American Diplomacy

American Diplomacy

The Cold War began on the date of February 22, 1946. George F. Kennan (1904-2005), then the Charge d ’Affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, Soviet Union (Russia) sent a telegram to President Harry S. Truman and the Secretary of State describing the threat posed by the Soviet Union and its policies towards the United States and its allies. Kennan recommended that U.S. respond to this threat with a long-term foreign policy the emphasized “patience but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansionist tendencies.” George Kennan introduces the long telegram to the secretary of state on February 22, 1946. The “Long Telegram” is summarized below of how George F. Kennan describe Soviet Union view of the world and what the United States (U.S.) saw as its foreign policy.

According to Kennan, the Union of Soviet Republic (USSR) viewed the world as a “capitalist encirclement.”The USSR found itself obliged to fight side-by-side with capitalist powers against a common threat. Since the USSR faced insecurity issues, it employed every possible economic capability to gain more power. The Soviet government used and applied Marxist dogma as required to resolve insecurity issues. Kennan surmised that the USSR was getting an outside source from an “outside world”^[1]. As a result, the Soviet Union was deeply suspicious of all nations and believed that their security could only be found in “patient but deadly struggle for total destruction of rival powers”^[2].

The USSR future foreign policy initiatives involve an increase in all military power and focus on industrial growth. The USSR goal is to extend their political power as an international organization while keeping the United States hidden from secrets. The USSR would use controllable Marxists in the capitalist world as allies thereby establishing a sphere of influence by creating buffer zones. Soviet aggression was not aligned fundamentally with the view of the Russian people. Despite emerging victorious from World War II, the USSR remained very poor.

Kennan believed the Soviet Union would do all they could to “weaken power and influence of Western power on colonial backward or dependent peoples. Although the Soviet Union is “impervious to logic of reason”, it was “high sensive to logic of force.^[3]” The United States and its allies, he concluded, would have to offer a form of resistance.

This telegram had broad consequences for the U.S. foreign policy from 1946 to 1991. Some people consider this telegram as a mark for the beginning of the Cold War. If it did not happen, the US foreign policy towards Soviet Union would have been different, and today’s World might have been very different.