X item

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The X article is the article The Sources of Soviet Conduct , which appeared in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine. The author used the pseudonym "X", but it was widely known that it was George F. Kennan , head of the State Department's planning staff and former envoy of the American embassy in Moscow.

The text was based on the Long Telegram of February 22, 1946, in which Kennan had explained to the US Treasury Department in around 5,300 words that the USSR was no longer an ally after the end of the war, analyzed the background to Soviet policy and, as an American guiding principle, a containment ( Containment).

The main ideas behind Kennan's analysis were:

  • The USSR sees itself in a constant state of war with the western world;
  • In the eyes of the USSR, Democratic Socialists and Social Democrats are enemies, but not allies;
  • The allies of the USSR in the western world are Marxist groups controlled by the same;
  • The policy of the USSR is rooted in a historically based Russian xenophobia and paranoia ;
  • The communist form of government is structurally incapable of drawing a realistic picture of internal and external conditions;
  • The USSR is characterized by internal instability and fundamentally inferior to the West, both mentally and economically.

Kennan recommended a defensive policy as a measure in the coming foreign policy confrontations he predicted, since the Soviet Union reacts aggressively to any use of force and its propaganda is characterized by negativity. The West, on the other hand, should pursue a containment of the conflict through positive values: trust in the superiority of its own social values, promotion of general education, foreign and economic policy based on solidarity in favor of a better world community.

The X article gained fame as an ideological milestone in the beginning Cold War , as it summarized essential aspects of the US strategy of containment as it was just developing and presented it to a wider audience. The publication sparked an intense debate about US foreign policy.

The importance of the contribution is seen in retrospect in that “the article gave the United States the intellectual framework that could be understood with the rise and eventual fall of the Soviet Union, and that offered a strategy to advance that goal. On this basis, the role of the United States in the Cold War was to be understood as the 'leader of the free world against the communist world; [US] would invest in the containment of the Soviet Union and limit the expansion of its sphere while building a dynamic economy and a society that is as prosperous and just as possible '. Government practice in the United States often deviated from this goal, as George Kennan was one of the first to admit. But it was this framework that matched the facts and the perception of which provided the basis for a loose consensus between the two American parties on security policy for 40 years. "

Walter Lippmann criticized the article and the Truman Doctrine based on it in detail in his book The Cold War , published in the same year . Lippmann didn't believe in containment that only reacted to Soviet actions. He spoke out against the leaps in support of weak states and regimes, as was happening at the time in Greece or China . Instead, the United States, in close cooperation with the European allies, who, strengthened by the Marshall Plan, would have their own political weight, should force the Soviet Union to withdraw from Central Europe in a long process.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Anne-Marie Slaughter: Preface to A National Strategic Narrative (PDF; 854 kB), Woodrow Wilson Center International Center for Scholars, 2011
  2. ^ Lippmann, Walter: The Cold War. A Study in US Foreign Policy. New York and London 1947. Google Books