Fred Kaplan
Once in a great while, a diplomatic memorandum—the outline of a proposed change in policy sent from a foreign service officer to his political masters back in Washington—has momentous impact. The most famous of these is George Kennan’s “Long Telegram” of February 1946, which urged “a long-term patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.”
Kennan, who was chargé d’affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, wrote the 5,000-word memo while debates raged at home over how to deal with the Soviet Union’s turn from wartime ally to Cold War adversary. The memo made a huge dent in this debate when Kennan published a shortened version of it, under the title “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs. (The journal identified the author only as “X,” but word spread that he was Kennan.)
Now a similarly long memo, written nearly 50 years later, in the early days of the post–Cold War era and post-Soviet Russia, raises questions about how the world today might be different if Bill Clinton had heeded it as much as Harry Truman heeded Kennan’s.
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