12/1/2023 0 Comments Long telegramAmerican money and military might had transformed the struggle against the Axis powers after the US entered the war in December 1941, but when peace came the rest of the world seemed chaotic, unstable and needy, reluctant to pick itself up and let the US alone to mind its own business. In 1945 the UK, US and USSR all thought they had won the war, individually as well as jointly, yet with the euphoria of hard-won victory came disappointment. The wartime Allies−Britain, the US and the USSR−had lost their common purpose and with it the imperative to work together harmoniously. ![]() The new world organisation, the United Nations, already seemed unlikely to fulfil the aspirations of its Charter. Europe was devastated physically and economically, with millions of people displaced nationalist uprisings, civil wars and competition for scarce resources disturbed the peace on a global scale. Less than a year since the end of the war in Europe, seven months since the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan, the victorious Allied powers were mired in fractious negotiations on peacemaking and institution-building. ![]() No one thought in March 1946 ‘this is the beginning of a long Cold War’, though it already seemed the postwar world was dividing on ideological lines, reinforced by military might. This is an over-simplification, but holds some truth. Roberts, representing a weakened and exhausted power, sought to understand the Soviet Union in order to work with it Kennan, representing a world superpower, sought to understand it in order to counter its ambitions. The two men agreed on many points: but aspects of Roberts’ reporting shed interesting light on the global context and on differences between the British and American approach to the USSR. 4 The quotations below are taken from these documents unless otherwise stated. 3 Three weeks later Roberts sent an equally long and penetrating analysis to the Foreign Office in a set of reports including three telegrams on 21 March 1946. 1Īt the beginning of 1946 Frank Roberts 2 was British Minister in Moscow, acting as Chargé after the departure of the Ambassador his American counterpart was George Kennan, who famously sent an 8000-word telegram to the State Department on 22 February 1946, analysing Soviet policy and recommending a strategy of containment to frustrate its aggressive expansionism. Those who have had this experience may be pardoned if they think that, among themselves, they can speak a language and carry thoughts which no one who has not shared that experience can fully understand. No one who has served in Moscow can ever be quite the same person again. ![]() Only in this land which had never known a friendly neighbor or indeed any tolerant equilibrium of separate powers, either internal or international, could a doctrine thrive which viewed economic conflicts of society as insoluble by peaceful means. caught hold and blazed for first time in Russia. unable to stand comparison or contact with political systems of Western countries. But this latter type of insecurity was one which afflicted rather Russian rulers than Russian people for Russian rulers have invariably sensed that their rule was. To this was added, as Russia came into contact with economically advanced West, fear of more competent, more powerful, more highly organized societies in that area. Originally, this was insecurity of a peaceful agricultural people trying to live on vast exposed plain in neighborhood of fierce nomadic peoples. "At bottom of Kremlin's neurotic view of world affairs is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity.
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