Singhalignment with the USSR. At the same time, they faulted Europe’s colonial
powers for their failure to satisfy “the aspirations of their dependent areas”
and advised them to “devise formulae that will retain their good will as
emergent or independent states.” Envisioning U.S. responsibility to author
such formulae in the future, the classified brief concluded that the United
States should adopt “a more positive and sympathetic attitude toward the
national aspirations of these areas,” including policy that “at least partially
meets their demands for economic assistance.” Otherwise “it will risk their
becoming actively antagonistic toward the US,” including loss of access to
previously “assured sources of raw materials, markets, and military bases.”
While the emerging U.S. foreign policy clearly accepted the un-
resolvable antagonism toward the Soviet Union, the challenge of the
future, as the CIA argued, was how the United States should address
the “increasing fragmentation of the non-Soviet world,” or, in a word,
decolonization. The means for assessing risk and reward in this expansive
and heterogeneous terrain of imperial disintegration were by no means
clear. But it is revealing that the possibility of potential alignments be-
tween decolonizing nations and Soviet power was far less concrete and
worrisome to the United States than the more definite and delineated
material losses faced by the United States and the colonial powers with
which it had aligned itself—namely, being deprived access to formerly
“assured sources of raw materials, markets and military bases.” In other
words, the challenge of the future, as Kennan had underlined, was to
devise “formulae” to buttress the forms of political authority that sustained
economic inequality (at a world scale) in the face of inevitable revolt and
revolution against such authority and the social conditions it supported.
Despite his later misgivings, Kennan had authored the concept
whose rhetorical elasticity and ideological indeterminacy proved crucial
to fashioning a nemesis that suited this consciously expansionist vision
of U.S. economic and military power. With the creation of the CIA, the