Overcoming the Second World War: George Kennan and the Origins of the Cold War

• In Event: Memory of WWII in the U.S.-Russia Cold War Discourse: Ideology vs History

Abstract

George Kennan was a U.S. diplomat during World War II, and like every member of his generation (in the United States and elsewhere) the war was an all-encompassing and transformative experience. Yet in his strategic thinking Kennan felt that he had to overcome the memory of WWII (and of WWI for that matter) to address adequately the arrival of a Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. In particular, Kennan was convinced that the strategic objective of WWII - the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan - had to be jettisoned for a new approach to war and to strategy, one that was slow and patient, that was content with incremental success and an approach that had been freed from the allure of complete victory. Kennan's task was to communicate this to a society besotted with the notion of itself as the engine of wartime victory. Through Kennan one can see a key Cold War tension in American politics and in American strategic thinking - between the long twilight struggle that the Cold War was destined to be, as Kennan well understood, and an impatience for defeating the enemy. Alert to this tension, Kennan’s attempt to learn from World War II and by doing so to move beyond the simplistic memory of this event was never anything more than a partial success.

Author

• Michael Kimmage, Woodrow Wilson Center, Kennan Inst