Revisiting Kennan’s long telegram
Ethan Brown
Few, if any, written or spoken analyses from the 20th century proved to be as prescient as George Kennan’s “The Long Telegram,” authored and transmitted in February 1946 to American diplomats and policymakers on the burgeoning international threat emanating from the communist bastion in Moscow.
Two key points are to be taken from Kennan’s penultimate forecast. First, the emerging bipolar world of liberal West versus communist East would adhere to this simple paradigm: the system of a democratic United States and her liberal allies could cohabitate a world featuring a communist system as its chief competitor. “Experience has shown that peaceful and mutually profitable coexistence of capitalist and socialist states is entirely possible” wrote Kennan. But the Soviet system of repressive collectivization could not—would not—exist, even tolerate, a world with a liberalist counterpart.
Second, realist theories of international affairs dominate the ideologies of any system which stands in fundamental opposition of the rules-based international order. Kennan expressed this as “[the] Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity.” Realism, simply, sees the sovereign state as the key actor in international relations, and relationships between states acting in their own rational self-interest are determined by national power. The self-perceived risk of invasion and subjugation by external powers thus incites a ruthless pursuit of internal security and stability as paramount above all other state pursuits. Insecurity, then, serves as the motivation, foundation, and impetus of the second actor in the decades-long Cold War.
Insecurity remains the key factor in world affairs today, but is far more complex than even Kennan projected.
Kennan’s insecurity paradigm in the 21st century
Today’s world is no bipolar the balance of power between two superstates. Rather, liberalism endures, despite an inherent and systemic inability to agree on a cohesive, long-term grand strategies against pervasive threats to sustains a stable, mutually beneficial world order. In contrast, competitors have emerged on a spectrum of repressive, non-mutually beneficial or cooperative outcomes which work to undermine and subvert the system of liberal cooperation.
Since the beginning of the 21st century, violent extremism (terrorism and other non-state violent actors), international organized crime, wealth and economic disparity, and the rise of both premier strategic and regional competitors have emerged as the quintessential challenges to that cooperative order of states who claimed “victory” in the Cold War. Therein lies the fundamental misunderstanding, one Kennan clearly understood in 1946, which remains wholly intact in today’s era of strategic competition. That the Cold War was, and will forever be, a misuse of the term “war.” In the same way, today’s strategic competition is a misnomer—competition is often mutually beneficial for the competitors, whose comparative efforts produce net-positive political, security or economic, outcomes. Today, the United States and the liberal institutions it ascribes to and still leads (despite our own domestic shortcomings in choosing our representation and the resultant regressionism) is engaged in the contest whose outcome will dictate the course of human events beyond the 21st century.
The Cold War did not end, merely an era
The subheading is not an attempt at hyperbole, but an effort to reapply Kennan’s theorem in this era of global contest between ideologies—liberal individualism, cooperation, and mutual benefit versus the repression of sovereignty under myriad forms of codified autocracies. The end of the bipolar era—Soviet communism versus Western liberalism—did not end this great contest, it was merely a transitory event where the perceived loser (collectivism) devolved in a temporary setback. To make this far more challenging to the rules-based order, the emergent threat has diversified; as CIA Director nominee R. James Woolsey testified to Congress in 1993 “Yes, we have slain a large dragon, but we live now in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes. And in many ways, the dragon was easier to keep track of.”
Some of those snakes have grown large in the decades following the Cold War chapter of this global contest. While the “victors” of that chapter rested on “the end of history” and allowed the system to stagnate, the emergent antagonists to the rules-based order diversified under the same construct as the Soviet system: insecurity, survival, and set against the triumphant liberal system as the monolithic insecurity. This explains why sub-state threats like organized crime, terrorism, and repressive ideologies, though individually outmatched by the technological supremacy of the liberal order, would collectively develop and evolve in contest.
Today, Russia and China have emerged as the grand strategic architects whose long-term vision is rooted in insecurity: repressive state architectures living in—as Kennan stated—a “fear of more competent, more powerful, more highly-organized societies,” such concepts serve as Moscow and Beijing’s strategic locus. Iran and North Korea echo this same sentiment, albeit, as regional power brokers vying for influence within their narrower spheres; this is evident in the fact that, while limited cooperation between Tehran, Pyongyang, Russia and China exists, a super-system akin to NATO, the EU, or the Quad has not manifested to challenge the broad construct which is the liberalist order. BRICS, an emergent institution serving as economic cooperation against Western capital cooperation, is nearest to a supra-system of anti-liberal cooperation, but it fails to match liberal institutions security outreach… for now.
The hyper-complex quagmire of African affairs stands as a particularly difficult theater for both liberal and authoritarian ambitions alike; the former hoping to quell the instability of those aforementioned violent extremist groups and humanitarian crises, the latter hoping to exploit those very same insecurities for their own economic, grand political, and security gain. The Cold War itself was not a singular paradigm of global affairs, it was merely the chapter which dominated the ordering of world power after liberalism defeated the rising threat of state Fascism after the First World War.
Satellite conflicts and instability—like Africa, the Levant, and across the fringes of the Global South—are locales where autocratic actors are wearing at the edges of the liberal orders influence, just as Kennan predicted would underwrite the Cold War’s paradigm. The sudden and unexpected outbreak of violence in Gaza and the rapid escalation of tensions across the Levant exhibit the liminal threats to the rules-based order in eloquent, tragic brevity. Though regional and narrow in scope, the Israel-Hamas conflict demonstrates the ways and means by which narrow conflicts have the potential to overturn the fragile stability of even the strongest regional powers.
Misunderstanding the competition
Kennan’s prescience must once again be appreciated in today’s geopolitical arena. The 21st century system of systems which have emerged to contest the liberal order—that is, the people and cultures of those states—are not inherently evil; although the central autocrats who headline this spectrum of competitors like Putin, Xi, Kim and Khomeini are inarguably corrupt and repressive monsters. These same actors perform in a rational manner in accordance with their own perception of world events, who simply seek a world order where their system determines the balance of power and not one subjected to the apparent discord between liberal states.
In 1996, Sam Huntington projected that cultures, tradition, and heritage would become the greatest driving factors in world events, and again Kennan’s words are eerie in their summary of the challenge which the Soviet system posed, as they are no less accurate today: “it should not be thought from above that Soviet party line is necessarily disingenuous and insincere on part of all those who put it forward. [Many] of them are too ignorant of outside world… we have the unsolved mystery as to who, if anyone, in this great land [Russia] actually receives accurate and unbiased information about outside world.”
The liberal orders’ spectrum of threats are not hordes of belligerent nationals who wish to undermine chances at global prosperity. They are national populations who suffer under the repressive regimes seeking to end the primacy of the liberal order. “Competition,” then, as in strategic competition, is a misnomer. The liberal order is not engaged with national citizenry who are committed to ending the world order as it stands now. Rather, the liberal order contends—"to engage in a competition to win or achieve something”—with ideologies which it fails to understand. And understanding those varied manifestations of repressive, authoritarian systems or non-state threats can indeed appear to be an ocean of threats.
But these myriad contestants holding state power have a similar objective, even if it is not expressly collaborative; to borrow Kennan yet again: “In foreign countries, communists will, as a rule, work toward destruction of all forms of personal independence, economic, political, or moral. Their system can handle only individuals who have been brought into complete dependence on higher power.” Kennan was addressing the Soviet threat in a post-World War II reordering of global power, but his assessment remains just as applicable today were those words ascribed to Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative or Moscow’s revanchist repression and nationalist ideology.
Kennan’s points hauntingly true today
The liberal order believes it can cohabitate a world of autocratic regimes, calling the dynamic “strategic competition,” and acts as if that competition will sustain liberalisms global geopolitical primacy out of simple necessity. Moscow, Beijing, and the other threats to international order, however, are not vectoring security capabilities to coexist with a system of rules and order. They continue to actively work to undermine that international order in favor of autocratic dominance, regionalization, or simple nationalized security aims, driven entirely be realism theorist’s need for internal security above all else.
What the liberal order fails to understand, and what Kennan understood all too well, is that the global dynamic remains a binary paradigm: that is, there are networks of states who have thrived under the experiment called democracy and democratic reform, enabling a level of prosperity and cooperative security heretofore unseen in the human experience. However, there remain prevalent threats to that order of rules and law and individual rights. Soviet communism—expertly foreshadowed by Kennan as the prevalent danger to that rules-based order after World War II—was just an era of the authoritarian threat which endures to this day under diversified form.
