Re-Assessing the Influence of George Kennan’s “X” Article in the Early Cold War Period

‘The Sources of Soviet Conduct’ also known as the “X” article is an imperative document that are needed to understand United States foreign policy in the Cold War. Written by George F. Keenan, a U.S. diplomatic staff in the Soviet Union, the “X” article turned into an influential document after the U.S. realized that the Soviet Union would no longer be allies in peacetime and it was necessity to figure out the nature of the Soviet Union so the U.S. could form precise foreign policies to prevent Soviet threats. This paper attempts to assess the “X” article’s influence in U.S. foreign policy in the early days of the Cold War, especially its role in Truman’s doctrine.
Introduction
After a few years since the publication of the “X” article, ‘containment’, the term that was coined by Keenan, became a key word to describe the U.S. foreign policy in overcoming Soviet threats. Yet, Keenan criticized Truman’s containment policy as ‘too universalistic’ in that it placed the U.S. in an exhausting commitment to block every Soviet expansion to free countries (Keenan, 1967). In fact, the containment policy was influencing the U.S. involvement in different confrontation from Germany to Vietnam.
In the “X” article itself Keenan stated several important points that generated his ‘containment’ recommendation (Keenan, 1947). First, he mentioned that the Soviet Union policy was dominated by rigid decision makers, which derived mostly from their subjective Marxist perspective, and showed hostilities toward the capitalist system. He also tried to convince the U.S. that the Soviet Union had a strong confidence in Marxist social revolution theory, no matter what the current circumstances were, and implicated in his arguments that the Soviet Union had...

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