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

 

The Rimland Thesis & US Containment

Cold War: Kennan’s Strategy, 1947-1950

Part III: Stabilization

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 particular, Kennan viewed the major states of Western Europe – Britain, France, Germany and Italy – along with Japan as essential to his strategy, due to their status as industrialized states capable of generating and sustaining significant power. He wanted US efforts to focus almost exclusively on them, and as strategymaker, he had worked tirelessly to keep other concerns from stealing Washington’s attention.

Under Kennan’s guidance, American policy would greatly influence the postwar socio-political trajectory of the West: from the Marshall Plan to covert operations, from European integration to Japanese conservatism. Yet the final results were not entirely to Kennan’s liking. Some of this was due to the usual bureaucratic politics, but increasingly, they were reflecting problems in Kennan’s own thinking – particularly his assumptions on how states would behave, which were fast hardening into assertions on how states should behave.

These convictions – which in turn clashed with how states actually behaved – made Kennan’s strategy appear increasingly-detached and therefore risky to his superiors, a viewpoint that Kennan interpreted as an insulting lack of faith. By the end of this period, both Kennan and the US Government had lost confidence in each other, opening the door for new leaders and new perspectives to replace him.

 

6. 1947-48: Stabilization

As Kennan took up his post, his overwhelming priority was on the economic, societal, and political stabilization of what he deemed the key regions within his strategy: namely Western Europe and Japan. This approach flowed directly from his theory of Soviet expansion, which argued that the Kremlin would not use military force, but instead would rely on political warfare and societal chaos to bring Communists into power. By contrast, stabilized and satisfied societies would not only defeat such attempts, their success would actively encourage defections from the Soviet sphere, by demonstrating that Communist domination and dictatorship were not necessary for development.

As of 1946, however, the situation in Western Europe and Japan was decidedly closer to chaos than stability, with GDP around half of pre-World War II levels. Moreover, the end of wartime destruction had not triggered a surge of rebuilding: instead, what came next was political gridlock, both amongst the occupying Allies in Germany and Japan, and also between the recently-liberated European states still nursing wartime grudges against one another.

The result was a series of interlocking crises: for example, the political gridlock over German economic punishment led to coal shortages, which in turn led to industrial shortages… foreign exchange shortages… food shortages. As Kennan predicted, such chaos fueled a surge in support for Communism in Western Europe, with Soviet-aligned Communists becoming the largest party in France, the third-largest in Italy and Belgium, and elsewhere gaining more than 10% of the vote. The trend was even stronger in the thoroughly-ravaged countries of Eastern Europe, where – setting aside obviously manipulated elections – Communists could still claim roughly a quarter of the vote.

As mentioned, Kennan’s remedy was to use non-military methods to set these countries back on the path to economic and societal recovery. But until those were ready, he had to rely on cruder stopgap measures. Crudest of them all was hard military force, which Kennan deployed to the unsettled border between Italy and Yugoslavia, in order to prevent the latter from taking land through political or actual warfare. Next was diplomatic force, where US officials pressured Western European leaders to block Communists from power, leading to the ‘May 1947 Crises’ in France and Italy where Communist ministers were summarily purged from government.

Italy, in particular, was seen as especially vulnerable, with the Italian Communist Party and its increasingly-subservient Socialist ally expected to win around 40% of the vote in the 1948 elections. Unwilling to risk a pro-Soviet government being elected, Kennan decided on aggressive US intervention: not just overt threats for the US to suspend aid and combat the quote-unquote ‘overthrow’ of democracy, but more ominously, covert operations led by the newly-established CIA, who spent millions on anti-Communist propaganda, voter outreach, and outright bribery. It worked, and the Italian Communists were kept out of political power.

To Kennan, the success in Italy confirmed the value of covert operations in political warfare, and he soon consolidated the CIA’s efforts into the euphemistically-named ‘Office of Policy Coordination’, lavishing it with cash as he approved a slew of new projects across the continent, from Radio Free Europe to attempted rebellion in Albania.

But Italy was also a potential test case for another approach that defined the early Cold War: partition. Had the Italian Communists, despite everything thrown at them, still won the 1948 election, Kennan was perfectly prepared to force the Italian government to take emergency action against them, which in the worst case, might have resulted in the country splitting into pro- and anti-Communist halves – a risk that Kennan deemed acceptable.

Just as we’ve seen in Greece, Kennan saw partition as a way to trim a country into a more manageable size for stabilization. However, unlike in Greece and so many other places, Kennan viewed partition of an industrialized state such as Italy almost certainly as a temporary expedient. After all, under his own logic, successful stabilization and development of the non-Communist half of Italy would soon generate powerful attractive forces that would draw the Communist half back into the Western fold.

This perspective may help clarify Kennan’s approach to another vulnerable industrial power: Germany, which as of 1947 was still under the joint administration of 4 Allied powers: the Soviets, the US, Britain and France. In theory, the 4 were meant to govern Germany by consensus, but sharp disagreements quickly emerged in practice over postwar policy, notably over whether to continue suppressing the German economy. On one hand were the US and the UK, who especially wanted to end the restrictions on German coal production in order to calm the chaos engulfing Western Europe; while on the other hand were the Soviets who – both due to their tremendous wartime suffering, and also their appreciation that chaos worked to their benefit – refused to budge on the issue. The result was administrative deadlock, and the unwilling continuation of German economic punishment to the misery of all Europe.

By 1947, the British and the Americans had had enough, and they began to unilaterally implement their own economic measures in their sectors of Germany. This first split was something that Kennan, at this stage, fully endorsed – indeed, he had suggested something similar even before the end of World War II, when he opposed the 4-power joint administration whose inevitable gridlock he foresaw. Kennan’s perspective remained unchanged throughout his first year in office, as he encouraged the French to join the British and Americans in what was fast growing into an East-West partition of Germany.

Kennan’s reasoning here was consistent with his broader strategy: since the Soviets benefited from chaos, including them in any stabilization effort would only result in them sabotaging the entire process. As such, if Germany was to be rehabilitated as quickly as possible, neither the Soviets nor the Soviet-dominated East Germans could be part of that effort. In any case, the existing size of partition was already pushing the limits of what Kennan saw as the ultimate measure for stabilization: US economic aid.

While Kennan saw covert operations and diplo-military pressure as useful stopgap measures against Soviet political warfare, he always recognized that sustained economic recovery provided the only long-term solution. Such recovery, in turn, had to rest upon 2 core pillars: first, the injection of substantial US capital into Western Europe as both relief and developmental ‘seed money’; and second, the politico-economic integration of Western European states in order to form a large unified market capable of sustaining competitive growth.

In advocating for European integration, Kennan broke with Spykman’s geopolitical advice to not encourage a ‘United States of Europe’, for fear that such a power would easily turn into a potential world conqueror. But in a world still awed by the Soviet Union’s apparent ability to produce economic miracles through central planning, Kennan likely felt that only such a powerful combination could hope to compete long-term against Moscow.

In any case, Western Europe was still very far from anything resembling unity. Initial attempts to coordinate regional coal production – the most basic step towards integration – stalled due to lingering insecurities amongst the major states, with France fearful of any German recovery and Britain prioritizing its crumbling Empire. In the end, an exasperated Kennan had to step in, coordinate, direct and edit the European proposals, producing a $22bn plan for Washington to review.

As with Germany, there was also a need to subtly exclude the Soviets and Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe from US economic aid. This Kennan achieved by inserting several ‘poison pills’ into the proposal, notably by asking Moscow to also help fund any continent-wide aid program, while insisting that it and all other recipient states adopt market reforms as a prerequisite. Of course, the biggest poison pill of them all lay in the implicit anti-Soviet thrust of the entire plan, which aimed to politically fortify Western Europe, use it to generate attractive forces that would peel off Eastern Europe, and perhaps eventually, encourage regime change within the Kremlin itself. Unsurprisingly, the Kremlin quickly refused all US aid and ordered aligned states to do the same.

The final obstacle was domestic politics. Kennan’s proposed $22bn aid program amounted to nearly 10% of US GDP, so President Truman understandably wanted Congress to pass it before it became a major issue in the 1948 election. This task fell to Kennan’s boss, Secretary of State George Marshall, who leveraged his enormous World War II prestige to go on a major lobbying tour: to Congressmen, he offered significant aid cuts that slashed the program from $22 to $13bn; to the military, he warned that US aid was the only thing stopping France and Italy from falling to Communism. To business leaders, he predicted that a recovered Europe would be a major market for American goods; and to the general public, Marshall copied Truman’s moralistic tone, portraying his Plan as the next chapter in America’s fight against those who quote-unquote ‘seek to perpetuate human misery’.

Building also on the momentum of earlier US aid programs to Japan, Greece, the Philippines and China, Congress eventually passed what became known as the ‘Marshall Plan’ starting December 1947, with the full program approved April 1948. As soon as it became law, US funds began immediately flowing into Western Europe, delivering urgent relief, restarting economic growth, and extinguishing the regional chaos that had fueled the Communist surge.

Kennan regarded his role in shepherding the Marshall Plan as his greatest achievement – and in hindsight, almost certainly the peak of his career. Yet stabilization was only the first half of his strategy for Western Europe and Japan – and there was still the second half to come.

7. 1948-49: Strategic Independence

With the passage of the Marshall Plan, Kennan considered the task of stabilization largely complete, a view reinforced by his observations of Moscow’s behavior. Starting in late 1947, Soviet encroachments on Eastern Europe sharply intensified, as Kremlin-aligned leaders, supported by the Soviet Army, systematically cracked down on non-Communist parties and assumed totalitarian control over their own governments. Particularly dramatic was the Communist self-coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948, leading to a formal dictatorship; and the Berlin Blockade that began in June 1948, as Moscow sought to disrupt the formation of what was rapidly becoming West Germany.

To most observers, these actions seemed to foreshadow a new round of Soviet expansion, but Kennan saw things differently. To him, the Kremlin’s moves reflected its grudging resignation that the political war for Western Europe had been lost, which meant that it now had to shore up its position in Eastern Europe to defend against the West’s growing economic and political attraction – a battle that Kennan was sure Moscow would eventually lose.

As if to further confirm his views, the most surprising event of them all – the expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Soviet-dominated Cominform in mid-48 – seemed to indicate that the Eastern bloc was already fracturing. Eager to encourage this trend, Kennan urged the US to reward Yugoslavia’s defection with increased trade, which the country quickly reciprocated by cutting off all aid to the Greek Communists in the Greek Civil War. This move, above all else, was what finally secured Greece for the West.

To Kennan, these developments provided an opportunity to move to next phase of his strategy. With postwar chaos rapidly subsiding and the Soviets now on the defensive, the time had come to restore Western Europe’s strategic independence. In doing so, the region would finally resume the role that Kennan had always envisioned for it: as the primary balancer of Soviet power in the western Rimlands, doing the lion’s share of the work in containing Moscow while the United States demobilized and withdrew across the oceans.

An example of what Kennan intended was already underway in Japan. Unlike in Europe, the main obstacle to Japan’s stabilization had not been international gridlock or Soviet interference, but in fact the American-dominated occupation itself – specifically Supreme Commander Douglas MacArthur, who effectively ran the country with little oversight. Following the initial Allied policy of punishment and reform, MacArthur pushed hard for Japan’s demilitarization and democratization, especially viewing its conservative industrial cartels as oligarchic relics to be dissolved. Eager to demonstrate achievement ahead of the 1948 US presidential election, MacArthur even pressed Washington to quickly sign a peace treaty with Japan to permanently lock in his reforms.

To Kennan, MacArthur’s policies severely disrupted Japanese society, and risked turning it into a weak, vulnerable state that would require permanent US protection, instead of the strong, independent power that, in his strategy, would contain the Soviet eastern flank. To stop this, Kennan uncharacteristically assembled a broad coalition of interests – US officials wishing to rein in MacArthur, Truman ally’s eager to keep him in Japan, military leaders worried about losing base access, and business executives hoping to partner with the cartels – and confronted the Supreme Commander in early 1948. Through flattery and persuasion, Kennan not only convinced MacArthur to stay in place, but also handed him a new mandate: to scale back his reformist ambitions, and focus instead on stabilizing Japan.

The result was what became known as the ‘Reverse Course’, where the US not only switched from demanding reparations to providing aid, but also halted its push for further political and social reforms – all in the hopes of accelerating Japan’s economic recovery. In making this change, Kennan accepted the risk that a partially-reformed Japan might eventually revert to its prewar path of militarism and anti-Americanism; but he judged that, whatever its internal character, the prevailing geopolitical and ideological environment would compel the country to contain the Soviet Union anyway, thereby achieving the main geostrategic expectation that he had for it.

In a similar vein, Kennan hoped to effect comparable change in Western Europe. In particular, he aimed to implement a similar ‘Reverse Course’ in Germany which, given its size and location, would inevitably play a leading role in a strategically-independent Europe.

As seen earlier, policy reversal was already underway to some extent, as the British and Americans gradually eased up on the economic punishment of Germany. But Kennan’s ambitions went much further than that, finally revealing themselves in mid-1948, when he – to the almost certain astonishment of his colleagues – did a complete 180 from his former pro-partition stance, to now oppose the idea of splitting up Germany. Instead, Kennan suggested a bold new deal, where all 4 Allies would jointly withdraw from Germany, freeing the country to chart its own course independent of either Washington or Moscow.

This abrupt change of heart, coming amidst the Berlin Blockade and fierce Soviet opposition to the growing formation of West Germany, exposed Kennan to accusations of appeasing Moscow. And to a degree, Kennan was indeed becoming more sympathetic to the arguments of Rooseveltian internationalists, who prioritized international harmony even if it meant conceding spheres of influence to the Soviets.

But Kennan’s changed stance was also consistent with his overall vision of containment, which called for massive but temporary American intervention in Western Europe, to be ended once the region was set back on a positive trajectory. Partition, the Marshall Plan, US forces and leadership: all these had been necessary when European states were uniquely susceptible to Soviet political warfare; but now that this danger had passed, it was time for Washington to pull back and hand control over Europe’s destiny back to the Europeans.

Like with Japan, in advocating a German ‘Reverse Course’, Kennan fully accepted the risks that a partially-reformed Germany might slip back into dictatorship or even fascism. But it was not America’s job to dictate what politics the country should have; and in any case, the prevailing geopolitical and ideological environment would – once again – force Germany to contain Moscow anyway, thereby achieving the main geostrategic expectation that Kennan had for it.

But unlike in Japan, where Kennan successfully implemented his new policy with the help of a supporting coalition, his plans for Germany met with the opposite result. Part of this was due to the usual bureaucratic infighting, with the US military in particular vigorously opposing Kennan’s scheme, dismissing him as quote-unquote ‘all theory’ and counter-proposing that shows of military strength – such as the ongoing Berlin Airlift mounted to break the Soviet blockade – were just as effective in containing Moscow.

But other objections were more substantial and centered on fairly-obvious flaws within Kennan’s thinking. Above all, Kennan failed to seriously consider how European integration could possibly proceed alongside a united yet unreformed Germany. Presumably, Kennan assumed that former foes could just set aside moral qualms and recent history in the face of a new common enemy, much like in 18th Century cabinet diplomacy. This was an unrealistic expectation in an age of mass democracy, and Britain and France vehemently opposed any notion of German unification, to say nothing of placing themselves under potential German leadership. Neither were the Soviets interested: quite apart from the fact that all of Kennan’s plans were explicitly designed to undermine them, they too had no desire to resurrect a state that had tried to exterminate them a mere couple of years ago.

Perhaps the Western European states could have grudgingly resigned themselves to Kennan’s plan, had there been no alternative. But there was – and a much more attractive one at that. It was, of course, the continuation of the status quo, where Germany and Europe would be split into US and Soviet blocs, leaving Western Europe too weak to contain the Soviets and thereby requiring permanent US protection. Besides removing the distasteful need to reconcile with an unreformed Germany, this arrangement also let Western Europeans free-ride off of American security, to the benefit of their welfare states. All it demanded were two things: firstly, permanently consigning Eastern Europe to Soviet domination – which frankly did not trouble Britain or France much – and secondly, surrendering much of their strategic independence, which the two imperial powers initially chafed at but gradually accepted.

In the end, Kennan’s plans for Germany would be killed off by what he characterized as a ‘spectacular coup de grace’: in mid-1949, shortly after the Berlin Blockade and just as the 4 Allies were about to negotiate over the country’s future, Kennan’s proposal to ‘Reverse Course’ was leaked to the public, prompting intense backlash from Britain and France. Unwilling to risk splitting up the West, Washington quickly disavowed any notion of German strategic independence, which naturally gave Moscow a pretext to reject what would have been reunification on Western terms. The process of partition therefore continued unimpeded, with a West German government formed in September 1949, followed by the establishment of East Germany a month later.

Kennan’s failure to prevent German partition deeply disillusioned him, and played a major role in his decision to step back from his formal duties at the State Department from mid-49 onwards. As he saw it, the Washington establishment was turning away from him – a view reinforced by the other personnel changes occurring at this time, most notably the retirement of George Marshall. Marshall was succeeded as Secretary of State by Dean Acheson, who unlike his predecessor, did not rely on Kennan as his sole source of geostrategic advice.

But on deeper level, Kennan’s instincts were indeed correct, and the failure of his German proposal also represented a broader abandonment of his original vision for containment – specifically the part where the US would restore strategic stability across Eurasia by ensuring that each region was strong enough to balance out the others. Now, with the US permanently forced to defend a weak Western Europe, the country would have to remain on a constant war footing, fostering the rise of a ‘Military-Industrial Complex’ that Kennan feared would eventually undermine traditional American society. There was little he could do now to change this state of affairs but lash out in frustration, bitterly complaining that his strategy had been ‘broken up’ by the ‘irreparable damage’ caused by Europe’s division.

But if the consequences of failure were so great, then Kennan himself cannot escape blame for his own strategy’s demise. A recurring weakness throughout his career as policymaker was his disinterest in developing proposals that could attract supportive coalitions. For instance, his plan for German reunification offered no benefits to Britain or France, was a poison pill to the Soviets, and did not address the concerns of his colleagues – many of whom in fact agreed with Kennan in theory, but saw his plan as unfeasible in practice. Contrast this with the far shrewder actions of the Western European governments, who quickly grasped the implications of what Kennan was proposing, coordinated between themselves to present a united front, and reached out to like-minded people in Washington. The result was what has been described as an ‘Empire by Invitation’, in which US hegemony in Europe has been sustained largely due to the action and initiative of European elites.

Another weakness – one which the Europeans surely seized upon to sow doubt in Kennan’s ideas – came from the flawed beliefs that lay at the very heart of his vision for containment. Over time, it became increasingly clear that some of Kennan’s assumptions about how countries behaved weren’t lining up with observable reality. For starters, we’ve already seen how Kennan’s German proposal presumed that European states would prioritize reclaiming their strategic independence above all else – even if it meant living with an unreformed Germany, or shouldering the massive burden of containing Moscow. This turned out not to be the case at all, and Kennan’s disappointment here surely contributed to his growing incomprehension and even hatred of modern democratic politics.

More importantly, Kennan’s singular emphasis on national sovereignty caused him to underestimate the role that ideological affinity and even tactical considerations played in shaping strategic alignments. This led to policy recommendations that – especially without hindsight – seemed far too risky to gamble the well-being of the US on. For example, Kennan’s proposal to restore the strategic independence of Germany and Japan entirely rested on the belief that – regardless of their feelings towards America – these nations would view the Soviet Union as the greater danger, and therefore work against Moscow in ways that fulfilled Washington’s geostrategic objectives. Such confidence seems a little misplaced, given that both countries had cut deals with the Soviets during World War II in order to confront the Western powers.

Indeed, there was at least one country where Kennan’s flawed thinking led to a clearly-failed gamble – and that was Communist China. In opposing US intervention in the Chinese Civil War, Kennan had repeatedly predicted that, once the Chinese Communists conquered and stabilized the country, they would quickly revert to their traditional xenophobia and break free from Soviet domination, as Yugoslavia had done. This conviction underpinned his conciliatory stance towards the newly-established People’s Republic of China or PRC, which the US initially offered to recognize and even trade with, while simultaneously denying any further support to the anti-Communists on Taiwan.

But contrary to what Kennan expected, the Chinese Communists did not immediately defect from the Soviet bloc, almost certainly because their sweeping success in the Civil War had convinced them of Communism’s inevitable global triumph. Starting in mid-49, the PRC progressively aligned itself with the Communist world, first through public declarations, then by seizing US property and even diplomatic personnel. This all culminated in the Sino-Soviet Treaty of early 1950, which formally bound Beijing and Moscow together in a close military and economic alliance.

Faced with yet another failure of his strategy, Kennan had little remedy to offer. Instead, he once again lashed out, accusing the PRC of being quote-unquote ‘grievously misguided and confused’, and drawing up a list of punishments ranging from diplomatic protests to military threats to, of course, covert operations. But none of it could hide the uncomfortable truth: that Kennan’s own analysis had misled him, and as a result, he had unwittingly handed a quarter of humanity over to Communism without a fight.

The fact that China and the Soviet Union did eventually split 12 years later is of limited relevance here, and brings to mind a famous observation on policy made by one of Kennan’s near contemporaries: ‘In the long run we are all dead’. The purpose of strategy is almost always to tackle immediate threats facing the state, and it is not enough to simply dismiss a threat by declaring it as something that will sort itself out in the long run. This is doubly so considering Kennan’s own understanding of Soviet strategy, which sought to permanently lock in any advantage that was gained.

Looking ahead, the risks of building an entire strategy around Kennan’s flawed analysis become especially clear when we consider his most fundamental assumption: that non-military containment alone would be enough to deter Moscow. At the very core of Kennan’s approach was his conviction that once Soviet political warfare failed to seize the Eurasian Rimlands, the Kremlin would meekly accept defeat rather than escalate to outright military invasion. He clung on to this belief even as Soviet occupying forces ramped up the pressure on the governments of Eastern Europe, characterizing these moves as defensive in nature or – as with the Berlin Blockade – a reaction to aggressive Western behavior.

To an extent, Kennan’s self-assuredness reflected the broader confidence within Washington that, in a world where only America had the atomic bomb, the Soviets would not dare to start a war that would likely result in their total and one-sided annihilation. But this nuclear monopoly was projected to last only a few more years, so what would become of containment after then? And far more alarmingly – what if Kennan was, once again, wrong?

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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 video – the last of the Kennan series – we’ll witness the final collapse of Kennan’s vision for containment, and the subsequent rise of what he would scornfully term ‘over-militarization’.