The larger point is that the Vietnam War, arguably the most indelible and tragic event for the United States during the entire Cold War, played out with little support or hindrance from Kennan’s 1946–1947 grand strategy. Both the proponents and the skeptics of going to war could have used containment as a basis for their belief. Though strictly speaking, containment, as in containing the territorial spread of communism, proved disastrous in Indochina; it led, in fact, to the break-up of the very bipartisan foreign policy establishment that Kennan personified. What was needed in the case of Vietnam was less a grand strategy than a genuine appreciation of the local terrain itself—geographical, cultural, and military. Eisenhower’s intrinsic caution was here absent, as was his suspicion about fighting a land war in Asia. Vietnam was a matter of presidential personalities as much as it was about politics and strategy.

Enter President Richard M. Nixon and his national security advisor (and later secretary of state), Henry Kissinger. Kissinger may have epitomized the spirit of containment better than any other American Cold War statesman. But Kissinger’s acceptance of Kennan’s theory was a consequence of Kissinger’s own historical and philosophical understanding of the Cold War world, which owed much more to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinkers and strategists such as Edmund Burke and Klemens von Metternich than to George Kennan. In his first book written as a Harvard graduate student, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-1822, Kissinger notes, “the most fundamental problem of politics … is not the control of wickedness but the limitation of righteousness.” Fighting evil is an easy choice, in other words; the hard part is controlling one’s own sense of a perfect morality. For freedom, quoting Metternich, is only a “goal.” And the “point of departure” for that goal is “order.” Order, thus, in Kissinger’s estimation, must come before freedom. And because, as Kissinger implies, with longevity comes legitimacy, communist states—however evil, like the Soviet Union and China—had to be tolerated as legitimate members of an international order, in which America’s idea of world freedom was a goal that was only a point of orientation, requiring considerable patience. This, of course, was the perfect accompaniment to the spirit of Kennan’s long-term strategy of containment.

And by moving closer to China in order to balance against the Soviet Union, while conducting a policy of détente with the Soviet Union at the same time, Kissinger brilliantly improvised on Kennan’s theory while not really requiring it as an inspiration. Kissinger’s realpolitik concerning the Communist powers naturally enraged the moralists of the political Right and Left. But without Nixon’s and Kissinger’s successful manipulations, which allowed the United States to geopolitically overcome the catastrophe of Vietnam, Ronald Reagan may not have had the luxury of his Wilsonianism, which would end up making Kennan look very good indeed.

THE HELSINKI Process, which followed the Conference for Security and Co-operation in Europe in 1972, began the culmination of the Cold War, though nobody could know it at the time. Helsinki was one of those cases where unintended consequences carried the day. The process, which culminated in the Final Act signed on August 1, 1975, was initiated by Soviet leaders in the period of détente. It was at first met with suspicion by leaders in the United States and Western Europe, who feared it would only formalize the division between East and West in Central Europe and the Balkans, and thus validate Soviet imperialism. But as it turned out, by encouraging discussions on human rights and economic development, and by accepting the eventual unification of Germany, it moved the needle in the other direction, providing dissident groups in the East Bloc with a new and critical layer of legitimacy. The Helsinki Accords were signed under President Gerald Ford, with Kissinger still as secretary of state. President Jimmy Carter employed them to push harder rhetorically on the theme of human rights in Europe and beyond. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev “could not repudiate it without causing even greater damage to his own reputation and to the legitimacy of the Soviet system,” observes historian Michael Cotey Morgan. This was all in the spirit of containment operating as a hidden hand: emphasize patience and your own values to help the opposing system either crumble or transform from within. Kennan’s theory may not have been nearly as influential throughout crucial junctures of the Cold War as many might now assume, but it did encompass an inspired element of prophecy. It wasn’t the usual linear projection of the future which forecasting firms offer up today.

When Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency in January 1981, neither Helsinki nor Kennan were quite seen in this light. For there would not be for almost another decade a strong indication that the Cold War would end in such a triumph for the West. At first, Kennan was a bit terrified of Reagan, seeing the new president’s rhetoric as an oversimplification of reality regarding the Soviet Union. Kennan, moreover, had become a passionate opponent of the nuclear arms race that Reagan intensified. Kennan, as an area specialist and policy intellectual, saw nuances and limitations; whereas Reagan was a man of black-and-white instincts on a few grand issues. Normally, the former type proves wiser than the latter. But this was a case where a U.S. president knew and believed only a few things, but they turned out to be the right things to know and believe at the right time in history. Yet, as Gaddis writes, “if Kennan could have read NSDD-75, the [Reagan] administration’s first top-secret review of policy toward the Soviet Union,” approved in 1983, he would have found “echoes” of Mr. X: “To contain and over time reverse Soviet expansionism by competing on a sustained basis with the Soviet Union … particularly in the overall military balance…”

The 1980s would see a resurgence of interest in Kennan himself. In 1986, journalists Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas published their bestseller about the architects of the post-World War II era, The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made. One of the six was, of course, Kennan. And in April 1989, The Atlantic Monthly published a cover story, “The Last Wise Man,” about Kennan. This trend was helped in the middle of the decade by the ascension of Mikhail Gorbachev, the first Soviet leader who demonstrably admitted the unsustainable inadequacies of the Communist system—another echo of Kennan—and set about to try to reform it.

But what really anointed Kennan as the grand strategic visionary was President George H.W. Bush, who, in the footsteps of Eisenhower, proved that greatness was a negative virtue: it was about preventing bad things from happening, and about deliberately avoiding action rather than taking it. Bush the elder was the last American aristocrat to be president of the United States. Like Isaacson’s and Thomas’ Wise Men, he was well-born and brought up, with a long and substantial resume of government service. He had excellent judgement rather than brilliance, and judgement in a leader is more important. Bush, rather than loudly cheer the anti-communist uprisings in Eastern Europe during the autumn of 1989, and rather than conduct a victory tour of Eastern Europe immediately afterwards, remained fairly reticent. The result was that the Soviet regime felt less humiliated than it normally might have, given the turn of events, and this helped allow its empire to disintegrate peacefully.

Kennan foresaw in 1946–1947 that the Soviet Union internally had less staying power than the United States. But he did not foresee the steely caution of the Eisenhower presidency in the 1950s; nor the development and mass production of hydrogen bombs in the same decade that ironically kept the Cold War relatively restrained. He did not foresee how the high drama of the Cuban Missile Crisis would lead afterwards to a stabilization of the U.S.-Soviet conflict. And he did not foresee the particular genius of Nixon and Kissinger in stabilizing the relationships with both the Soviet Union and China to America’s advantage—in the wake of a looming U.S. military defeat in Vietnam, no less. Again, we expect too much of a grand strategy, even when it works.

IS GRAND strategy of Kennan’s dimension, however much it was helped by individual leaders and events, still possible?

In the first place, Kennan’s containment theory was more or less adopted by the governing elite of his time with basically little resistance. This was because the elite of the immediate postwar era was both small and homogeneous. They had similar backgrounds, being white, Protestant, and financially well-off. They had gone to similar prep schools and universities, had served in the armed forces, were in similar professions, and had all just been through the crucible of World War II. They were bipartisan and tight-knit. Furthermore, the challenge posed by a leader like Stalin was stark and unambiguous. Thus, they had the same assumptions about the world. Kennan’s Long Telegram and X article were a summation and clear articulation of their views at a decisive juncture.