Kennan too, though, failed to anticipate feedback, notably the risk that selective containment - protecting only the industrial regions of Western Europe and Japan - might not sustain self-confidence within the democracies over however long it might take for Soviet behavior to change. Self-confidence is an emotion, which Kennan hoped to produce through rational argument. So had Pericles when he advised the Athenians to rely exclusively on their naval strength and the wealth it brought them, while watching impassively from atop their walls as the Spartans ravaged their countryside.4 Strategy depends as much on morale as on logic, and Pericles found the Athenians unready for the path he meant to follow. Kennan’s experience was similar.
Containment, Kennan acknowledged, was like walking a tightrope. It was an economical way to cross an abyss, but it was important not to look down. That meant maintaining composure when Stalin succeeded - unexpectedly early - in building his own atomic bomb. It meant not worrying about Communist victories in non-industrial regions like China, where Mao Zedong had defeated Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists and was poised to take power. Neither of these developments significantly shifted the global geopolitical balance, Kennan argued at the end of 1949: deterrence would still work, Mao might not follow Moscow’s orders, and even if he did China would absorb whoever tried to run it. The United States should simply stick to reviving capitalism and planting democracy in Western Europe and Japan - lest it too succumb, as the Soviet Union had, to imperial temptations.
But the Americans were no more prepared than the Athenians had been to suffer setbacks with equanimity. The Truman administration, under congressional pressure, had to agree to build a thermonuclear bomb, a weapon so powerful that war planners had no idea how it might be used. The president also commissioned a reassessment of containment, NSC-68, which concluded that no parts of the world were now peripheral, that no means of protecting them could now be ruled out, and that the existing defense budget was woefully inadequate. Then, in June 1950, the North Koreans invaded South Korea, a country whose defense no one in Washington had regarded as a vital interest. Now everyone, including even Kennan, believed it to be.
Historians have generally argued that Stalin blundered in authorizing this attack. He had not expected the United States to intervene; when it did military spending tripled, while Truman used the crisis to justify rearming the West Germans and stationing American troops permanently in Europe. From the Soviet leader’s perspective, however, Korea also brought benefits. The United States suffered major military reversals there without using the atomic bomb. Chinese involvement ended any hope in Washington that Mao might become another Tito. And the war convinced Truman and his advisers that the authors of NSC-68 were right: any part of the world threatened or even apparently threatened by international Communism - industrial or not - would have to be protected.
So the Americans, like the ancient Greeks, lost the self-confidence to leave anything undefended. They gained in its place the insecurity that accompanies expansion: "fear [was] our principal motive," Thucydides has the Athenians tell the Spartans. '[I]t appeared no longer safe to give up our empire; especially as all who left us would fall to you."5 From a strategy meant to retain the initiative by distinguishing vital from peripheral interests, the United States shifted to one that yielded the initiative to its enemies. Wherever they chose to challenge, it would have to respond.
World History
