George Kennan’s Legacy in 2025

George Kennan’s most celebrated texts are from the 1940s. That is some eight decades ago. His “X Article” and “Long Telegram” mark the dawn of the Cold War, delineating a geopolitical landscape that is surely as distant from today as the geopolitical landscape of the 1860s was from the 1940s. Thinking and writing about international affairs are inevitability presentist, which raises a question about George Kennan’s legacy. Is he a historical figure and not much more – in the age of AI, of social media and of China’s superpower status? A historical figure Kennan is, but his legacy is still current. It is so current that it demands sustained consideration at present.

Four elements of Kennan’s long and deep legacy stand out. The first is his aptitude for strategic thinking. A second is Kennan’s willingness to be a critic of U.S. policy, as he was during the Vietnam War, a critic whose aim was prudence, clarity of action and the long-term success of U.S. policy. A third element is scholarship and scholarship rooted in “area studies,” the premise that to be effective is to be informed and to be informed is the work of a lifetime. Kennan was masterful at engaging the public – the fourth element of his legacy. A relatively private person, he was a natural communicator at home in lectures, in journalistic writing and in books. To be effective on the international stage, his career implies, a democratic public must be well informed.

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Kennan was synthetic as a strategic thinker. His doctrine of containment linked multiple and discrete problems. Modern warfare had by 1945 put humanity on the brink of destruction; the Soviet Union after World War II had newfound ambitions and capacities; and the United States was awesomely but not limitlessly powerful in the late 1940s. This triad of problems might – without Kennan – have admitted divergent solutions. It was his gift to look at them and to see one solution, which he was able to articulate in his inimitable prose, to-the-point (usually), dramatic (at times) and persuasive (almost always). He reduced a multi-part strategic shift to a single not-very-abstract word: containment.

Containment resolved separate problems into one arc of action. It did away with unconditional surrender, the maximalist goal the United States had adopted for World War II. Kennan rejected unconditional surrender just after it had led the United States to victory in the Second World War – no small feat. With this pull-back in mind, Kennan found a way to counter the Soviet challenge in the mid-1940s. To contain is not to defeat, though to contain is also not to stand still; it was a coherent program for moving forward. Containment was also designed with domestic American politics in mind, and it was guided by worries about over-reach (culled from Kennan’s study of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon). Part of containment for Kennan was the sly attempt to contain American power. Kennan would never be satisfied with the consequences of this attempt.

Kennan set an example of synthetic brevity. The “Long Telegram” and “X Article” are short texts (relatively speaking). In a government skilled at generating verbiage, endless documents and mountains of words, Kennan found an improbable degree of focus in short-form writing. Avoid trivia, he was famously instructed by Secretary of State George Marshall. It was good advice, and it was advice Kennan had taken to heart long before he became the Director of the State Department’s Office of Policy Planning in 1947. The trivia of bureaucracy, the trivia of “the news,” the trivia of theory did not get in Kennan’s way. One can only imagine what he would have thought about the media environment of the twenty-first century, but the buzz and hum of today’s media do not make Kennan’s example unreachable or esoteric. They make it more important.

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Kennan spent many years in government service. He never ceased being a policy planner, even when he was writing his books in Princeton, New Jersey or spending time on his farm in East Berlin, Pennsylvania. Yet he was able to regard his own government from a critical distance, and he was never shy about voicing his skepticism or worry about policy choices – from the 1940s into the early years of the twenty-first century. He did so concerning containment itself, concerning the Vietnam War, the Iraq War and the U.S. decision to expand the NATO alliance into Eastern and Central Europe. In each instance, Kennan came out against particular polices when these policies were popular: containment in the 1950s, the Vietnam War in the mid-1960s, the Iraq War in 2003 and NATO enlargement before Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.

The details of his dissent remain interesting. Kennan felt that containment got unnecessarily militarized, having been launched (by him) as mostly political process. Instead of curtailing U.S. overreach, containment could be an incitement to overreach, to an out-of-control Cold War with the Soviet Union. On Vietnam, Kennan was prescient in emphasizing the Vietnamese context of the war. In his critique of Washington’s containment-driven march to war in Vietnam one senses Kennan the area-studies scholar, wondering whether his government knew enough about the country it was seeking to rescue. He applied a similar frame of reference to Iraq after September 11. After the fact, many Americans would come to agree with Kennan on Vietnam and Iraq; fewer perhaps on containment. Kennan was most controversially a critic of NATO expansion. He speculated in 1997 about NATO as a provocation to Russia.

At issue is not whether Kennan was right or wrong on these individual issues. His assessments should be the object of vigorous debate. At issue is the responsibility Kennan took upon himself to think through policy choices in public, in real time and without flattering the government. It is not so easy to do. Access can get lost; egos can get bruised. But governments need critical debate for policy formation to be healthy. When such debate is curtailed, for whatever reason, misjudgments and mistakes ensue. When such debate flourishes, it may be ignored, and it may be worth ignoring, but it can also be revisited, when the situation on the ground changes. In 1968, Kennan’s objections to the Vietnam War were the conventional wisdom. That the objections were already there in the public domain allowed them to be reconsidered, a subtle service to the American polity.

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Professionally speaking, Kennan got lucky. Born in 1904, he came to maturity when the study of Russia and the Soviet Union was more than minimal in the United States. He had a famous great uncle – after whom the Kennan Institute is named – who sparked his interest in Russia. He drifted into the foreign service after college, where he did not major in Russian or Soviet studies; nor could he have at Princeton in the 1920s. Without a lot of forethought, the State Department sent Kennan to Latvia to learn about the Soviet Union, a state with which the United States did not have diplomatic relations at the time. Kennan absorbed language and literature and history from the Russian emigres (and others) who taught him in Riga, proceeding to Berlin to study a country that to most Americans was terra incognita. This background gave Kennan a unique body of knowledge in the 1940s, exactly when his career took off.

Immersion in area studies did not turn Kennan into a technocrat. He turned area studies into a vast field of available erudition. Self-consciously literary, Kennan did not so much amass information as acquire – through study – the habits of strategic empathy. His Russian-language skills impressed Joseph Stalin, and they enabled his fine-grained observation of Kremlin. On discerning Soviet motivations, an imprecise science, Kennan was fantastically skilled. He arrived at his conception of “Soviet conduct” and its sources slowly and through books, the literature of Fyodor Dostoevksy, for example, which Kennan was able to merge (in his thinking) with the diplomat’s normal analysis of political economy and military affairs. Having drawn from area studies as a diplomat and policymaker, Kennan then devoted himself to area studies as a scholar. The transition was not seamless, but it has left us a rich record (not least in his memoirs) of the back-and-forth between the construction of ideas and the construction of policy.

There were borders to Kennan’s area-studies purview. He did not command an equal knowledge of the globe’s four corners, but he had a remarkably textured view of Russia-in-Europe and an appropriate fascination with the evolving contours of Europe from the early-modern period to the twentieth century, the European sides to Imperial Russia and the odd Europeanness of the Soviet experiment. He tied this expertise to the formulation of American grand strategy and never more cogently than in the 1940s, when Europe was at the engrossing center of American foreign policy. Kennan’s contributions to the Marshall Plan and to the creation of the NATO alliance followed from his sense of the Kremlin’s ambitions and of the European structures that would be needed to counter these ambitions. Kennan synthesized strategic concepts on the basis of his area-studies learning. The synthesis did not come about by accident.

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Kennan spent the first half of his life as a diplomat and the second as an educator. No doubt this reflected his enjoyment of learning and research as such. Most of all, though, his pedagogy was public. He wrote accessible books on diplomatic history. Rarely a neutral pedagogue, he wanted to shape public opinion and to wean the American public off of a moralistic internationalism he attributed to Woodrow Wilson. Kennan’s own moralistic fervor could lend excitement to his essays and books, which ranged far and wide and did not always have a clear-cut purpose. Kennan was a twentieth-century influencer, serious and high-brow to the core. He could assemble audiences that might have turned away from a specialist but avidly bought and read his books. He knew how to break through.

Kennan was also a lecturer. Though he would surely have hated social media and been perplexed by the realities (and irrealities) it has brought into being, he might have been attracted to the less sensationalist purposes of social media. One can envision him doing a podcast. He did not confine himself to writing, much as he loved to write: he valued the spoken word. Kennan is well known for his reservations about democracy. He had no reservations about teaching the American public – and the American electorate – about foreign policy, diplomatic history or about the life and times of the Soviet Union. For teaching, it helps to have a persona and to be invested in an audience’s reaction, which makes speaking different from writing. Kennan projected his public persona into the mass media of the day. He appeared on the cover of Time magazine, a testament to the scope of his public persona and to all he had done to build it up.

Finally, Kennan was a journalist. The “Long Telegram” was a diplomatic cable; for a while it was supposed to be classified. “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” appeared in Foreign Affairs magazine, anonymously authored and highly public at the same time. Among other things, it was journalism. One of Kennan’s most-quoted pieces was an op-ed in the New York Times. It was his 1997 condemnation of U.S. policy toward NATO and his prediction that it would destroy a working relationship between Russia and the United States. Journalism is a classic medium of foreign-affairs discourse and debate, much more so than books. It hews close to the present tense, invites polemics and can be yet another occasion for “teaching” the public. Proudly elitist, Kennan did not cloister his ideas. He never hid them away. He had the successful writer’s knack for envisioning a public and then for finding it, for inventing it perhaps. Various publics continue to find their way to his ideas, without having to be assigned his books in class.

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Kennan lived to see the Soviet Union’s collapse. Still, it is this collapse that separates his world, the world born at the end of the Second World War, from ours. Different angles of vision are now mandatory. Moscow may not be the fulcrum for a region of independent nation states. Moscow, by invading Ukraine serially since February 2014, has driven a wedge into the entire region. A jagged line of conflict extends around Belarus and across Ukraine. The South Caucasus may be drifting away from Russia’s reach, while in Central Asia countries horrified by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine do not wish to sever themselves from Russia. Once in the Soviet Union, the Baltic Republics are now in NATO. They are robust supporters of Ukraine. One must persistently ask the question about what this region is – and whether it is a proper region at all. It may be united by the experience of war at this point and by not much else. Ours is an era inhospitable to long telegrams and inhospitable to any single telegram that could determine a comprehensive policy. In its basic set-up, Kennan’s best strategic thinking (from the early Cold War) cannot be replicated. It has become history.

The method behind his strategic thinking has very much survived the Cold War’s end. It is his living legacy. Kennan permitted himself the inward glance as a diplomat. He thought hard about the United States. He worked even harder to acquire a body of knowledge that had little to do with his Midwestern childhood; he read countless books. Eager as he was to offer suggestions about policymaking, Kennan was equally inclined to challenge the policy being made in Washington. Over the course of his career, his recommendations were infrequently adopted, and his moments of dissent were more frequent than his moments of unambiguous achievement. Several of his public dissents were achievements in their own right: they came to be recognized as such in retrospect. Kennan helped the public to follow the progress of his mind and to review the historical record, the stories behind the story. This aggregate method must not be consigned to the past. It can thrive in the present. U.S. policy is unlikely to thrive without the people and the institutions that can keep this method alive.