Kennan's X Marks the Spot

“Go back to Kennan's long cable. It's all there. In fact, if you read... passages from that [1947] cable today... you could literally insert Russia and Putin for what he says about the then Soviet Union.” -US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, February 23, 2023.

Nothing ages faster than a given moment in international politics. The dilemmas of a president’s first term rarely resemble those of a second. Demographic alterations, economic shifts, and technological developments can all occur rapidly. In the 20th century, politics and history were commonly understood to be evolving with unprecedented speed. The World War I era yielded to that of World War II. The Cold War came and went. The September 11 terrorist attacks and the COVID-19 pandemic changed everything until other crises came along and pushed the pandemic into the historical background.

According to the rules of rapid-fire transformation, the diplomat George F. Kennan’s writing from the late 1940s (the outset of the Cold War) should no longer be relevant. When Kennan wrote the “X Article” and the “Long Telegram,” his statements about Soviet power and about what the United States should do in response to this power, Harry Truman was president of the United States and Joseph Stalin presided over the Soviet Union, which was not yet a nuclear power. The rubble of World War II had not yet been cleared in Europe and the Chinese Communist Party had not yet triumphed in China’s civil war. Decolonization had begun in some countries, yet colonialism continued in many others.

Kennan lived long enough to comment on the post-Cold War world and his writings and interviews from the 1990s retain their salience. Yet nothing Kennan ever wrote could compete with the “X Article” and the “Long Telegram.” Both texts were rediscovered in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea and the motif of the Cold War was once again common currency. If anything, Kennan’s texts have been most intensively consulted—by policy-makers and others—in the wake of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The United States and its allies may be returning to a containment strategy vis a vis Russia. Should they do this, Kennan’s influence on US policy will have extended from the late 1940s to the second decade of the 21st century.

Unique as Putin’s Russia is, historically and otherwise, its general characteristics point toward containment as a linchpin of 21st century US grand strategy.

Two factors help to explain Kennan’s longevity of influence. The first is his method: his ability to connect dots and his prose. Kennan was a scholar and a writer at heart. He made strenuous efforts to understand the Soviet Union on its own terms, and to do so he employed history, politics, and literature. He then translated his knowledge into policy prescriptions—factoring in what was achievable abroad and domestically. This is a powerful method. Secondly, Kennan devised a grand strategy for the nuclear age, which is still our age, a strategy that was neither defeatist (allowing the Soviet Union to advance where it wished) nor maximalist (risking the threat of nuclear war). He called this strategy “containment.” For good reason, this strategy has been dusted off and brought back to life in the last two years.

Accessing Probabilities

Kennan is often claimed as a “realist thinker” on international affairs. Though this is hardly invalid, such labels can give the false impression that Kennan was primarily a theorist. He was not. He was a student of Soviet foreign policy whose inclination was to think historically. His intellectual rigor did not enable him to predict Soviet actions. Instead, it helped him to assess probabilities: the probability that Stalin would drive a hard bargain on Eastern and Central Europe; the probability that the Soviet Union would use communist revolution not so much to “achieve” communism as to enhance the Soviet Union’s geopolitical clout; and the probability that the Soviet Union would not last forever. Each of these possibilities went into his containment strategy for the United States.

Kennan’s historically-focused method of thinking about the Soviet Union can be applied to today’s Russia. Using his method generates a portrait that is not especially Soviet. Putin’s Russia, circa 2024, is less of a global power than the Soviet Union was. It cannot activate the network of communist parties, movements, and revolutionary agents that the Soviet Union cultivated around the world. Putin’s reliance on disinformation and meddling in the domestic politics of other countries is a marker of Russia’s relative weakness. The Soviet Union had many more levers of influence, most of them grounded in a sincerity of communist conviction that gave Moscow international prestige and power. By this metric, Putin’s Russia is less of a threat to US interests now than the Soviet Union had been during the Cold War.

Putin’s Russia will suffer the vicissitudes of dictatorship. It has suffered them already.

Putin’s Russia differs from the Soviet Union in another respect. It is less artificial. Kennan intuited a space between the Communist Party and the Russian people. He thought containment would work because this space would gradually widen and ultimately weaken the Soviet Union, and this came to pass. Putin’s Russia is a dictatorship—as the Soviet Union had been—but rather than being constructed with an abstract ideology like communism, Putin has built his dictatorship on national pride, national grievance, and a heroic narrative of the Russian people. Putin’s approach has been more elemental. It may prove unpopular in years to come, but Putin’s narrative, his war, and his nation may well have narrowed the space between state and people and between state and society. Putin’s prosecution of his war against Ukraine, which has scarcely been opposed in Russia, suggests as much.

Kennan’s Lessons for Today

Unique as Putin’s Russia is, historically and otherwise, its general characteristics point toward containment as a linchpin of 21st century US grand strategy. Because Russia is no longer the Soviet Union, containment must be updated. On the one hand, the containment of Russia can be downsized on the assumption that Russia’s global sway is far more modest than the Soviet Union’s had been. The United States often implemented its Cold War containment strategy overzealously. Freed from the fear of a global communist revolution, the US of 2024 can be much more selective in the places and ways it contains the spread of Russian power.

A Kennanesque lesson about containment strategy is that it must not be excessively militarized. Though poorly absorbed in the Cold War, this lesson fits the contemporary imperative of containing Russia. Kennan emphasized the value of setting a political example alongside the value of placing persuasion over coercion. In those areas where Russia and the United States are competing for influence (Latin America, Asia, Africa, the Middle East), the United States would be prudent not to embark on military crusades or to presume that Russia’s presence should be met with military force. Russia would be more effectively contained by peaceful measures, diplomatic engagement, economic investment, and the prospect of cooperation on challenges related to global health and climate change.

Should Putinism prove longer-lived and more cohesive than Soviet communism, containment will have to be reframed. In the late 1940s, Kennan was already prodding the US Government to pursue foreign policy objectives in decades-long arcs, rather than year-by-year or month-by-month. He was correct in seeing a hollowness at the core of the Soviet Union that would eventually be filled by a competing national project; but in no way did Kennan (in the 1940s) predict the imminent demise of the Soviet Union. For containment to succeed as a US strategy, it had to be kept in place for more than four decades. Kennan was preoccupied with what might be termed strategic patience—even as he speculated about the brittleness of Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Freed from the fear of a global communist revolution, the US of 2024 can be much more selective in the places and ways it contains the spread of Russian power.

Putin’s Russia will suffer the vicissitudes of dictatorship. It has suffered them already, most dramatically with the mutiny mounted by Yevgeny Prigozhin in 2023. Each dictatorship has a unique brittleness. Yet the Putinist recipe has the potential to be enduring: authoritarian rule undergirded by security services and the military; the top-down compulsion to be patriotic while signing on to a militarized civic culture; the repression of dissent; and the propagation of anti-Western sentiment through war and government organs (including mass media and educational institutions). If a successor to Putin can be found, the system can be perpetuated. This should be the working assumption of policymakers in the United States.

A recalibrated containment will require at least as much strategic patience as Kennan’s containment needed. It may well require more. At the heart of such containment is sustained assistance to Ukraine. Part of this assistance must be political, and this will entail Ukraine’s integration into Europe, a reason (beyond Ukraine’s survival as a state and as a polity) that will motivate Ukrainians to continue fighting. Part of this assistance must be military-related and pegged to the literal task of containing the spread of Russian military power in and around Ukraine. Compatible with the search for rules of engagement and for the establishment of red lines, containment is incompatible with surrender. That much George F. Kennan articulated with his singular clarity and eloquence in the “X Article” and “Long Telegram.” That much is still true today.

Michael Kimmage is a professor of history and department chair at the Catholic University of America. He is also a fellow at the German Marshall Fund. From 2014 to 2017, he served on the Secretary's Policy Planning Staff at the US Department of State, where he held the Russia/Ukraine portfolio. He publishes widely on international affairs, US-Russian relations, and American diplomatic history. His latest book, The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy, was published by Basic Books in April 2020. He is the chair of the Kennan Institute Advisory Council.

Cover photo: George F. Kennan becomes Ambassador to the Soviet Union in a State Department ceremony April 2, 1952. Kennan, left, reenacts the swearing in by Raymond Muir, protocol officer, with Mrs. Kennan (second from left), and daughter Grace, 19, looking on. (AP Photo/Byron Rollins)