The Containment Policy

Although he was vice president during much of World War II, Truman had been excluded from all foreign policy discussions. He was not granted full security clearance and thus knew little about the Manhattan project. “They didn’t tell me anything about what was going on,” Truman complained. While FDR had concluded at Yalta that he could charm or otherwise personally cope with the Soviet dictator, Truman early resolved to deal with Stalin firmly.

Repeatedly Stalin made it clear that he had no intention of even consulting with Western leaders about his domination of Eastern Europe, and he seemed intent on extending his power deep into war-devastated central Europe. The Soviet Union also controlled Outer Mongolia, parts of Manchuria, and northern Korea, and it had annexed the Kurile Islands and regained the southern half of Sakhalin Island from Japan. It was fomenting trouble in Iran. By January 1946 Truman had decided to stop “babying” the Russians. “Only one language do they understand,” he noted in a memorandum. “How many [military] divisions have you?”

Truman’s problem—and it would bedevil American policymakers for years—was that Stalin had far more divisions than anyone else. Truman, a seasoned politician, had swiftly responded to the postwar clamor to “bring the boys home.” In the two years following the surrender of Japan, the armed forces of the United States had dwindled from 6 million to 1.5 million. Stalin, who kept domestic foes out of office by shooting them, ignored domestic pressure to demobilize the Red Army, estimated by U. S. intelligence at twice the size of the American army.

Stalin and the mighty Red Army evoked the image of Hitler’s troops pouring across the north European plains. Like Hitler, Stalin was a cruel dictator who championed an ideology of world conquest. Averill Harriman, American ambassador to the Soviet Union, warned that communist ideology exerted an “outward thrust” more dangerous than Nazism. George Kennan, a scholarly foreign officer who also had served

A propaganda poster enshrining Stalin proclaims that he has led his people "Forward to Communism!”

In Moscow, thought that ideology was more symptom than cause. Marxism, he wrote, provided the intellectual “fig-leaf of morality and respectability” for naked Soviet aggression. In an influential article, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” published anonymously in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs, Kennan argued that the instability and illegitimacy of the Soviet regime generated explosive internal pressures. These forces, vented outward, would cause the Soviet Union to expand “constantly, wherever it is permitted to move” until it filled “every nook and cranny available to it in the basin of world power.” A policy of “longterm, patient but firm and vigilant containment” was the best means of dealing with the Soviet Union.

“The Sources of Soviet Conduct” was powerfully argued, but the article was ambiguous and imprecise in crucial aspects. Exactly how the Soviets were to be “contained” and the parts of the world to which the policy should be applied were not spelled out. At the outset containment was less a plan of action than a plea for the resolve to act.