NSC-68 General Address Analysis
The sweeping rhetoric and universal language the President used in his address was not an accurate representation of the objectives and goals of the new foreign policy, however. Many feared the policy was too ambiguous and reaching. The address gave the impression that the US would intervene on behalf of any and every country facing communist threat, that it would be the United States’ responsibility to defend free people everywhere. This overall impression left many with intense reservations regarding the policy. Even Kennan quietly argued it was best to be forgotten, and Marshall sought to add limits to the objectives. (Gaddis, 1974)
Despite the universal tones of the President’s address, however, the actions of the administration showed …show more content…
an awareness of the country’s limitations. In the months following the President’s address, State Department Officials went out of their way to stress during Congressional hearings that the President’s program would in no way be committing the United States to any further or future action. It was stated repeatedly that aid to Turkey and Greece would not serve as a precedent for aid to all countries threatened by communists. Instead, Dean Acheson, acting Secretary of State at the time, insisted that any further aid or assistance would be evaluated on an individual basis, free from reference to the policy. (Frazier, 1999)
The primary objective of the doctrine, therefore, was not to contain Communism so much as to contain the Kremlin. The United States saw the Communist movements in France, Italy, Greece, and elsewhere in Europe as vulnerable to Kremlin influence. Stalin’s propaganda certainly supported the notion that Soviet expansion was not limited to Eastern Europe, and while we now know that he actually actively discouraged the communist parties in these countries from coming to power, his orders for restraint were not made public. His anti-capitalist propaganda was. Policy makers at the time saw the USSR as embarking on an imperialistic agenda similar to that of Nazi Germany. Such an agenda was a huge threat to the European balance of power that the US had just fought two World Wars to defend. (Gaddis, 1974)
The United States saw communism, then, as the tool of the Kremlin, not the determinant. The policy of containment did not necessarily target communism all over the world. Instead, it called for the careful consideration and selection of when and how the US should use its influence to stop the spread of Kremlin born communism. The US did recognize indigenous communism. It recognized that subscription to the ideas of Marx and Lenin did not necessarily mean subservience to the USSR. (Gaddis, 1974)
This is clearly supported in the United States’ attitude towards and relations with Communist China and Yugoslavia. Despite the political ideologies of each, neither Communist country was seen as under Soviet influence; subsequently, neither was treated as an enemy of the United States. Instead, in many ways, they were supported by the US. Acheson remained persistent up until the start of the Korean War to keep relations open and civil with China, hoping to gain influence and drive a wedge between Chinese leader Mao Tse-tung and Stalin. (Gaddis, 1974)
Furthermore, the policy of containment originally functioned on the premise that the threat was primarily a political and economic one, not a militaristic one. Kennan, along with fellow Soviet expert, Charles Bohlen, did not see containment as a permanent policy. The objective, in their minds, was to restore faith in Democracy in Europe while cultivating viable democracies on the periphery of the USSR in an effort to convince the Soviets that their best option for security lay in a peaceful resolution and coexistence with the West. Neither believed the Soviets would risk resorting to military force to continue their expansion. The fear of US retaliation, they held, would be too strong. (Gaddis, 1974)
Kennan, the crafter of containment, strongly opposed to the universal language and rhetoric used by the administration, advocated specificity in all things, especially in policy making. He, along with Bohlen, stressed the importance of differentiating between periphery and vital interest, recognizing the United States was not capable of stemming the flow of communism everywhere. Instead, they argued, it should carefully evaluate the areas of vital importance and act accordingly. China, for example, while communist, was not a vital concern as it was not an instrument of the Kremlin. This policy called for a constant and careful re-evaluation of Soviet intent, rather than a cold assessment of Soviet capability. (Gaddis, 1974)
While the ideas of Kennan and Bohlen were accepted early on, they slowly fell out of favor. The flexibility required to continuously reshape policy was difficult to reconcile with the administration’s need for direction. The President could not continuously change his stance, nor could the US continuously change its foreign policy. As Acheson once asserted to a group of critics, “The farmer who pulled up his crops every morning to see how much the roots had grown would not be very productive.” (Gaddis, 1974)
Moreover, the universalism Kennan detested was increasingly becoming a tool used by the administration to allow more freedom of action. Men like Acheson saw generalizations and oversimplifications as not only beneficial in swaying an audience, but almost essential to get a complex or intricate idea across. In trying to educate the American public about the varieties of communism, Acheson recalls, “I was a frustrated schoolteacher, persisting against overwhelming evidence to the contrary in the belief that the human mind could be moved by facts and reason.” (Gaddis, 1974) In a meeting with special members of Congress before Truman’s address in 1947, it was Acheson’s more impassioned explanation, rather than Secretary of State Marshall’s carefully measured one, which inspired and gained support for the plan. (Frazier, 1999) Furthermore, when Acheson attempted to explain in specific and limited terms the defensive perimeter during his National Press Club Speech, he was accused of essentially giving North Korea the green light in its attack on the Republic of Korea. This only served to further reinforce universal rather than specific statements. (Matray, 2002)
As Kennan began to lose influence, his successor as Head of the PPS, Paul Nitze, began to gain it. Nitze, a more shrill and confrontational man, approached the Soviet situation very differently. While Kennan advocated an understanding of US limitations, Nitze placed more faith in the United States’ power and ability. Unlike Kennan, he believed the Soviets’ had every intention of spreading their influence as widely as possible, and he did not doubt their willingness to use military force in achieving their ambitions. (Young, 2013)
Nitze’s opinions gained credibility in the late 1940s with a multitude of developments. The Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948, the Berlin blockade of 1948-1949, and the fall of China to Communists in 1949 renewed skepticism regarding the intentions and limitations of Soviet expansion. In August of 1949, US national security and foreign policy were transformed when the Soviet’s successfully built and tested nuclear weapons. (Nitze & Drew, 1994)
With the end of the US monopoly on nuclear capability came the resurgence of military awareness.
No longer possessing an edge over the Soviet’s, Truman ordered a reexamination of US foreign policy and objectives by the Departments of State and Defense. The National Security Council also began an assessment of the global threat with the intention of updating NSC-20, a series of reports regarding containment overseen by Kennan. Eventually the two groups merged with Nitze chairing the review, and the resulting report was NSC-68. (Nitze & Drew, 1994)
Despite being derived from NSC-20, NSC-68 completely reoriented containment. Unlike its predecessor, NSC-68 dogmatically asserted the Soviets were intent on eventually waging war against the United States. It also took the idea of containment a step further, advocating a “roll back” of Kremlin influence:
[the] risks crowd in on us, in a shrinking world of polarized power, so as to give us no choice, ultimately, between meeting them effectively and being overcome by them . . . it is clear that a substantial and rapid military building up of strength in the free world is necessary to support a firm policy necessary to check and roll back the Kremlin’s drive for world domination. (Young,
2013)
Consequently, the report called for rearmament, effectively militarizing containment. The final version of the report proposed to quadruple defense spending from its already controversial 5 percent of gross national product, a feat Nitze supported was possible following Leon Keyserlings ideas put forth in support of Truman’s Fair Deal Program. (Gaddis, 1974)
The report not only marked a turning point in the objective of containment, but also in US foreign policy. The more innocuous policy of subtle political and economic coercion had evolved, and it had taken a confrontational turn. Gone was the careful consideration of Soviet intent. Their intent was “world domination.” Gone was the distinction between Kremlin born communism and indigenous communism. Peripheral and vital interests were muddled together, making any such distinctions difficult to make. (Gaddis, 1974)
Although the changes between NSC-20 and NSC-68 seem vast, Nitze denied NSC-68 as a turning point in American foreign policy. The turn, he held, had already been made by Kennan with the birth of containment and the end of isolationism. Instead, he claimed continuity with the original policy, even claiming such in his presentation of NSC-68 to Truman. The basic concepts and ideas, he claimed, remained the same. He simply gave the policy operational effect, or as he put in his annotation of a student’s dissertation, he “more realistically set forth the requirements necessary to assure success of George Kennan’s idea of containment.” (Young, 2013)
Truman had received but not yet accepted the final recommendations of the report when the Korean War broke out. The timing could not have been better planned. The administration immediately assumed the Soviets had sanctioned the attack, suggesting that Soviet interests did lie outside of Europe and the Middle East. It also served to confirm the idea that they were willing to risk war in pursuit of their ambitions. Furthermore, when the Chinese intervened in the conflict on the side of the North Koreans, the notion of differences between varieties of communism was also put to bed. Containment became a zero-sum game. The war made Nitze look prophetic, and NSC-68 was immediately accepted. It served as the guiding foreign policy for the remainder of the Cold War. (Gaddis, 1974)
Despite the universal tones of the President’s address, however, the actions of the administration showed …show more content…
an awareness of the country’s limitations. In the months following the President’s address, State Department Officials went out of their way to stress during Congressional hearings that the President’s program would in no way be committing the United States to any further or future action. It was stated repeatedly that aid to Turkey and Greece would not serve as a precedent for aid to all countries threatened by communists. Instead, Dean Acheson, acting Secretary of State at the time, insisted that any further aid or assistance would be evaluated on an individual basis, free from reference to the policy. (Frazier, 1999)
The primary objective of the doctrine, therefore, was not to contain Communism so much as to contain the Kremlin. The United States saw the Communist movements in France, Italy, Greece, and elsewhere in Europe as vulnerable to Kremlin influence. Stalin’s propaganda certainly supported the notion that Soviet expansion was not limited to Eastern Europe, and while we now know that he actually actively discouraged the communist parties in these countries from coming to power, his orders for restraint were not made public. His anti-capitalist propaganda was. Policy makers at the time saw the USSR as embarking on an imperialistic agenda similar to that of Nazi Germany. Such an agenda was a huge threat to the European balance of power that the US had just fought two World Wars to defend. (Gaddis, 1974)
The United States saw communism, then, as the tool of the Kremlin, not the determinant. The policy of containment did not necessarily target communism all over the world. Instead, it called for the careful consideration and selection of when and how the US should use its influence to stop the spread of Kremlin born communism. The US did recognize indigenous communism. It recognized that subscription to the ideas of Marx and Lenin did not necessarily mean subservience to the USSR. (Gaddis, 1974)
This is clearly supported in the United States’ attitude towards and relations with Communist China and Yugoslavia. Despite the political ideologies of each, neither Communist country was seen as under Soviet influence; subsequently, neither was treated as an enemy of the United States. Instead, in many ways, they were supported by the US. Acheson remained persistent up until the start of the Korean War to keep relations open and civil with China, hoping to gain influence and drive a wedge between Chinese leader Mao Tse-tung and Stalin. (Gaddis, 1974)
Furthermore, the policy of containment originally functioned on the premise that the threat was primarily a political and economic one, not a militaristic one. Kennan, along with fellow Soviet expert, Charles Bohlen, did not see containment as a permanent policy. The objective, in their minds, was to restore faith in Democracy in Europe while cultivating viable democracies on the periphery of the USSR in an effort to convince the Soviets that their best option for security lay in a peaceful resolution and coexistence with the West. Neither believed the Soviets would risk resorting to military force to continue their expansion. The fear of US retaliation, they held, would be too strong. (Gaddis, 1974)
Kennan, the crafter of containment, strongly opposed to the universal language and rhetoric used by the administration, advocated specificity in all things, especially in policy making. He, along with Bohlen, stressed the importance of differentiating between periphery and vital interest, recognizing the United States was not capable of stemming the flow of communism everywhere. Instead, they argued, it should carefully evaluate the areas of vital importance and act accordingly. China, for example, while communist, was not a vital concern as it was not an instrument of the Kremlin. This policy called for a constant and careful re-evaluation of Soviet intent, rather than a cold assessment of Soviet capability. (Gaddis, 1974)
While the ideas of Kennan and Bohlen were accepted early on, they slowly fell out of favor. The flexibility required to continuously reshape policy was difficult to reconcile with the administration’s need for direction. The President could not continuously change his stance, nor could the US continuously change its foreign policy. As Acheson once asserted to a group of critics, “The farmer who pulled up his crops every morning to see how much the roots had grown would not be very productive.” (Gaddis, 1974)
Moreover, the universalism Kennan detested was increasingly becoming a tool used by the administration to allow more freedom of action. Men like Acheson saw generalizations and oversimplifications as not only beneficial in swaying an audience, but almost essential to get a complex or intricate idea across. In trying to educate the American public about the varieties of communism, Acheson recalls, “I was a frustrated schoolteacher, persisting against overwhelming evidence to the contrary in the belief that the human mind could be moved by facts and reason.” (Gaddis, 1974) In a meeting with special members of Congress before Truman’s address in 1947, it was Acheson’s more impassioned explanation, rather than Secretary of State Marshall’s carefully measured one, which inspired and gained support for the plan. (Frazier, 1999) Furthermore, when Acheson attempted to explain in specific and limited terms the defensive perimeter during his National Press Club Speech, he was accused of essentially giving North Korea the green light in its attack on the Republic of Korea. This only served to further reinforce universal rather than specific statements. (Matray, 2002)
As Kennan began to lose influence, his successor as Head of the PPS, Paul Nitze, began to gain it. Nitze, a more shrill and confrontational man, approached the Soviet situation very differently. While Kennan advocated an understanding of US limitations, Nitze placed more faith in the United States’ power and ability. Unlike Kennan, he believed the Soviets’ had every intention of spreading their influence as widely as possible, and he did not doubt their willingness to use military force in achieving their ambitions. (Young, 2013)
Nitze’s opinions gained credibility in the late 1940s with a multitude of developments. The Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948, the Berlin blockade of 1948-1949, and the fall of China to Communists in 1949 renewed skepticism regarding the intentions and limitations of Soviet expansion. In August of 1949, US national security and foreign policy were transformed when the Soviet’s successfully built and tested nuclear weapons. (Nitze & Drew, 1994)
With the end of the US monopoly on nuclear capability came the resurgence of military awareness.
No longer possessing an edge over the Soviet’s, Truman ordered a reexamination of US foreign policy and objectives by the Departments of State and Defense. The National Security Council also began an assessment of the global threat with the intention of updating NSC-20, a series of reports regarding containment overseen by Kennan. Eventually the two groups merged with Nitze chairing the review, and the resulting report was NSC-68. (Nitze & Drew, 1994)
Despite being derived from NSC-20, NSC-68 completely reoriented containment. Unlike its predecessor, NSC-68 dogmatically asserted the Soviets were intent on eventually waging war against the United States. It also took the idea of containment a step further, advocating a “roll back” of Kremlin influence:
[the] risks crowd in on us, in a shrinking world of polarized power, so as to give us no choice, ultimately, between meeting them effectively and being overcome by them . . . it is clear that a substantial and rapid military building up of strength in the free world is necessary to support a firm policy necessary to check and roll back the Kremlin’s drive for world domination. (Young,
2013)
Consequently, the report called for rearmament, effectively militarizing containment. The final version of the report proposed to quadruple defense spending from its already controversial 5 percent of gross national product, a feat Nitze supported was possible following Leon Keyserlings ideas put forth in support of Truman’s Fair Deal Program. (Gaddis, 1974)
The report not only marked a turning point in the objective of containment, but also in US foreign policy. The more innocuous policy of subtle political and economic coercion had evolved, and it had taken a confrontational turn. Gone was the careful consideration of Soviet intent. Their intent was “world domination.” Gone was the distinction between Kremlin born communism and indigenous communism. Peripheral and vital interests were muddled together, making any such distinctions difficult to make. (Gaddis, 1974)
Although the changes between NSC-20 and NSC-68 seem vast, Nitze denied NSC-68 as a turning point in American foreign policy. The turn, he held, had already been made by Kennan with the birth of containment and the end of isolationism. Instead, he claimed continuity with the original policy, even claiming such in his presentation of NSC-68 to Truman. The basic concepts and ideas, he claimed, remained the same. He simply gave the policy operational effect, or as he put in his annotation of a student’s dissertation, he “more realistically set forth the requirements necessary to assure success of George Kennan’s idea of containment.” (Young, 2013)
Truman had received but not yet accepted the final recommendations of the report when the Korean War broke out. The timing could not have been better planned. The administration immediately assumed the Soviets had sanctioned the attack, suggesting that Soviet interests did lie outside of Europe and the Middle East. It also served to confirm the idea that they were willing to risk war in pursuit of their ambitions. Furthermore, when the Chinese intervened in the conflict on the side of the North Koreans, the notion of differences between varieties of communism was also put to bed. Containment became a zero-sum game. The war made Nitze look prophetic, and NSC-68 was immediately accepted. It served as the guiding foreign policy for the remainder of the Cold War. (Gaddis, 1974)