That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [8]
On the evening of February 22, 1946, Kennan, then the forty-two-year-old deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in Moscow, dispatched an 8,000-word cable to the State Department in Washington. The “Long Telegram,” as it was later known, became the most famous diplomatic communication in the history of the United States. A condensed version, which ran under the byline “X” in Foreign Affairs the next year, became perhaps the most influential journal article in American history.
Kennan’s cable earned its renown because it served as the charter for American foreign policy during the Cold War. It called for the “containment” of the military power of the Soviet Union and political resistance to its communist ideology. It led to the Marshall Plan for aid to war-torn Europe; to NATO—the first peacetime military alliance in American history—and the stationing of an American army in Europe; to America’s wars in Korea and Vietnam; to the nuclear arms race; to a dangerous brush with nuclear war over Cuba; and to a political rivalry waged in every corner of the world through military assistance, espionage, public relations, and economic aid.
The Cold War came to an end with the overthrow of the communist regimes of Eastern Europe in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. But the broad message of the Long Telegram is one we need to hear today: “Wake up! Pay attention! The world you are living in has fundamentally changed. It is not the world you think it is. You need to adapt, because the health, security, and future of the country depend upon it.”
It is hard to realize today what a shock that message was to many Americans. The world Kennan’s cable described was not the one in which most Americans believed they were living in or wanted to live in. Most of them assumed that, with the end of World War II, the United States could look forward to good relations with its wartime Soviet ally and the end of the kind of huge national exertion that winning the war had required. The message of the Long Telegram was that both of these happy assumptions were wrong. The nation’s leaders eventually accepted Kennan’s analysis and adopted his prescription. Before long the American people knew they had to be vigilant, creative, and united. They knew they had to foster economic growth, technological innovation, and social mobility in order to avoid losing the global geopolitical competition with their great rival. The Cold War had its ugly excesses and its fiascos—Vietnam and the Bay of Pigs, for example—but it also set certain limits on American politics and society. We just had to look across at the Iron Curtain and the evil empire behind it—or take part in one of those nuclear bomb drills in the basements of our elementary schools—to know that we were living in a world defined by the struggle for supremacy between two nuclear-armed superpowers. That fact shaped both the content of our politics and the prevailing attitude of our leaders and citizens, which was one of constant vigilance. We didn’t always read the world correctly, but we paid close attention to every major trend beyond our borders.
Americans had just seen totalitarian powers conquer large swaths of the world, threatening free societies with a return to the Dark Ages. The nation had had to sacrifice mightily to reverse these conquests. The Cold War that followed imposed its own special form of discipline.