When the American diplomat George Kennan developed his policy of containment in the late 1940s, the Soviet Union had just been an ally of the United States in the biggest war ever fought. It had yet to develop a nuclear weapon. Yet Kennan viewed the USSR as an aggressive, expansionist power whose prevailing ideology of communism was fundamentally at odds with American interests.
Soon President Harry Truman adopted Kennan’s ideas in the Truman Doctrine, which called for sending assistance to countries threatened by Soviet expansion or internal Marxist revolutions. Containment did not call for militarily crushing the Soviet Union. Rather, it took the long view that the USSR could not last forever.
In this episode of History As It Happens, historians Michael Kimmage and Frank Costigliola discuss whether Kennan’s ideas should be updated to deal with Vladimir Putin’s revanchist aims in Eastern Europe. Mr. Kimmage is an expert on U.S.-Russia relations at Catholic University. Mr. Costigliola is a distinguished scholar of U.S. foreign policy at the University of Connecticut. Last year he published an authoritative biography of the American diplomat whose ideas influenced Cold War policy-makers for half a century.
“For anyone thinking of a new or old strategy toward Russia, you can’t do it without turning to Kennan,” said Mr. Kimmage, the author of “Collisions: The Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability.”
“Containment is in a way a commonsensical notion,” Mr. Costigliola said. “It was like pushing on an open door. American policy was already moving in that direction, and if George Kennan had never existed American policy may not have had the name containment, but probably would have moved in the same direction.”
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