StephenKMackSD!
Apr 11, 2026
Stephanson-Kennan Correspondence
Introduction
‘Know the adversary’ is the first law of politics, as of war. But how should such knowledge proceed? In examining the thought-worlds that informed American foreign-policymaking, the young Anders Stephanson was drawn to the moments of flux, when the country’s overseas stance was in contention; pre-eminently, the turn of 1945–47, from war-time military and economic alliance with the Soviet Union to nuclear confrontation and high Cold War. A key figure in articulating the premises for that switch—and endowing them with the force and urgency that could animate an ideology—was George Frost Kennan. Wisconsin born, an unlikely recruit for the us Foreign Service, he was a staunch conservative and trained Russianist who had been posted to Moscow after stints in Geneva, Hamburg, Riga, Prague, Berlin, Lisbon. A convinced opponent of the Soviet regime from the 1920s, Kennan had described the Bolsheviks as ‘spiteful Jewish parasites’, declared when Hitler invaded in 1941 that the ussr had no claim on Western sympathy and observed in 1945 that ‘ten good hits with atomic bombs’ could finish its war-making capacity for good. Asked by the State Department in February 1946 for an interpretive report, he dictated from his sickbed in the Embassy the 5,000-word Long Telegram that electrified Truman’s Washington with its account of a regime fanatically committed to the destruction of the American way of life (somewhat contradicted by its reading of Stalin as ‘cautious’). Returning to the us as an intellectual hero, Kennan expanded in his ‘X’ article in Foreign Affairs on the Soviet leaders’ particular brand of fanaticism and the Russian-Asiatic world from which they had emerged, making them impermeable to the Anglo-Saxon tradition of compromise. Active us ‘containment’ and the use of counterforce at every juncture—ideally with measures short of war—was the indicated response.
Whatever the Bolsheviks’ hopes in 1918–21, this was an empirically false description of the ussr in 1947, exhausted from the War, whose main aim was to retain its defensive buffer against a resurgent Germany and to carry on the Big Three understanding affirmed with Churchill at Yalta. Yet the notion of an inherently expansionist Soviet threat, which only America’s superior power and vigilance could prevent from overrunning the world, would be a core claim of Cold War ideology for the next twenty years. Meanwhile us expansionism had ringed the ussr, its forces implanted in Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Turkey, Greece, the Persian Gulf and Western Europe. Within a year of the X article, however, Kennan, alarmed by Truman’s belligerence and America’s new global role, began to change his mind. The leading spirit of the early Cold War became one of its most powerful critics, shocking Western establishments with his eloquent case for military disengagement and nato drawback from Germany; later, from his berth at Princeton, opposing the renewed drumbeat against Moscow under Carter and Reagan. When Stephanson approached the old man for permission to quote his papers, he was therefore something more complicated than an opponent.
In the selection of letters between the student and the grandee, published below, Stephanson rather disarmingly shares the conceptual harvest he has gleaned from, broadly speaking, the Western Marxist world, as more productive than either Anglo-Saxon empiricism—mere reporting—or an ideological reductionism that fails to register the relative autonomy of mid-level structures. In Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy, Stephanson’s lethally precise use of his voluminous writings, expertly stitched together by the running contextualization and courteous but highly critical evaluative commentary, provides a fully historical portrait of both his sensibility and his function, illuminating why he was—and where he wasn’t—in tune with us global expansion. It is an achievement that makes Kennan’s respectful reception of the book and recognition of himself in it, registered in these letters, all the more remarkable.
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