The National Security Council's position paper, NSC-68, served both as a summary of major American cold war assumptions and as a blueprint for its future foreign policy. Although the document accurately reflected the views of Secretary of State Dean Acheson, it provoked a dissent from the State Department's leading experts on the Soviet Union and containment. George Kennan questioned the assumptions about Soviet expansionist designs and the proposal to militarize containment.
Two complex sets of factors have now basically altered [the older] distribution of power. First, the defeat of Germany and Japan and the decline of the British and French Empires have interacted with the development of the United States and the Soviet Union in such a way that power has increasingly gravitated to these two centers. Second, the Soviet Union, unlike previous aspirants to hegemony, is animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our world. Conflict has, therefore, become endemic and is waged, on the part of the Soviet Union, by violent or non-violent methods in accordance with the dictates of expediency. With the development of increasingly terrifying weapons of mass destruction, every individual faces the ever-present possibility of annihilation, should the conflict enter the phase of total war.
On the one hand, the people of the world yearn for relief from the anxiety arising from the risk of atomic war. On the other hand, any substantial further extension of the area under the domination of the Kremlin would raise the possibility that no coalition adequate to confront the Kremlin with greater strength could be assembled. It is in this context that this Republic and its citizens in the ascendancy of their strength stand in their deepest peril.
The issues that face us are momentous, involving the fulfillment or destruction not only of this Republic but of civilization itself. They are issues which will not await our deliberations. With conscience and resolution this Government and the people it represents must now make new and fateful decisions...
The fundamental design of those who control the Soviet Union and the international communist movement is to retain and solidify their absolute power, first in the Soviet Union and second in the areas now under their control. In the minds of the Soviet leaders, however, achievement of this design requires the dynamic extension of their authority and the ultimate elimination of any opposition to their authority.
The design, therefore, calls for the complete subversion or forcible destruction of the machinery of government and structure of society in the countries of the non-communist world and their replacement by an apparatus and structure subservient to and controlled from the Kremlin. To that end Soviet efforts are now directed towards the domination of the Eurasian land mass. The United States, as the principal center of power in the non-Soviet world and the bulwark of opposition to Soviet expansion, is the principal enemy whose integrity and vitality must be subverted or destroyed by one means or another if the Kremlin is to achieve its fundamental design.
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This passage contains some difficult vocabulary. Define aspirants, hegemony, antithetical, endemic, expediency, and subservient. Now reread the passage to ensure that you understand the argument.
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Why, in the opinion of the authors of NSC-68, has conflict become "endemic" to the cold war world? Why is the Soviet Union seen as different from previous empires? What strategy will the Soviets use, according to NSC-68, to dominate "the Eurasian land mass?"
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Much of the vocabulary is scholarly and complex, but the authors also use language that contains strong value judgments designed to persuade. Underline judgmental and emotion-laden words and phrases.
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What assumption does NSC-68 make about the relationship between communist parties around the world and the Kremlin?
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George Kennan believed Stalin had no grand design for world conquest, but was concerned primarily with affairs in the Soviet bloc. Kennan argued that the Russian dictator, as a conservative, feared overextending Soviet power. In what ways do Kennan's arguments challenge the major assumptions of NSC-68?
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