeagh reported, was in complete political, economic, and social disarray; armed Communist bands, he warned, would take over if the government collapsed. Mark Ethridge, the U.S. delegate to a U.N. commission investigating Greek border disputes, reported that the “Soviets feel that Greece is [a] ripe plum [waiting] to fall into their hands in a few weeks.”38
When London had been urging a coalition against the Soviet threat on the European continent, Washington was uninterested. Now that Washington was warming to the idea, London hadn’t the means to participate. Acheson, who had fought pitched battles with the FDR Treasury over its efforts to unravel the British empire financially, now scrambled to deal with the consequences of its success. It was a crisis, he believed, “in some ways more formidable than the one described in the first chapter of Genesis.”39
DEAN GOODERHAM ACHESON, SON OF an Episcopal Bishop, had been born for this moment—a moment his political memoir would term “the Creation.” His abiding admiration for the Pax Britannica had, until this point, been a nostalgic one—one that made him an awkward bystander at times during two tours with the FDR administration. At Treasury in the early 1930s, he could not abide the president’s willful destruction of the gold standard, an inheritance from the last century; at State in the early 1940s, he condemned efforts to encourage Britain’s imperial liquidation. Britain had, until Pearl Harbor, stood alone against Hitler, and its collaboration, he believed, would be needed to restore order after his defeat. Now that the ruinous effects of British insolvency were clear, Acheson became consumed with a sense of mission. As convinced of the need to resist Soviet expansion as he had been of the need to roll back Nazi expansion before it, he set out to initiate a new American order to carry out the resistance. He hoped that this time the United States would not have to resort to arms.
Acheson was no reflexive cold warrior. He sought détente over confrontation. In 1944 he supported extending debt forgiveness and reconstruction aid to Moscow.40 In November 1945 he gave a speech to the Soviet-American Friendship Society, before thousands at Madison Square Garden in New York, proclaiming that “we understand and agree with [the Soviet Union] that to have friendly governments along her borders is essential both for the security of the Soviet Union and the peace of the world.”41 In a January 1946 address he called it “absolutely unthinkable that we should fight Russia.”42 The press needled him as “Red Dean.”43
But he had also been deeply distrustful of the Soviet leadership since its crushing of Polish independence in 1945—a distrust that turned to alarmed wariness after Stalin’s belligerent February 1946 “election” speech at the Bolshoi Theater, on the eve of the first postwar balloting for the Supreme Soviet, in which he painted a dark landscape of inevitable conflict with the capitalist West. Acheson thought Secretary of State Jimmy Byrnes too naively compromising in his dealings with him.44 The media began to take note of the shift in his posture. “When the facts seemed to him to merit a change,” as they did in the case of the Soviet Union, wrote James Reston of The New York Times, Acheson “switched with the facts.”45
When in January 1947 Marshall asked Acheson to stay on as his under secretary, and de facto chief of staff, he accepted with the proviso that he would return to private life on June 30—hardly sufficient time to erect a new postwar diplomatic architecture. But the dangerous breach in Western defenses left by Britain’s retrenchment left him in no doubt of his responsibility for doing so now. Eloquent and possessed of a lawyerly love of logic and detail, Acheson was an ideal complement to Marshall. Their relationship would become much like that between Alexander Hamilton and George Washington—never close, but each essential to the other’s success.46
George Frost Kennan, too, was no instinctual cold warrior. Six feet tall, thin, balding, with engaging blue eyes and a smile “chilling or charming as its owner decrees,”47 an eclectic, emotional, even melancholic intellectual, Kennan had what at times seemed a
n all-consuming empathy for Russia. Fascinated by foreign peoples generally, or more specifically those living outside the United States (where he favored old-stock Protestants such as himself), Kennan—whose great-uncle of the same name had traveled Russia and written popular books on Siberian life and tsarist authoritarianism48—had a powerful affinity for Russians. “It gave me an indescribable sort of satisfaction,” he said after returning to Moscow in 1944, “to feel myself back again in the midst of these people—with their tremendous pulsating warmth and vitality. I sometimes feel that I would rather be sent to Siberia among them . . . than to live on Park Avenue among our own stuffy folk.”49
Deeper still was Kennan’s love for the Russia of literary renderings—of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Chekhov (of whom he was writing a biography, never finished). His facility with the language, buoyed as it was by his literary engagement with it, astonished Russians—even Stalin himself.
Kennan’s warm sentiments for the country and its culture, however, did not extend to its leadership. He abominated it. Like Acheson, he was unnerved by Moscow’s brutal subjugation of “liberated” Poland after 1945, as he was by the massacre of thousands of Polish officers at Katyn five years prior. He saw these as harbingers of wider aggression to come.
Kennan had had two postings to the embassy in Moscow, the first from 1933, right after FDR normalized relations with the Communist government, to 1937, and the second from 1944 to 1946. On May 9, 1945, he watched the city’s frenzied celebration of the war’s end from the embassy’s balcony. Terrified of being swept away by the surging mass of revelers, he, as deputy chief of mission with Ambassador Harriman away, felt he had no choice but to engage them, lest silence be interpreted as official indifference or hostility. Walking downstairs and stepping out onto the pedestal of one of the building’s large columns, he summoned his courage. “Congratulations on the day of victory!” he shouted in Russian. “All honor to the Soviet allies!” The crowd roared. Kennan, heart pounding, dashed back inside.
Harriman, the former banker—pragmatic, peremptory, businesslike, monolingual; Kennan’s temperamental and intellectual opposite—had great regard for his deputy’s insights, but was put off by his impractical tendency to ruminate. Kennan, he said, was “a man who understood Russia but didn’t understand the United States.”50 Bohlen seemed to agree, urging his friend to reacquaint himself with his native land by automobile after returning from Moscow in May 1946.51
Kennan certainly did not understand his government, or more specifically what he considered its absurd belief that it could conclude a Grand Alliance with Moscow to preside over a peaceful postwar world. In early 1946 he set out to disabuse Washington of its notions in the most famous and influential diplomatic cable in history—what has come to be known as the Long Telegram.
Byrnes had asked for Kennan’s analysis of Stalin’s notorious election speech. What he got back on February 22 was a 5,326-word cable,52 well exceeding the department’s length limits, written in a singular style mixing high prose with telegramatic abbreviation, expounding on the forces driving the behavior of Soviet rulers.
Kennan argued that the natural neuroses and insecurities of Russian autocrats were born of a geographic vulnerability to outside predators, and found their ultimate political pretext in Marxist dogma:
In this dogma, with its basic altruism of purpose, they found justification for their instinctive fear of [the] outside world, for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not dare not to inflict, for sacrifice they felt bound to demand. In the name of Marxism they sacrificed every single ethical value in their methods and tactics. Today they cannot dispense with it. It is [the] fig leaf of their moral and intellectual respectability. Without it they would stand before history, at best, as only the last of that long succession of cruel and wasteful Russian rulers who have relentlessly forced [the] country on to ever new heights of military power in order to guarantee [the] external security of their internally weak regimes.
The implications for American policy were stark: “We have here,” he wrote, “a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with [the] US there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure.” Negotiations with them were ultimately fruitless. Soviet leaders, he argued, were “impervious to logic of reason.” They were, however, “highly sensitive to logic of force.”53
As the content of the cable flowed through the Washington foreign policy apparatus the effect was rapid, widespread, and consequential. “The year 1946,” Acheson would later write, “was for the most part a year of learning that minds in the Kremlin worked very much as George F. Kennan had predicted they would.”54
The rhetorical quality of the cable should not be underestimated. Kennan’s prose had, in Acheson’s words, “a sort of sad lyrical beauty about it which drugs the mind.”55 Even if the Russia his cable purported to explain had been fictional, its sheer logical eloquence, not typically seen in such a medium, would have ensured an impact. It offered a sense of epiphany, of a great and important mystery being unraveled. It gave justification to inchoate animus. And the message seemed clear, devoid of the usual messy diplomatic caveats: Russia was implacably hostile to American interests, and had to be confronted whenever and wherever those interests were challenged. Even those, like future secretary of defense James Forrestal, who had been convinced that Marxism was driving Russian expansionism, rather than being co-opted to justify it (as Kennan was arguing), embraced this message.56
Kennan would sharpen and expand upon it in an article he was now, in the spring of 1947, honing for the establishment journal Foreign Affairs—an article he would naively publish anonymously under the pseudonym “X,” but which would make its easily identifiable author famous. The piece would argue 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 expansive tendencies.” Such “containment” would have to be conducted through “the adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points.”57
On the basis of the telegram and the article, Henry Kissinger would later credit Kennan with coming “as close to authoring the diplomatic doctrine of his era as any diplomat in our history.”58 But what did “containment” mean? When translating the article for Stalin, certain Soviet analysts wanted it hardened to “strangulation.” Though they were overruled, Stalin still interpreted containment as “extremely hostile to the USSR.”59 Given the context painted of an implacable foe, together with the reference to “force,” the article appeared to be pointing to armed confrontation. Indeed, Kennan’s War College lectures in the fall would highlight the benefit in negotiations of “quiet but effective augmentations of our military and air strength.” Soviet leaders, he said, “are not gamblers when faced with the reality of military force.”60
But Kennan was never that simple. In two of the most important paragraphs of his cable, he insisted that a robust diplomatic offensive against Moscow needed to encompass what Harvard’s Joseph Nye would today term “soft power”61—being able to influence the behavior of others who might otherwise fall under Soviet influence. “We must,” Kennan said, “put forward for other nations a much more positive and constructive picture of [the] sort of world we would like to see than we have put forward in [the] past.” Europeans, he wrote, were “tired and frightened by experiences of [the] past.” They were seeking “security,” to be understood in the widest sense: encompassing domestic order, material well-being, and freedom from foreign threat. “We should,” he went on, “be better able than [the] Russians to give them this.” But if the United States failed to act, if it retreated into the old isolationism, the “Russians certainly will” act to fill the gap. Americans must n
ever, however, Kennan emphasized, behave like Russians. “[W]e must have [the] courage and self-confidence to cling to our own methods and conceptions of human society.”
It is no leap to read into these passages, however vague, a call for the United States to bolster free and independent European nations through material, as well as military, assistance: a prescription that lay ready for the first hard evidence of the malady. In early 1947, it was at hand.
Kennan argued that Moscow would exploit all “timely and promising” opportunities to expand its power. Initially, it would focus on “neighboring points . . . of immediate strategic necessity, such as Northern Iran [and] Turkey.”62 The State Department, special assistant Joseph Jones63 explained, now saw these countries, together with Greece, as a single “barrier” to Russia “breaking through . . . into the Middle East, South Asia, and North Africa.” And given that “every Communist party in the world” was, Bohlen asserted, “the subservient instrument of Moscow Policy, the installation of a Communist regime in Athens would have meant extension of Soviet control in the eastern Mediterranean.”64 The upshot, Jones said, was that “everyone in the executive branch” now recognized what “British abdication from the Middle East” meant: that “if Russian expansion was to be checked, the United States [would have to] move into the defaulted position in the Middle East.”65
Such a move could not be undertaken without reckoning with its consequences. Soviet foreign minister Molotov had been blunt in condemning British political, economic, and military support for the royalists in Greece as unacceptable interference in that country’s internal affairs and a threat to international peace and security. He had typically been more restrained in leveling charges against the United States, but any overt move by the Truman administration to take over the British role in Greece with financial and military aid would, at least many in Washington believed, elicit a harsh reaction from the Kremlin.66 Confining the boundaries of a confrontation to Greece seemed, therefore, a virtual impossibility at this point, whatever the two sides might wish for. Thus would begin what Jones was famously to call “The Fifteen Weeks”67—America’s monumental, breakneck transformation into a political superpower, filling the breach left by Britain’s imperial implosion.
