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On February 22, 1946, George Kennan sent a 5,000-word diplomatic cable that shaped how the United States would understand and respond to the Soviet challenge for the rest of the Cold War. Kennan—the State Department’s foremost expert on the Soviet Union and chargé d’affaires at the U.S. embassy in Moscow—delivered a masterful analysis of the factors driving Soviet conduct. Kennan identified the fusion of Marxist-Leninist ideology, Russian historical insecurity, and deep suspicion of the West as the driving forces behind Soviet behavior, particularly its efforts to exploit divisions within the capitalist world, harness sympathetic “democratic-progressive” elements abroad, and increase the “strength and prestige” of the Soviet state. Kennan did not directly advocate a formal policy of containment in the Long Telegram; instead, he argued that the United States must preserve its own “cohesion, firmness, and vigor,” achieved through strengthening our own institutions and public education. Kennan’s work laid the intellectual groundwork for the strategies of containment that remain relevant for combatting contemporary challenges posed by Russia and China. In this video, Peter Berkowitz, the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and Vance Serchuk, Executive Director of the KKR Global Institute, examine Kennan’s Long Telegram and its influence on U.S. foreign policy.
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