Quick questions on Iron Curtain and containment 1946-1947: HSC Modern History Cold War

Through late 1945 and early 1946 the wartime alliance had soured rapidly. Soviet behaviour in Iran (the refusal to withdraw troops from northern Iran by the agreed 2 March 1946 deadline; the proclamation of the Azerbaijan People's Republic in November 1945), in Turkey (demands for joint control of the Straits and territorial concessions at Kars and Ardahan), and in Eastern Europe (the rigged Bulgarian and Polish elections of late 1945) accumulated.

Kennan's 8,000-word cable was structured in five parts: the basic features of the Soviet post-war outlook; the background of this outlook; the projection of the outlook in practical policy on the official level; the projection on the unofficial level; and practical deductions for American policy.

Winston Churchill, Leader of the Opposition since the Labour victory of 26 July 1945, accepted an invitation to speak at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, the home town of Truman's military aide General Harry Vaughan. Truman travelled with Churchill from Washington and was on the platform.

Soviet Ambassador to Washington Nikolai Novikov, prompted by Foreign Minister Molotov, sent the Soviet counterpart to Kennan's cable on 27 September 1946. Novikov argued the United States was pursuing "world supremacy" through military expansion, anti-Soviet propaganda, and the construction of a global base network. American behaviour was driven by capitalist contradictions and the search for export markets.

Kennan, by then head of the State Department's new Policy Planning Staff (created May 1947), published "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" in Foreign Affairs (July 1947) anonymously as "X." The article extended the Long Telegram's argument and coined the policy term: "the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies."

Kennan came to regret the militarisation of containment after NSC-68 (April 1950) and the Korean War. His preferred approach was political, economic, and patient. By the 1960s he was publicly critical of American policy in Vietnam and of nuclear arms-racing. His American Diplomacy 1900-1950 (1951), Memoirs 1925-1950 (1967) and Memoirs 1950-1963 (1972) became important historiographical texts in their own right.

Containment, articulated by Kennan, was operationalised by:

John Lewis Gaddis's Strategies of Containment (1982, revised 2005) is the standard account of doctrinal development. Gaddis's biography George F. Kennan: An American Life (2011) is the major life. Wilson Miscamble's George F.

Kennan's 1946 version was political and economic. The militarisation came later (NSC-68, Korea).

5 March 1946, after Stalin's election speech (9 February) and the Long Telegram (22 February), not before.

The Soviet diagnostic mirror image is part of the historiography of mutual misperception.