weakness of the Soviet Union would force the
Soviet leadership to pursue limited goals. But
whatever utopias of distant future world conver-
sion Marxist-communism held out to its believ-
ers, it was current realism that would dictate
Soviet policies. Kennan advised that Soviet behav-
iour in world affairs was not the result of any
objective analysis of the situation beyond its
borders but was shaped by a traditional and
instinctive sense of Russian insecurity. Soviet
leaders reacted to this insecurity by taking the
offensive ‘in a patient but deadly struggle for total
destruction of rival power, never in compacts and
compromises with it’. Therefore, coexistence
between the West and the Soviet Union was not
possible. The Soviets sought complete control to
secure Soviet power, the international influence
of the US therefore had to be destroyed. The
Soviet Union was impervious to reason, Kennan
warned, and responded only to force. It will with-
draw, and usually does, he added, when strong
resistance is encountered at any point. Soviet aims
were revolutionary, unlimited and global.
Was the West not then facing a situation
similar to the 1930s, when Hitler had aimed at
domination while lulling his neighbours with talk
of peace and limited aims? Munich and the folly
and danger of appeasement provided a vivid
lesson of history about which no one needed to
be reminded a decade later. The opposite to
appeasement was the new doctrine of ‘contain-
ment’. The Soviet Union would not be allowed
to expand further by direct aggression or indirect
subversion. The provision of military equipment
and economic assistance to the countries border-
ing on the Soviet sphere was intended to create
the ‘strong resistance’ at every point which
Kennan’s ‘long telegram’ (as it came to be called)
had advocated. Soviet intransigence in diplomacy
over the German question and at the United
Nations appeared to confirm Kennan’s analysis, as
did the Soviet refusal to withdraw from northern
Iran. Soon after the arrival in Washington of
Kennan’s cable, which was much admired and
widely distributed, the crisis in Iran broke.
Iran during the Second World War had provided
a vital supply route for Western aid to the Soviet
Union. But the Shah’s inclinations had been pro-
German, so in 1941 the Russians in the north and
the British in the south had jointly occupied the
country. The Shah had been forced to abdicate in
favour of his son, with whom Britain and the
Soviet Union had then signed a treaty undertaking
to leave Iran six months after the end of the war.
The Russians after the war promised to withdraw
in March 1946. Meanwhile in the provinces they
had occupied they were encouraging autonomy,
promoting an independence movement and refus-
ing the Iranian troops entry. As the price for with-
drawing its troops, the Soviet Union demanded
oil concessions and autonomy for the province.
At the UN Security Council there were sharp
debates. The American secretary of state, James
F. Byrnes, who until then had taken a conciliatory
line towards the Soviet Union, now strongly
backed Iran. In May 1946 the Russians withdrew
from Iran without gaining any of their aims.
The crisis was important for the lessons that
were read into it. Firmness in resisting Soviet
expansion had paid off. The Russians had been
warned off. The US had joined Britain in a region
traditionally within Britain’s predominant sphere.
The US judged its national interests to have been
affected by events in a country on Russia’s bor-
ders, thousands of miles from its own. This was an
important psychological step to have taken. The
new assumption, expressed in the policy of con-
tainment, was that after the great expansion of the
Soviet sphere of control in central and Eastern
Europe, further expansion must be resisted in
regions on its borders to which Soviet control had
not yet expanded – Turkey, Afghanistan and, lying
in between, Iran. American motives were not
entirely altruistic. Oil had become a vital issue. Oil
reserves in the US were no longer judged suffi-
cient for its future needs and it was seeking, in
commercial rivalry with the British, to expand its
oil interests in the Middle East. American oil com-
panies were accordingly receiving strong backing
from Washington.
When the Russians in that summer of 1946
delivered a strong note that made demands on
Turkey, it seemed in the West, so soon after the
Iranian crisis, to be part of a well-planned Soviet
tactic to probe for the West’s weak points. In fact