At the end of the Second World War, the United States, the emerging superpower, took some time to realise that it had been fooled by Joseph Stalin’s USSR. The two countries fought Nazi Germany together, but after the victory, the USSR grabbed as much territory as it could and refused to concede any to its allies.
After the war, which had thrown the whole of Europe into confusion, the US continued its wartime diplomacy as it held the view that Stalin had abandoned centuries of Russian history and was working towards peaceful coexistence with the rest of Europe and the US.
At this crucial moment, the State Department asked its Moscow embassy to comment on a routine speech by Stalin. The ambassador happened to be away, so the deputy ambassador, George F. Kennan, took the opportunity to write the now-famous Long Telegram, in which he demolished his government’s assumption that the USSR was friendly, arguing effectively that the Bolsheviks had taken Russia’s deep distrust of the outside world, to which they had added their own global revolutionary doctrine.
But Kennan went a vital step further and predicted that the USSR and the Communist Bloc would collapse of its own accord, unable to manage the vast territories it had acquired, nor the command and control economy that it was building. But he had no doubt that the US was facing a serious enemy: The Soviet leadership controls vast natural resources and "the energies of one of the world’s greatest peoples", Kennan wrote. This will "undoubtedly be the greatest task our diplomacy has ever faced".
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