constantly shifting geographical and political points’, as its originator put it. But from the beginning, the objective was not to check, but delete the adversary. Victory, not safety, was the aim.7
In later years Kennan would represent his conception of containment as a political strategy of limited geographical application—not a call for worldwide armed activity, as charged by Lippmann, a rare early critic—and contrast it as a stance of prudent defence with the adventurist notions of ‘rollback’ advocated by Dulles, and ‘flexible response’ by Kennedy. Legend has since canonized the image of a sober adviser whose counsels of moderation and wisdom were distorted into a reckless anti-communist activism that would bring disasters against which he spoke out, remaining true to himself as a critic of American hubris and intransigence. The reality was otherwise. Unstable and excitable, Kennan lacked the steadiness of his friend and successor Nitze, but in his days of power in Washington was a Cold Warrior à l’outrance, setting the course for decades of global intervention and counter-revolution.8 At the outset of his career as a diplomat, he had decided that the Bolsheviks were ‘a little group of spiteful Jewish parasites’, in their ‘innate cowardice’ and ‘intellectual insolence’ abandoning ‘the ship of Western European civilization like a swarm of rats’. There could be no compromise with them. Stationed in Prague during the Nazi takeover of Czechoslovakia, his first reaction was that Czechs counted German rule a blessing; later, touring occupied Poland—he was now en poste in Berlin—he felt Poles too might come to regard rule by Hans Frank as an improvement in their lot. When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, he told his superiors that, from Scandinavia to the Black Sea, Russia was everywhere feared more than Germany, and must bear the ‘moral consequences’ of Operation Barbarossa alone, with ‘no claim on Western sympathies’.9
After the war, promoted to Deputy Commandant of the National War College, he declared that if Russian military industry should make faster progress than American, ‘we would be justified in considering a preventive war’, unleashing nuclear weapons: ‘with probably ten good hits with atomic bombs you could, without any great loss of life or loss of the prestige or reputation of the United States, practically cripple Russia’s war-making potential’.10 At the head of the Policy Planning Staff in the State Department, and as consigliere to Acheson, he initiated covert paramilitary operations in Eastern Europe; advocated, if need be, US military intervention in Southern Europe and Southeast Asia; urged support for French colonialism in North Africa; supervised cancellation of reforms in Japan; endorsed repression in Latin America; proposed American seizure of Taiwan; exulted when US troops were dispatched to Korea.11 Containment was limited neither in its range nor in its means. It was an Ermattungskrieg, not a Niederwerfungskrieg, but the objective was the same. America could hope that ‘within five or ten years’ the USSR would be ‘overwhelmed by clouds of civil disintegration’, and the Soviet regime soon ‘go down in violence’. Meanwhile ‘every possible means’ should be set in motion to destabilize Moscow and its relays in Eastern Europe.12 In their intention, containment and rollback were one from the start.
II
A bureaucratic euphemism, containment was too arid a term to galvanize popular opinion for the launch to Cold War. But it could readily be translated into what was henceforward the centrepiece of the American imperial ideology: security. In the critical years 1945–1947, this became the key slogan linking internal atmospherics and external operations into a single front, and assuring passage from the New Deal to the Truman Doctrine.13 The Social Security Act had been the most popular reform of the Roosevelt era, enshrining a new value in the vocabulary of domestic politics. What more natural complement than a National Security Act, to meet the danger, no longer of depression, but subversion? In March 1947 came Truman’s speech warning of the apocalyptic dangers of communism in the Mediterranean, designed by Acheson ‘to scare the hell out of the country’ with a message that was perforce ‘clearer than truth’. Calling his countrymen to battle in the Cold War, Kennan expressed ‘a certain gratitude to Providence which, by providing the American people with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent on their pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear’.14 In the same month, the National Security Act created the Defence (no longer War) Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the National Security Council and—the pièce de résistance—the Central Intelligence Agency. Around this institutional complex developed the permanent ideology of national security presiding over the American empire to this day.15 If the depth of its grip on the national imaginary was a product of the Cold War, the fears on which it played had a long pre-history, in alarmist scenarios of US vulnerability to external attack and magnification of foreign dangers, from Lodge through Wilson to Roosevelt.16 Masking strategies of offence as exigencies of defence, no theme was better calculated to close the potential gap between popular sentiments and elite designs. The most authoritative study of the Truman administration’s entry into the Cold War offers a critique of the ‘expanded’ conception of national security that came to take hold in Washington. But the ideology of national security, US-style, was inherently expansionist.17 ‘There is literally no question, military or political, in which the United States is not interested’, Roosevelt cabled Stalin in 1944, during a global conflict it had not initiated. A fortiori, in a Cold War it had.
The organization of the postwar discourse of empire around security did not, of course, mean that the foundational themes of American patriotism were eclipsed by it. The legitimations of US expansionism had always formed a mobile complex of ideologemes, their order and emphasis shifting kaleidoscopically according to the historical conjuncture. The primacy of security after 1945 altered the hierarchy of appeals, without purging them. Immediately below it, now came democracy—the American gift to the world that security served to protect. What had to be secured—that is, expanded—against the totalitarian threat of communism was a Free World in the image of American liberty. In the struggle of the US with the USSR, the force of the claim to be what the enemy was not, a liberal democracy, was plain: where there was any experience or prospect of representative government, typically a trump card. In private, of course, the managers of national security were often contemptuous of the democracy they were supposedly defending. Kennan, an admirer of Schuschnigg and Salazar, rulers who showed that ‘benevolent despotism had greater possibilities for good’ than democracy, argued on the eve of the Second World War that immigrants, women and blacks should be stripped of the vote in the United States. Democracy was a ‘fetish’: needed was ‘constitutional change to the authoritarian state’—an American Estado Novo.18 After the war Kennan compared democracy to ‘one of those prehistoric monsters with a body as long as this room and a brain the size of a pin’, and never lost his belief that the country was best governed by an enlightened elite immune to popular passions. Acheson dismissed ‘the premise that democracy is some good’, remarking ‘I don’t think it’s worth a damn’—‘I say the Congress is too damn representative. It’s just as stupid as the people are; just as uneducated, just as dumb, just as selfish’.19 Such confidences were not for public consumption. Officially, democracy was as prominent a value in the American mission to the world as in the time of Manifest Destiny.
