The Rimland Thesis & US Containment - Cold War: Kennan’s Strategy, 1947-1950 (Part I)

 

The Rimland Thesis & US Containment

Cold War: Kennan’s Strategy, 1947-1950 (Part I)

 

Introduction

“Who controls the Rimland rules Eurasia;

Who rules Eurasia controls the destinies of the world.”

With these words, the Dutch-American strategist Nicholas Spykman summarized his geopolitical theory on the global distribution of power, warning that the Rimland – Eurasia’s resource-rich coastal strip, stretching from Europe through the Middle East to South and East Asia – was at risk of consolidating into an Empire that could then dominate the whole world. To prevent this, the United States needed to periodically intervene in the Rimlands, with the goal of maintaining a Balance of Power amongst Rimland states, particularly in the key subregions of Europe and East Asia.

Spykman’s Rimland Theory has often been seen as a major influence on modern US strategy, particularly during the Cold War and in the present day. However, Spykman had died before he could fully develop his ideas, leaving only the bare bones of a theory whose details had to be fleshed out by his colleagues, who inevitably injected their own views in the process. In addition, when strategymakers later tried to apply this reconstructed Rimland Theory to real life, they often modified it even further in order to align it with prevailing strategic and political realities, as well as to compensate for various flaws that Spykman had overlooked in his original thinking.

This brings us to George Kennan’s Cold War strategy of ‘containment’ against the Soviet Union, which he formulated in 1947, just 4 years after Spykman’s death. While it’s unclear – though likely – whether Kennan had ever read Spykman, his approach undoubtedly echoes many elements of the Rimland Theory, though with unique nuances and emphases that reflect Kennan’s own thinking. Combined, these ideas established the framework for how America would wage the Cold War.

 

1. Background

The origins of containment can be traced back to the rapid breakdown of the ‘Grand Alliance’ between the Soviet Union and the United States following World War II. Under wartime President Franklin D Roosevelt, there had been optimism for what could be called ‘idealistic internationalism’, where stability and justice within the international order would no longer depend on raw state power, but instead on the procedural mechanisms of international law, embodied by the United Nations. Under this ideal, America and the Soviet Union would retain leading roles as joint enforcers of the new order, impartially upholding UN resolutions to guarantee lasting peace and stability.

By 1947, however, it had become clear to now-President Harry S Truman that the US and USSR held fundamentally irreconcilable visions for the postwar world order, with neither willing to yield to the other nor to the United Nations. As such, rather than cooperating as joint enforcers, each preferred to use its power to secure ideological dominance over the world.

This led to intensifying geopolitical competition: the Soviets sought to expand into Eastern Europe and the Middle East, while US-aligned European powers tried to reestablish their imperial colonies in Southeast Asia. Caught in the middle were the defeated and occupied Axis powers Germany and Japan, where the breakdown of Allied consensus led to policy gridlock and the continuation of punitive measures that prolonged the misery of their populations.

For the US, this reassessment of Soviet intentions demanded a new framework to guide policy. This was especially so given the USSR’s perceived advantages in the postwar world: not only was it surrounded by power vacuums thanks to the wartime devastation of Germany, Japan, Europe and China, but its totalitarian system was also estimated to be capable of mobilizing just as many resources as the US, despite having only a quarter of the latter’s GDP.

By contrast, America faced much stronger headwinds when it came to projecting power. Already, its military spending stood at a mere 7% of GDP compared to the Soviets’ 14%; but crucially, Truman wanted to slash it down even further, even claiming to want 2%. This was less geopolitical calculation and more political necessity: facing almost certain defeat in the 1948 election, Truman could not afford to antagonize the many isolationists in the American Midwest, who expected Washington to cut down on overseas intervention. He was correct: Truman famously eked out an upset victory in that election, in large part due to carrying 2 Midwestern states by margins of less than 1%.

In short, growing Soviet strength and mounting US constraints meant that Washington’s existing approach – sending forces to stop the Soviets whenever they advanced beyond the ‘Iron Curtain’ – would be unsustainable within just a few years. It thus fell to Secretary of State George Marshall – lionized as the so-called ‘Organizer of Victory’ during World War II – to develop a new strategy.

Recognizing that this challenge required a specialized team with the resources and time to take a broad, long-term perspective on global events, Marshall in turn established the Policy Planning Staff at the State Department, envisioning it as the civilian equivalent to the Operations and Plans Division within the US Army’s General Staff. He tasked this group with a simple, central question: how and where could the US effectively resist Soviet expansion, given its constrained resources?

To find the answer, Marshall turned to a rising star in the State Department: a diplomat and geopolitical lecturer named George Kennan.

 

2. Kennan’s Strategy of Containment

Prior to his appointment as Director of the Policy Planning Staff, George Kennan had served at the US Embassy in the Soviet Union, where he had authored the celebrated ‘Long Telegram’ in 1946. In it, Kennan argued that the Soviets had no intention of cooperating with Roosevelt’s vision of ‘idealistic internationalism’; instead, they would aggressively compete with the US for global influence. Indeed, for several years Kennan had been urging Washington to start the struggle while the Soviets still depended on US aid, even suggesting that America should withdraw from World War II if Moscow insisted on dominating Eastern Europe.

Kennan’s emphasis on the centrality of state competition has placed him alongside Spykman in the ‘realist’ school of international relations – though as mentioned, it is unclear – though likely – whether Kennan ever encountered Spykman’s ideas. Even so, Kennan didn’t simply borrow everything from the Rimland Thesis, and his strategy would blend his own takes on realist and Rimland geopolitics, with elements of idealistic anti-Communism and even American isolationism.

Kennan’s unique thinking shines through in his explanation for why the US and USSR were destined to compete in the postwar world. For Spykman, such rivalry was inevitable within the anarchic state system; by contrast, Kennan – both in his ‘Long Telegram’ of 1946 and his anonymous ‘X Article’ a year later – argued that expansionism was not inherent to the Russian people, but instead stemmed from Soviet leaders needing a permanent external threat to justify their dictatorial powers.

This perspective was somewhat self-congratulatory, as it pinned all the blame for global tensions on the Soviet regime, while depicting American democracy as innocent and naturally power-averse. But it also informed Kennan’s ideal outcome for the Cold War: one where the Soviets were stopped from world domination, but without the US becoming permanently mobilized and therefore dictatorial in the process, as American isolationists feared might happen with the creation of a so-called ‘military-industrial complex’.

If in the short run, the US could quickly establish a stable Balance of Power with the USSR, while also rehabilitating its allies in Europe and Asia, then over the medium-run, America could shift the burden of maintaining that Balance back to those allies, which in the long-run would allow Washington to demobilize, withdraw back across the oceans, and revert to being a peacetime society. Indeed, the main reason why Kennan urged confrontation with the Soviets as soon as possible was that: if Washington let Moscow pick off too many existing or potential allies, then preserving the Balance of Power would require America to undertake a massive and long-term mobilization – one that would ultimately destroy the very society it was meant to defend.

In such a way, Kennan ultimately circles back to George Marshall’s original question: how could the US – with constrained resources and devastated allies – effectively balance out the Soviets in the short-run?

Once again, Kennan distinguishes himself from Spykman and other realists by downplaying the importance of hard military power in achieving that balance. The USSR, in his view, was not Nazi Germany: it did not have to constantly seize new territories and resources in order to survive. So in the short-run at least, Moscow would see no need to escalate its underlying hostility with the US – which, as mentioned, was primarily for regime preservation – into a potentially-suicidal military conflict.

Instead, the Soviets would operate below the threshold of direct military confrontation, waging so-called ‘political warfare’ via civilian, paramilitary or covert channels, with the goal of eventually dominating peoples, parties and even entire governments. Actions such as coordinating pro-Communists, informational warfare, or even encouraging rebellion hardly merited a violent US response, but they might deliver dramatic gains for Moscow all the same – especially if they turned a former American ally into a Soviet-aligned regime.

Similarly, Kennan also rejected the notion that the Soviets had fixed targets or timetables for conquest. Instead, Moscow would advance only when local political conditions were in its favor – and even then, it would be open to retreat if the geopolitical winds shifted.  Of course, this did not mean that the USSR would be completely passive – in fact, one of the main purposes of ‘political warfare’ was to actively foster those helpful political conditions in the first place.

Kennan, in particular, highlighted one scenario that he found especially relevant amidst the ruination of World War II: chaos. As he saw it, Communism was an ideology that thrived on chaos, since only those with nothing left to lose would ever see it as a solution to their suffering. The Soviets understood this well, which is why a key tactic in their political warfare was: to stoke and prolong as much political-societal chaos as possible.

In war-torn countries, the Soviets would exploit their authority as an Allied decisionmaker to obstruct and delay reconstruction efforts; in other places they would spread divisive propaganda – most notably anti-colonial messaging – in order to stir up political conflict. By doing so, they aimed to swing populations and voters behind local Communist parties, who could then claim an electoral mandate for realigning their countries away from the US and towards the USSR.

Hard military force was of limited value against such Soviet political warfare: the US Army couldn’t possibly police everyone’s political choices; and even if it tried, such action would be seen as the US openly overturning the popular will. Instead, Kennan’s celebrated proposal to apply ‘counterforce’ against Soviet pressure would rely primarily on political, economic, diplomatic and covert measures, with Washington marshaling civilian resources to wage political warfare back at Moscow.

In print and broadcast media, the US would establish institutions such as ‘Radio Free Europe’ to spread its own propaganda and counter Soviet messaging, while American diplomats would deal favorably with states willing to fight Communism. If these fell short, then the CIA – which Kennan would play a key role in developing – would conduct subterfuge, election rigging, and even outright coups to try and keep the government aligned. Crucially, all this would unfold amidst the backdrop of the most powerful counterforce of them all: massive American economic aid, designed to sweep away the chaos of wartime destruction and build up prosperous, stable societies to which Communism would have no appeal.

In these ways, Kennan planned to tackle Marshall’s central challenge: how could the US contain and balance out the Soviets in the short-run, despite constrained resources and Moscow’s many advantages in political warfare. As mentioned, in the medium term, as America’s allies recovered, Kennan expected them to shoulder the burden of balancing Moscow, allowing the US to demobilize back to pre-World War II levels. In the long-run, Kennan – uncharacteristically for a realist – even mused that continued containment might lead to regime change in the USSR, as its repressed populations tire of sacrificing themselves without significant external success – and overthrow the Communist dictatorship as a result.

All in all, Kennan’s strategy of containment is an unconventional take on the classic realist push for a ‘balance of power’ between states, one that emphasizes the role of non-military methods in achieving that balance. While such an approach might reflect Kennan’s bureaucratic bias for the civilian State Department, it also reflected Washington’s confidence in its military edge: after all, it was the only country with the atomic bomb during this time, which meant that any Soviet attempt to escalate from political to actual warfare risked the complete and one-sided obliteration of the USSR. This superiority was not expected to last beyond the early 50s; but for the moment, Kennan and his team could rely on this margin of safety, as they began delving into the practical details of containment.

 

3. 1947-48: Prioritization – Theory

By mid-1947, the fundamentals of Kennan’s strategy of containment had come together: the assumption that the Soviets would push their geostrategic advantage through opportunistic, low-level political warfare; the US’ short-term response of restoring a Balance of Power via non-militarized forms of counterforce; and the medium-term goal of handing the burden of containment back over to America’s rebuilt allies.

All this went a long way towards meeting Truman’s desire to thwart Soviet global domination with minimal military effort. But for the strategy to be fully complete, one last set of questions had to be answered: where exactly should Containment be applied?

After all, the entire postwar world seemed to be descending into chaos, with the USSR taking advantage to spread its influence all across Eurasia. In war-ravaged Europe, Communist parties were gaining electoral and political momentum, not only behind the infamous ‘Iron Curtain’, but in Western Europe as well. Things looked even worse in East Asia, where the Chinese Communist Party was beginning its eventual conquest of Mainland China; while in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, Moscow was poised to exploit new geopolitical opportunities exposed by the receding tide of European imperialism.

Washington’s immediate response was exemplified in March 1947 with the proclamation of the Truman Doctrine, prompted by the intensifying Communist insurgency in Greece: in it, Truman pledged US economic and financial aid to all so-called ‘free peoples of the world’ resisting implied Soviet and Communist domination. The scope of this policy alarmed Kennan, however, who worried that the Doctrine would inevitably drag the US into every Eurasian conflict, draining it thoroughly while contradicting Truman’s electoral pledge to reduce defense spending.

Kennan therefore emphasized the need for the US to prioritize, focusing containment efforts on regions and states that would actually help balance against the Soviets. Here, Spykman’s geostrategic ideas proved to be a helpful starting point, with his Rimland Thesis pointing out that the vast majority of Eurasia’s power lay within its long coastal arc, especially in the industrially-significant subregions of Western Europe, East Asia and potentially South Asia.

As usual, however, Kennan inserted his own changes. Like Spykman, he dismissed India as a relevant power center during his day due to perceived ‘low development’; unlike Spykman, he used that same logic to also dismiss China and all of East Asia beyond Japan. Accordingly, Kennan assessed that there were only 3 subregions that were potentially powerful enough to merit US attention: the United Kingdom; what he called ‘Continental Europe’ – which probably meant Germany, Italy, France and the Benelux – and Japan.

That said, Kennan also addressed one of the key omissions in Spykman’s geostrategic thinking by stressing the need to maintain control over the coastal seas that linked the Eurasian Rimlands together. While Spykman had simply noted the potential for this so-called ‘Maritime Circumferential Highway’ to speed up both development and conquest, Kennan recognized that the Highway not only could be controlled but must be controlled, if only to prevent the Soviets from accessing it and overrunning the Rimlands.

Consequently, Kennan also prioritized containment for two other subregions that were not powerful in themselves, but overlooked key maritime chokepoints around Eurasia: first, the Middle East with its Suez Canal, and second, what he deemed the ‘Offshore Island Chain’ in East and Southeast Asia, which stretched from Okinawa through the Philippines and down to Indonesia.

Beyond these subregions, Kennan advocated disengagement. Though he personally despised most indigenous societies, Kennan nevertheless conceded that the days of effortless imperial control were over, and any attempt to retake European colonies would only prompt the locals to call in the Soviets. Indeed, on many occasions Kennan would even argue for US disengagement from priority subregions, reasoning that such a move would also diminish the subregion’s importance to Moscow, opening the door for a mutual pullback that would allow for more reprioritization or even demobilization.

By listing out his geostrategic criteria, Kennan hoped to establish a foolproof system for prioritization – one that would clearly and convincingly determine whether the US should or should not get involved in any given conflict. But foreign policy is rarely that straightforward, and there are numerous other reasons that can push a nation towards intervention, as Kennan himself was soon to discover.

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Thanks for watching the video, and please like, subscribe and hit the bell button! If you have any questions, I’ll be happy to answer them in the comments section. In the next Part of this series, we’ll go over the many problems and struggles Kennan faced when implementing his strategy in practice, especially when it came to preventing American intervention in non-priority subregions.