The Long Telegram just turned 80. Our times demand a new one.
The United States gathers an armada around Iran, and President Donald Trump threatens its clerical regime. Russian troops grind forward in Ukraine, as President Vladimir Putin’s war begins its fifth bloody year. Chinese war planes probe Taiwan’s air defenses, even as President Xi Jinping fires his top general and deepens his dictatorship. Trump responds defiantly to a Supreme Court rebuff of his economic policies by doubling down on tariffs through other means. Layer onto this an escalating great-power contest for the commanding heights of artificial intelligence (AI), raising concerns about the future of war.
The headlines are disorienting and the accumulation of events overwhelming.
For those like me who are in the business of connecting global dots, making sense of it all is daunting. The international order of rules and institutions, established in the years after World War II, is morphing in uncertain directions, influenced by a US president who prides himself on his unpredictability. Meanwhile, geopolitical risk grows greater, testing the capacity of great-power leaders who are less focused on common cause than on national advantage.
Eighty years ago this month, US diplomat George Kennan confronted a similar fog in the first months after World War II. It was a historic inflection point of comparable significance. On February 22, 1946, working from the US Embassy in Moscow, he sent his now-famous eight-thousand-word “Long Telegram.” The United States had won the war, but its wartime alliance with Joseph Stalin’s Russia had collapsed. Washington was improvising.
Defining a strategic era
Kennan did something radical for his time—and for ours. He stepped back and took the longer view. He framed the challenges the United States faced in a manner that would help define Washington’s approach to the Cold War. In the clipped language of the telegraph era, he wrote that the Soviet Union was “[i]mpervious to logic of reason” but “highly sensitive to logic of force.” It would probe for weakness, but it would retreat in the face of firmness. In “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” the public version of his telegram published in Foreign Affairs in July 1947 and written under the pseudonym “X,” he prescribed what would follow: not overreaction or accommodation, but rather “long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.”
His writing influenced all that would follow, which included: the Marshall Plan’s introduction in April 1948, NATO’s birth in April 1949, and then allied forces’ success in breaking an eleven-month Soviet blockade of West Berlin a month later, signaling unshakable US commitment to a free Europe with more than two million tons of food, fuel, and supplies. The European Coal and Steel Community, the forerunner to the European Union, would be established in April 1951.
Kennan provided his times with a strategic language and a unifying frame of containment. His Long Telegram and Foreign Affairs essay became foundational documents for US foreign policy during the Cold War, contributing to the strategic patience that ultimately brought US and allied victory.
Taking on the China challenge
What’s missing now is a similar roadmap for navigating our times. The historic stakes are just as great as in the immediate aftermath of World War II and during the Cold War, yet the challenges are more complex and disorienting due to the growing challenge posed by China and to the wider array of powers and issues that shape this moment.
Kennan wrote at a moment when the United States had unmatched military and economic power, which is also the case now, but it lacked an operating theory to confront its challenges. What did Moscow want? How durable was the Soviet system and its increasingly global reach? What military and statecraft tools should the United States employ—and avoid?
What’s similar today is the United States’ strong military capability, economic heft, and technological dynamism. What’s different is that the capabilities of the United States’ primary global competitor, the People’s Republic of China, are far more formidable than the Soviet Union at the height of its power. And China’s capabilities are augmented by supportive autocratic powers that include—but are not limited to—Russia, Iran, and North Korea. This is, however, not a “dictators’ NATO,” as it is not fused by any treaty or shared ideology beyond grievance against the United States. That makes it less cohesive, perhaps, but still cumulatively dangerous.
Russia is waging the largest, longest, and deadliest European land war since 1945. Though the Trump administration has not yet articulated this, ensuring Ukraine’s survival is not only morally right but also strategically crucial. If Putin can change borders through force, then the rule of law soon can be replaced by the law of the jungle, in Europe and beyond.
Once a rising power, China is now the United States’ primary systemic competitor—economically indispensable to its partners, with fast-growing military capabilities and a technological ambition to be second to none. Alongside Ukraine, Taiwan is a dangerous flashpoint due to a mixture of Xi’s determination to absorb it, a sense that Taiwan is slipping away from his grasp, and a feeling that the United States and its allies are not yet ready to defend it militarily.
Kennan’s deeper insight—one that applies to our times in even greater measure—was that US success depended as much on itself as it did on the weaknesses and strengths of its adversary. Most importantly, success required US allies and partners for the economic integration, political cohesion, and credible deterrence they provided.
Today’s democratic world has all the advantages required to prevail again. The United States and its European and Asian allies still account for the majority of global gross domestic product. NATO’s defense spending is rising. After years of neglect, Europe is now addressing its security and economic vulnerabilities. Meanwhile, the United States is deepening its Indo-Pacific partnerships. And from semiconductor manufacturing to frontier AI research, capital markets, and higher education, the United States and its partners continue to dominate key technological fields.
Seeking an antidote to fragmentation
That said, the risk also lies more with the United States than its adversaries.
The democratic world is flirting with fragmentation. Tariffs untethered to alliance strategy can be counterproductive. European leaders are hedging against Washington’s unpredictability, while Asian partners and allies question US commitments. Some Trump administration officials fail to appreciate the risk in sowing such doubts.
In his “X” article, Kennan argued that a primary element of containment was “the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points.”
One shouldn’t overestimate China or Russia. China faces slowing growth, demographic decline, and the inevitable brittleness of autocratic rule. Russia’s economic and social weakness is so profound that it would be unable to sustain its war in the face of a more unified and determined West.
Even so, the danger is that democracies lose confidence in themselves and in one another. Kennan turned out to be correct in believing the Soviet system contained “the seeds of its own decay”—but only provided that the democracies remained steady. For the United States, strategic competition is inevitable, but to succeed it can’t be strategically lonely.
The United States needs an updated Kennan, but not to replicate his approach during the Cold War. Rather, it needs to clarify the challenges it is facing at this dangerous new inflection point, set the priorities among them, and prescribe the very different tools required for our times.
With those pieces in place, it will inevitably become clearer why Ukraine and Taiwan matter, as much as West Berlin did in its time. It will also become clear why any solution to Greenland’s future, as a part of Denmark and hence also of NATO, needs to strengthen and not threaten Alliance unity.
Eighty years ago, Kennan’s clarity set the tone for a Cold War victory that would require more than forty years of strategic patience and coherence. The question now is whether the United States can summon the same degree of clarity and allied coherence, or whether our times will instead be shaped by the failure to do so.
Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X @FredKempe.
This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.
Further reading
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Image: A nighttime view of Red Square in Moscow during the Cold War. (IMAGO/piemags via Reuters Connect)