Guns and Gear

Guns & Politics: Understanding The Policy Of “Containment”

Susan Smith Columnist
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We are currently seeing the damage that can be done by the arrogance and the power of unelected bureaucrats, whether they have been politically appointed or they are in the civil service.  For whatever reason no one seems to be able to remember, these people do not seem to be able to be fired, so they can carry on, accountable to no one, least of all to their ultimate boss, and that would be, The President of the United States of America, the Head of the Executive Branch of Government, and either enact, or refuse to enact, policy they are commanded to do.

It’s actually quite astonishing.  But what is most astonishing is to look back in history and see what people in these positions have actually wrought while in these positions of power.  Perhaps the most egregious was that accomplished by the State Department diplomat George Kennan, in his, at the time, much vaunted, bureaucratically-sanctioned policy of “containment.”

This benign sounding term, found to be an acceptable policy by executive branch types everywhere in late 40’s American government in dealing with post-World War II USSR, destroyed the lives of millions of Eastern Europeans in more than nine formerly sovereign nations.  This policy subjected the people of those nations to existences of unspeakable brutality under the Soviet Communist dictatorship for more than five decades.

Following World War II, America was figuring out how to deal with her “ally,” the USSR.  FDR had been the American President throughout almost the entirety of this catastrophic war and had been extremely ill during a large part of the final negotiations with the aggressive and malevolent Communist dictator, Joseph Stalin, who was determined to grab as many people and lands as possible after the Nazi collapse.  FDR’s debilitating illness, and therefore weakness, had been hidden from the U.S. by a compliant press, and Americans had no idea what we were just handing over to Stalin, which turned out to be half of Europe.

Many were concerned that another war, this time the U.S. with the Soviet Union, was the only alternative in the face of Soviet aggression, so when American diplomat with experience in Russia, George Kennan, came up with what seemed to be a reasonable option in 1946, it was treated as an acceptable policy.  Later termed as the “Long Telegram,” Kennan essentially laid out in this document “a third path between the extremes of war and appeasement,” described in this article as “containment.”

“Stalin,” Kennan said, “is not Hitler.”  The diplomat further said that the Russian leader did “not have a fixed timetable for aggression, and (though he) is determined to dominate Europe and, if possible, the world, … there is no hurry about it.”  Kennan also said that “if the US and its allies could be patient and contain Soviet expansionism without war or appeasement over a sufficiently long period of time, the Russians would change their priorities.”  Kennan felt that “if we could develop a coherent strategy on non-provocative resistance, this third path would lead to a settlement with the Soviet Union or even to the break-up of the Soviet Union.”

So, this State Department diplomat, in his ivory tower, having no actual real world experience, came up with the theory that if one would contain the peoples of Eastern Europe behind what would later be known as an “Iron Curtain,” maintained by the rulers of the USSR, that Stalin et al in the Soviet Union would be pacified for the time being and all would be well, again for the time being.

Thus, millions upon millions of innocent Eastern Europeans, who had just gone through years of a brutal military conflict on their soil, led by the Nazis, were now, with no one asking their permission and for the foreseeable future, were going to be subject to the equal brutality of Soviet rule.

Their savior against Nazi rule had been America.  Their savior against Soviet conquest?  Not America, as America had given them over to the Soviets through the bureaucratically approved policy of Containment.  And if not America, no one.

George Kennan told us we were doing the right thing, however, and he saw “internal contradictions within the Soviet system that would probably cause it to fall apart.”  The first major initiative to make this happen that he proposed was the Marshall Plan, providing American aid for the recovery of Western Europe “so that Europe would not despair and feel it had to look to the Soviet Union as an alternative.“

The people of Eastern Europe, however, never saw any of this prosperity, but they saw all of the despair.

Kennan’s faith in what he saw as the eventual European reaction to the USSR came from his training not as a real world diplomat, but as a student of “the great Russian literature of the 19th century—Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov.”  Kennan the romantic felt that “the Bolshevik revolution…had not fundamentally changed the national character, which was reflected in these great literary works of art, novels though they were.” He felt that it “was that character that would eventually reassert itself to overthrow or subvert the Soviet system.”

Kennan’s Containment policy, and the ideas generated from this, became the base of the Truman administration’s foreign policy, the implementation of which eventually became known as the “Cold War.”

Thus, the fate of millions of innocent Eastern Europeans was determined by the mistakenly romantic notions of a misguided, delusional intellectual serving in a seminal position in the United States federal bureaucracy.  We will never know exactly how many suffered the ultimate fate of the gulag, and starvation, and famine, and imprisonment, and death, as the Soviets were not big on demographics, though it has been estimated that Stalin killed a minimum of 20 million people in Russia and the other eight nations behind the Iron Curtain.

World leaders of the West did continue to argue over the policy of containment, while keeping it in practice, while all the while the millions of Eastern Europeans lived in Communist controlled slavery-like conditions with no hope of ever escaping what was basically no better than what life would have been under Nazi rule.  Their only hope of salvation, America, had come up with the idea, and hypothetically, to avoid further war, had enslaved them with the increasingly vain hope of eventual release.

The people of these nations continued to live like this until a certain former California Governor, thankfully elected President of the United States in the decade of the eighties, made his presence known.

And the brilliant State Department bureaucrat who came up with this idea, and his opinion of the liberator of those having been “contained” for so many decades?

Mr. Kennan thought that “Ronald Reagan was the most dangerous leader of the cold war,” despite the fact that Reagan actually “came close to implementing Kennan’s recommendations from the late 1940s.”  When the Berlin wall finally came down and Germany finally reunified, Kennan wrote in his diary that “nothing good can come of this.”  “The wall came down, he wrote, because of East German youths lusting after the fleshpots of West Berlin.”

God save us from the arrogance and the power of those of the unelected federal bureaucracy who seek to “govern us.”  Only God, and now Donald J. Trump, can.

Susan Smith brings an international perspective to her writing by having lived primarily in western Europe, mainly in Paris, France, and the U.S., primarily in Washington, D.C. She authored a weekly column for Human Events on politics with historical aspects. She also served as the Staff Director of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Children, Family, Drugs and Alcoholism, and Special Assistant to the first Ambassador of Afghanistan following the initial fall of the Taliban. Ms. Smith is a graduate of Wheeling Jesuit University and Georgetown University, as well as the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, France, where she obtained her French language certification. Ms. Smith now makes her home in McLean, Va.