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

The Rimland Thesis & US Containment

Cold War: Kennan’s Strategy, 1947-1950

Part II: Prioritization

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 died a few years before the start of the Cold War, but his geopolitical thinking was partially taken up by George Kennan, who was tasked by the US Government to craft a strategy for the emerging conflict with the Soviet Union. Deeply concerned about Communist domination, yet equally wary of the potential damage that US mobilization could inflict on American society, Kennan advocated a restrained approach that minimized direct and long-term military intervention. Instead, the US would primarily use diplomatic, economic and covert tools to reach a balance of power with Moscow, buying time until the war-torn nations of Europe and Asia rebuilt themselves and could re-assume the burden of Soviet containment.

In a similar vein, Kennan also rejected the idea that the US had to prevent Soviet expansion everywhere. Declaring that much of the world had little power potential, Kennan proposed that US efforts should primarily be concentrated on two vital centers of power – namely Western Europe and Japan – along with a few maritime chokepoints in the Middle East, East Asia and Southeast Asia.

Kennan’s strategy for containment was meant to channel American power towards the areas that mattered the most against the USSR. Yet throughout 1947, 48 and beyond, the realities of the postwar world repeatedly tried to pull Washington into conflicts that Kennan felt were peripheral and unimportant. To his growing frustration, he often had to step away from clean geopolitical theory and confront the far messier world of actual foreign policy: emotional decisionmaking, domestic politics, international intrigue, and the sobering realization that the world was far more complex and interconnected than even he had anticipated.

 

4. 1947-48: Prioritization – Greece

The first problem was the same one that had prompted the issuing of the Truman Doctrine: the Greek Civil War. This was not supposed to be an American problem: historically, Greece fell within Great Britain’s sphere of influence, which Moscow had agreed to respect during World War II. But Britain’s postwar bankruptcy had opened up a major opportunity that the Soviets felt they could exploit, and by 1946, they were not only allegedly supplying the Greek Communists through their ally Yugoslavia, they were also putting direct pressure on Greece’s equally-vulnerable neighbor, Turkiye. Moscow’s assessment proved to be correct: by 1947, an exhausted Britain threw in the towel, informing the US that it would end all support for the Greek anti-Communists.

By itself, Kennan judged Greece to be of marginal geostrategic importance, and he doubted the country’s ability to ever contribute positively to containment. Nevertheless, Greece had to be defended, if only because it had the potential to trigger a series of bad events, in what was one of the earliest examples of Cold War ‘Domino Theory’. If Greece fell to Communism, the reasoning went, then Turkiye would also fall, followed by Iran, the Middle East, and ultimately the prize jewel – the Suez Canal. From there, further dominoes might even topple in North Africa, Italy and finally the rest of Western Europe.

Despite his later rejection of Domino Theory, Kennan seems not to have opposed this particular version of it – possibly because official Washington had already accepted it as established wisdom, and it would do him no favors, as a bureaucratic newcomer, to challenge it. Instead, Kennan looked to minimize American intervention: first, he proposed an unconventional plan to simply split Greece into pro- and anti-Communist halves, denying complete victory to Moscow while leaving behind a rump state that would be easier to support.

Failing that, Kennan settled for a more modest goal: merely ruling out US military intervention in the Greek Civil War, which was achieved thanks in part to the US Army, who also had no desire to deploy troops in what it considered a difficult theater. Washington would therefore send Greece economic and military aid at best, but even this was not guaranteed.

As Congress dragged its feet, Kennan despaired at the apparent strength of isolationism amongst the US public, only to flip completely to despair at the Truman Doctrine, which he feared would set the US on a global anti-Communist crusade. Nevertheless, the way Truman sold American intervention – by framing world politics as a contest between quote-unquote ‘free’ and ‘unfree’ peoples, with the United States firmly on the side of freedom – resonated strongly with the public, leading Congress to eventually approve $400 million in aid for Greece and Turkiye. This sum amounted to 0.2% of US GDP at the time – proportionately equivalent to what the US officially spends on foreign aid today – and it was only the first of many commitments to come.

The US response to the Greek Civil War is widely viewed as the opening act for Kennan’s strategy of containment, though it’s doubtful whether Kennan fully endorsed any part of it – from its questionable geopolitical dominoes, to the black-and-white rhetoric Truman used to secure Congressional approval. What’s clearer is that this episode previewed many of the difficulties that lay in wait for Kennan as he attempted to implement containment, and would eventually so warp his original vision that he would largely reject the whole concept by the end of his career.

First and most obvious of all is Domino Theory. As noted earlier, Kennan’s strategy saw neither Greece nor Turkiye as inherently powerful: instead, their significance lay in their potential to spark geopolitical chain reactions that could eventually threaten the stability or alignment of truly vital regions. Despite their usually-shaky reasoning, Domino Theories – in all their variants – often prove surprisingly convincing, because they appeal to the risk aversion that is common to most bureaucrats and politicians. If the consequences of the final domino falling are so catastrophic, and the action to stabilize the first one so comparatively easy, why not just make the investment now while the cost is still cheap?

Part of the reason is because: if left unchecked, Domino Theories also lead to unlimited intervention and overstretch. As such, much of Kennan’s career as a strategymaker would be spent attempting to distinguish between plausible dominoes that merited intervention, and ‘unnecessary’ ones whose advocates ought to be ignored.

Second is what I will uncharitably call “Allied Freeloading”, where postwar European governments, fearful of Communism and weary of power politics, sought to offload their security responsibilities to the United States, in order to free up budget space for domestic welfare. Britain’s withdrawal from Greece in 1947 exemplified this: too bankrupt to provide £85m in aid, but not too bankrupt to spend more than 5 times that amount establishing universal healthcare the following year. Allied freeloading infuriated Kennan to no end, but he was rarely able to do much about it, largely because Europeans would invoke Domino Theory to neutralize any American threat to leave.

Finally, there was the challenge posed by domestic politics. Kennan’s stance to contain the Soviets wasn’t a popular one: it disappointed those who still clung to former President Roosevelt’s sunny postwar internationalism, while failing to appease isolationists who demanded an end to all foreign entanglements. As discussed in our previous video, democratic unpopularity is a common fate for balance-of-power strategies, since their stark cynicism and unsentimentality play poorly with the public, who tend to view foreign policy in more self-righteous terms.

To Kennan – an elitist whose faith in mass democracy was weak even in the best of times – unpopularity wasn’t much of a problem, but Truman knew better. And while the latter’s solution – to reframe the anti-Soviet struggle as an emotionally-charged morality tale – caused Kennan considerable discomfort, such rhetoric played a key role in advancing containment as a viable democratic policy.

That said, Truman wasn’t the only one who understood US politics, and soon, other people who wanted US intervention would evoke similar sentiments to try and pull Washington into their own conflicts – as we will see in the next chapter.

5. 1947-48: Prioritization – Palestine, Southeast Asia, China

Palestine

Kennan had scarcely stabilized the situation in Greece when another crisis erupted on the peripheral Rimlands – one that was, once again, thrust upon the US by Britain’s imperial withdrawal. In fact, it is the issue that has vexed strategymakers ever since: what was then Mandatory Palestine, already wracked by widespread communal violence between its Jewish and Arab populations. In late 1947, the United Nations finally resolved to split Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states by mid-1948 – the date by which, to their own great relief, the British would finally leave. Yet this decision in turn sparked outrage across the Arab world, whose leaders vowed to preserve Palestine as a single, Arab-majority state… by any means necessary.

In assessing Palestine, Kennan paid little attention to religious or historical factors, and even less to Jewish suffering during the Holocaust. Instead, he employed the simplest rule: the Arabs were the subregional majority in the Middle East, and so it was they whom the US should side with, if only to prevent them – along with the Suez Canal and the region’s oil – from defecting to the Soviets. Furthermore, given Britain’s lingering imperial commitments to the Arabs, backing the Jewish cause risked creating an awkward confrontation between America and a critical ally. Kennan therefore recommended Truman defy the UN and side with the Arabs against Palestine’s partition.

In offering this advice, Kennan overlooked the domestic consequences of such a stance. Pro-Jewish officials leaked Kennan’s advice to the media, igniting a political firestorm that Truman –with his presidential election in mind – needed to extinguish immediately. He therefore flipped and threw his weight completely behind Partition, practically guaranteeing official US recognition of a future State of Israel. Chastised, Kennan’s efforts now quietly shifted towards ensuring that American support would not go beyond diplomacy – and in this, he prevailed. When Israel declared independence in May 1948, sparking off the First Arab-Israeli War, the United States did not provide military support, washed its hands of the matter and shifted attention to other parts of the Rimlands.

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Southeast Asia

One of the subregions that would consume significant American attention in the coming decades was, of course, Southeast Asia, where the British, Dutch and French all sought to restore their pre-World War II imperial control, though with varying degrees of commitment. As mentioned previously, Kennan had a split view of the subregion’s significance: while the ‘Offshore Island Chain’ of the Philippines, Indonesia, and probably Malaya overlooked vital chokepoints on the ‘Maritime Highway’ linking Japan to Western Europe, the Asian Mainland – Burma, Thailand and Indochina – was practically worthless in his eyes, a judgement colored by his frankly racist belief that the local peoples were capable of neither development nor stability.

Kennan’s interest in Southeast Asia was further diminished by its considerable distance from the USSR, as well as his low opinion of the local Communist threat, which was China. Accordingly, he pushed for total disengagement from the entire subregion including the Offshore Island Chain, opposing even minimal military basing in the Philippines, on the grounds that no immediate military threat existed that would require the deployment of US forces. In fact, their presence would only provoke local nationalists, make them more vulnerable to Soviet political warfare, and set a bad precedent that Moscow might later use to establish its own foreign bases.

American policy in the Offshore Island Chain largely followed Kennan’s advice. While the US kept bases in the newly-independent Philippines, it otherwise maintained a largely hands-off approach and even successfully pressured the Dutch to abandon their attempt to reconquer Indonesia. The performance of the newly-independent governments broadly validated Kennan’s restraint, as they successfully contained and suppressed the various subregional Communist elements by themselves.

But then there was Indochina, where France was deeply committed to reclaiming Cambodia, Laos and especially Vietnam for its so-called ‘French Union’. By 1948, this had prompted the Vietnamese nationalist coalition, the Viet Minh, to move towards Communism and seek Soviet and Chinese support, dramatically escalating the conflict to World War II-like proportions as France replied by pouring troops and resources into the fight.

Following his geostrategic logic, Kennan strongly opposed the US entangling itself alongside the French, and during his time at the State Department, he kept American involvement in Vietnam to a minimum. At the same time, however, he failed to halt the growing relevance – or perceived relevance – of Vietnam in US geopolitics, which virtually ensured that once he left in 1950, American intervention in Indochina would immediately restart and intensify far beyond what was even intended before.

The driver behind this was a particularly compelling version of ‘Domino Theory’ that Kennan had no real response to. While France would later try to pull the US into Vietnam by holding several Western European political initiatives hostage – notably the rearmament and reintegration of West Germany – the main factor motivating those in favor of American intervention was, in fact: fear, stemming from France’s by-now-massive commitment in Indochina.

There was genuine concern that the French had staked so much of their prestige on Vietnam that defeat there would fatally undermine the country’s already-fragile Fourth Republic, triggering the collapse of a major European power and US ally right as the Soviet threat was at its peak. If Indochina fell, then France would follow – and crucially, this Domino Theory actually came true in a way, as the loss of French Indochina accelerated the outbreak of the Algerian War, which in turn indeed led to regime change in Paris.

All the same, short of risking an outright rupture with France by denying its right to reclaim Indochina, it’s hard to see how Kennan, or Truman, or anybody else in Washington could have resisted the increasingly-compelling stakes of this Domino Theory for much longer. This is a nuance that many historians have arguably overlooked, in their haste to praise Kennan’s quote-unquote ‘unique foresight’ in guiding America away – even if temporarily – from the deadly jungles of Vietnam.

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China

To an extent, Kennan was able to fend off the many calls for US intervention across the peripheral Rimlands, because interventionist energy at the time was primarily fixated on what he considered to be the most peripheral Rimland subregion of them all: China. Utterly devastated by the decade-long agony of the Sino-Japanese War, the end of the conflict nevertheless brought no relief, as the country swiftly descended back into its even longer civil war between the ruling Nationalists and insurgent Communists.

At first, the Nationalists unleashed what most observers considered to be a war-winning offensive, but by mid-1947, their momentum had stalled, stranding their armies at the ends of several very long and vulnerable supply lines, just as the Communists were preparing their own counteroffensive. Realizing the dire situation they were now in, the Nationalists desperately called on the US to help.

To Kennan, such an intervention would have been America’s worst possible geostrategic mistake. Unlike Spykman, he was profoundly dismissive of China’s developmental potential – a perspective that might seem misguided today, but was far more defensible in the 1940s, given the country’s by-then century-long history of stagnation and chaos. As he saw it, US aid to China was simply pouring resources into a bottomless pit, a view reinforced by the Nationalists’ infamous reputation for corruption.

Even if American assistance somehow ‘fixed’ China, Kennan questioned whether that would actually result in any geopolitical benefit for the US. In his view, the Chinese were historically xenophobic and were therefore unlikely to be reliable allies to anyone: as such, it was far better for Washington to disengage and leave the country as a problem for Moscow to solve, than to squander scarce resources on an inevitably-doomed effort to make it a useful ally.

That said, there was one part of China that Kennan considered somewhat important: Taiwan, which had been handed over to Nationalist rule after 50 years of Japanese colonization. As part of the ‘Offshore Island Chain’, Taiwan could help contain a Communist Mainland China, though Kennan probably thought that this role could also be replicated by a combination of Okinawa and the Philippines.

The key problem, of course, was that Taiwan was now formally part of China – but this legality apparently did not bother Kennan much, who floated various schemes to make the island independent or even transfer it back to American-occupied Japan. But in the end, even if Taiwan fell alongside Mainland China to the Communists, that was not a major loss in Kennan’s book.

Unsurprisingly, none of this was what the pro-Nationalist ‘China Lobby’ in the US wanted to hear. As a coalition of influential business leaders, media outlets, religious institutions, anti-Communists, military figures and Congressmen, the Lobby campaigned hard for Washington to support the Nationalists, even advocating a benchmark where China would receive aid on par with Western Europe. This would have meant another 5% of America’s GDP being sent overseas, all but guaranteeing an electoral loss for Truman – but not doing anything also risked a similar outcome.

Kennan therefore moved with care, constantly shifting his arguments to depict supporting the Nationalists as the most geostrategically-risky choice, even as the Communist offensive gained momentum and overran ever-larger swathes of China. Initially, he suggested that the Chinese Communists served as a buffer for the Soviets, which meant that American intervention could lead to direct confrontation with Moscow. Then, he tactically endorsed a $500m aid package for China as a way to temporarily placate the Lobby, even as he stripped out all military elements in order to turn it into a strictly civilian program.

By late 1948, as the overstretched Nationalist armies began to crumble in earnest, Kennan switched to direct confrontation with the China Lobby. In particular, he pressed military leaders to outline what they would do to reverse the Nationalist defeat, knowing that their only realistic answer – a World-War-II-scale military intervention on Mainland China – was utterly unacceptable. Finally, with the Communists on the verge of dominating the Mainland, Kennan prepared an official government paper that harshly criticized Nationalist incompetence and corruption, expecting that its release would finally sour the public on the Nationalists and shield Truman from blame for the impending loss of China.

While Kennan’s actions clearly revealed his disdain for the Chinese Nationalists, it’s important to recognize that his stance was not motivated purely by spite. Rather, he believed that Washington could do nothing to halt the Nationalist defeat, yet it might still extract some advantage from a Chinese Communist victory. Remember that Kennan saw the Chinese as inherently xenophobic, making them unreliable allies – for both the United States, and the Soviet Union.

As such, Kennan anticipated that the Chinese Communists would quickly turn against Moscow and align with America in containing the Soviets, and so it was Washington’s job to make this defection as smooth as possible: whether by avoiding any further support for the refugee Chinese Nationalists on Taiwan, or even by facilitating some of Beijing’s goals – most notably, by endorsing Britain’s recognition of the People’s Republic of China merely 1 year after it was founded, which Kennan saw as a stepping-stone towards America’s own eventual recognition.

Like in Indochina, Kennan’s China policy is once again credited for keeping the United States out of another potential quagmire, though it’s doubtful whether Truman would have ever sanctioned large-scale deployment to Mainland China. In any event, Kennan’s approach encapsulated many of his core principles about US intervention in the peripheral Rimlands: a deep skepticism over America’s ability to compensate for local government failure, a sharp emphasis on rigorous geopolitical reasoning over emotional or political appeals, and a ‘less-is-more’ philosophy that argued that reduced US intervention might paradoxically produce greater geopolitical gains.

At the same time, China also again underscored one of the core weaknesses of Kennan’s strategy: his failure to build political support for his geostrategic approach. Even assuming that Kennan had the right idea regarding China’s limited significance, he failed to sway enough people to his point of view.

Instead, prodded by groups like the China Lobby, American political actors increasingly interpreted Kennan’s withdrawals and non-intervention as evidence of Communism’s global advance – one which only an equally-expansive US response could stop. The Nationalist defeat in China amplified this sentiment dramatically, with Kennan’s criticisms of Nationalist governance completely drowned out by the scornful question: “Who Lost China?” The backlash this created would ultimately play a major role in deconstructing Kennan’s original vision for containment, clearing the path for more politically-astute strategymakers to transform it into something rather different.

But for the time being at least, Kennan had successfully headed off the peripheral distractions to his containment strategy. Now, he could finally direct American resources and energy towards the Rimland regions he deemed truly vital: Western Europe and Japan.

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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. The next video will explore Kennan’s Strategy of Containment as it was applied to Western Europe and Japan.