Foreign Relations of the United States, 1950, Central and Eastern Europe; The Soviet Union, Volume IV

661.00/8–850

Memorandum by the Counselor of the Department (Kennan)

top secret

[Washington,] August 8, 1950.

Mr. Secretary: I thought it might be useful if at this juncture I were to make a round-up of Communist intentions, as far as they seem to me discernible on evidence now available.

1. The Soviet Communists did not launch the Korean operation as a first step in a world war or as the first of a series of local operations designed to drain U.S. strength in peripheral theaters. They simply wanted control of South Korea; saw what looked to them like a favorable set of circumstances in which to achieve it; feared that if they did not achieve it now, time might run out on them. They did not think it likely that we would intervene militarily, and thought that if we did try to intervene we would get there too late.

2. While there is no reason, as indicated above, to believe that the Soviet leaders desired a general military conflict at this time, that does not exclude the possibility that they might now consider it less likely that the early outbreak of such a conflict could be avoided. It is entirely possible that this may be their frame of mind at the moment; and it should be noted that in this case their behavior in the conduct of their affairs would be in large measure the same as though they themselves had deliberately decided to unleash a general war.

It may be asked, of course, how they could come to consider war probable though not desirable, when a few simple concessions on their part would suffice to remove the danger. The answer is that they are conscious of weaknesses in their own position which we, for one reason or another, ignore; and what appear to us as easy and cheap concessions on their part look to them like initial steps in a process which could easily lead to a crumbling of their entire structure of power.

3. In the face of our intervention, the Soviet leaders have naturally followed with most intense interest the subsequent course of military operations. They refrained from engaging air forces after our entry into the picture, probably because such air strength as they had assembled in the theater of operations was intended for support of the North Koreans against the South Koreans alone, and was neither sufficient (momentarily) nor expendable for operation against U.S. They have no doubt been surprised and impressed with ground successes of the North Koreans even in face of a total renunciation of the air arm on their own part and the consequent unlimited freedom of air operation on the part of their adversary. (This will quite probably affect their estimates of Soviet military capabilities in other areas.)

4. As North Korean forces approached the end of the peninsula, the Soviet leaders naturally envisaged the possibility that we would be driven out entirely. Their re-entry into U.N. was doubtless decided upon in light of this eventuality, since the period immediately following our ejection would obviously be the best moment to strike for a United Nations settlement which would bar our re-entry and thus seal the accomplishment of their purpose.

5. Nevertheless, they have been keenly aware of the converse possibility (namely, that we would not be forced out) and know that in this case several disturbing factors would arise from their point of view; notably:

(a) A great portion of North Korean strength was probably committed and expended in the initial effort to force us out; if this effort is unsuccessful, a period of exhaustion and depletion of reserve strength might ensue on the North Korean side, just as the U.N. forces were beginning to build up strength.

(b) The Kremlin, having expected to complete the Korean operation on special supplies stock-piled for the purpose and being unwilling to deplete to any appreciable extent the arsenals of the Far Eastern Red Army, may find itself in a relatively poor position to conduct a war of attrition at a point some 5,000 miles from Moscow.

(c) Communications for the North Korean army are presumably steadily deteriorating under our bombings.

The Kremlin leaders are therefore well aware that the military fortunes might easily soon be altered to their disfavor.

5 [6]. Furthermore, the Soviet leaders must be seriously worried over the proximity of the Korean fighting to their own borders and over the direct damage which can conceivably be done to their military interests by any extension of the area of hostilities. It is probable that their strategic interests in the Soviet Far East have already been directly affected by the destruction of industrial installations of military significance in North Korea. If our forces should begin to advance, it might become necessary for the Soviet command to draw on the Far Eastern Red Army Air Force to an extent which they would consider undesirable and dangerous. Our reconnaissance flights and naval patrols in the neighborhood of the Northern borders of Korea will seem to them to involve the danger of revealing to us intelligence concerning the Port Arthur and Vladivostok areas to a highly undesirable degree. Finally, it must be to them an intensely humiliating and irritating experience to be obliged either to keep their naval forces out of areas which seem to them almost part of their territorial waters or, alternatively, to risk their being molested and destroyed by U.S. and other naval units.

7. In the light of this situation, it is quite probable that they are:

(a) About to bring in the Korean units, formerly operating with the Chinese Communist forces in South China, to participate in actual combat in South Korea;

(b) Introducing into North Korea their own puppet Chinese forces from Manchuria, to act as a first reserve defense buffer; and

(c) Preparing to re-occupy North Korea with their own Red Army forces, if necessary, to forestall any U.S. advance beyond the 38th Parallel. (Any further direct detriment to their Far Eastern military establishment which may result from hostilities in South Korea may be expected to hasten such re-entry.)

It is doubtful whether Mao¹ wishes to commit any of his own forces to Korea, and there is no evidence that Moscow has reached any agreement with him envisaging such entry. This situation is of course subject to change at any moment.

8. As Bohlen² emphasized when he was here, when the tide of battle begins to change, the Kremlin will not wait for us to reach the 38th Parallel before taking action. When we begin to have military successes, that will be the time to watch out. Anything may then happen—entry of Soviet forces, entry of Chinese Communist forces, new strike for U.N. settlement, or all three together.

9. The reported absence of the Japanese Communist leaders from Japan, taken in conjunction with depletion of our strength in Japan, with the inadequate state of the Japanese police, and with our paucity of information about internal developments in Japan, is disturbing. We should reckon with the possibility at any time of a rival Japanese government in North Korea, and attempts at infiltration and Subversion on a serious scale in Japan. (The number of Japanese prisoners-of-war remaining in Soviet hands is presumably great enough to provide personnel for such efforts).

10. Evidence of Chinese Communist plans with respect to Formosa is inconclusive. Had we hot reacted as we did on June 27, the communist forces would probably already have seized the island. In the circumstances, the Peiping leaders have plainly been vacillating. Chances are somewhat less than 50–50 that they will make the attempt in the next six weeks (i.e., before the setting in of the southwest monsoons). If the attempt is not made within this period it will probably not be made at all at the present juncture. Nothing that has yet occurred gives us reason to believe (a) that the Nationalists could not hold the island with what they now have if determined to do so and well-led in the operation, or, on the other hand, (b) that they would, as things now stand actually, put up any appreciable resistance if Chinese Communist forces were to land on the island in sizeable strength. (This is not to say they will not fight; it is merely to say that nothing we now know gives us any assurance that they will).

11. With respect to Indo-China, the Chinese Communists are now lending fairly large-scale assistance in the training, and to some extent the equipping, of new Viet Minh forces, who will presumably be moved across the border in time to participate in the intensified hostilities which are expected in the autumn of this year. There are no indications as yet that the Chinese Communists have any intention of introducing their own forces into the Indo-Chinese guerrilla war, and indeed this would raise delicate political problems for Peiping and Moscow and the Viet Minh, if it were to occur. However, there is fairly serious evidence that Chinese assistance short of this may soon assume much more serious proportion and even involve some show of Chinese force along the frontier.

12. With respect to Iran, the war of nerves will be carried on vigorously, possibly even to the point of a demand for Iranian assent to the re-entry of Soviet troops into northern Iran on the basis of the 1921 agreement.³ If the Iranian Government stands firm, refuses to give its assent, and makes it plain that an entry of Soviet forces in defiance of its wishes will be opposed by force of arms, it is not likely that the move will be attempted.

13. In the Balkans, evidence as to Soviet intentions is inconclusive. It is probable that at least until quite recently the Soviet leaders had themselves not made up their minds what to do in that area. An attack against either Turkey or Greece is not a promising undertaking, from their standpoint, as long as Tito remains recalcitrant and not militarily crushed. The position of Tito’s Yugoslavia as an uncommitted, unpredictable and possible hostile force on the flank of their Balkan satellites would be uncomfortable for the Soviet leaders in the event of war ill Europe; and it is possible that, convinced of the likelihood of an early outbreak of war, they consider it mandatory, as a measure of military precaution, to eliminate the political resistance to their power in Yugoslavia. Nevertheless, any attempt along these lines, whether launched exclusively with satellite forces or with Soviet forces, or with both, involves formidable risks and disadvantages from their own standpoint, and they will not come lightly to such a decision.

14. In Germany, they will continue to try to build up armed strength in Eastern Germany and to provide it with a political and diplomatic framework (with respect to peace treaty, alliances with other satellite powers, etc.) which would place it in a suitable position to make trouble for the western powers including eventually armed action by German units, along the Korean pattern. The recent instructions to West German Communists to oppose the occupying powers indicate that those communists are regarded as fully expendable, and that their contemplated role in the execution of Soviet plans for the extension of communist power to Western Germany is only a subsidiary one—the main burden being borne either by eventual armed attack from eastern Germany or, as Moscow continues to hope, by an aroused German nationalism, or a combination of the two.

15. Information on Soviet instructions to the western European communists indicates only a desire on Moscow’s part to be ready for all contingencies. Moscow is particularly interested in a build-up of the sub-surface militant units of the western European communist parties to a point where they could play an important subsidiary role (by sabotage, civil disorder, seizure and temporary exercise of police authority, etc.) in the accomplishment of what would be the Soviet purpose in the event of war. This could be an indication of either direct offensive intentions or of a sharp anxiety lest general hostilities should break out in the near future. It is more likely to be the latter.

16. As far as general world strategy is concerned, the most likely pattern of Soviet intentions is the following:

The Soviet leaders would still like to avoid general hostilities and hope that their present purposes, namely the promotion of the security of their own power by the complete shattering of U.S. prestige and influence outside the North American continent and the subjugation of all of Eurasia to their own political will, can be achieved by means less risky, less costly, and less restricting on their own freedom of action. In particular, they are not attracted by the prospect (which looms so large in the minds of people elsewhere) of occupying all of Western Europe before they are able to crush U.S. industrial and military power; for they would thereby only place themselves in a position analogous to that of the Germans in 1942, and incur heavy responsibilities to which there would be no calculable satisfactory termination at any early date. They still recognize a possibility—in fact, a fairly strong possibility—that it will prove possible for them to make satisfactory progress in the accomplishment of their purposes by means short of general hostilities. In the light of recent events, however, they probably rate considerably lower than they did some months ago the possibility of avoiding general hostilities. They are wise enough to recognize the cumulative tendencies in international complications and the great role of the unforeseen and the unintended in situations of extreme delicacy and instability. For this reason, they are no doubt preparing with intensified vigor and in every way for the contingency that general war might develop. This will be widely reflected in the evidences of their attitudes and operation, in the coming period. But they almost certainly wish at least to delay an outbreak of general hostilities, if the latter cannot be avoided; and they have not written off the possibility that general war may be avoided entirely.

This being the case, they will continue to conduct against us in the coming period the most intensive and savage type of political warfare, interspersing political, psychological, covert-subversive, and limited military means as may seem to them suitable and advisable. They will do this in the hope that if this attack is sufficiently successful it will obviate any necessity of a general war from their standpoint; but that if war cannot be avoided, it will put them in a better position both to conduct it militarily and to carry it to a political conclusion which they would regard as favorable.

The main accent of this political warfare will be laid on the exploitation of the major point of disunity evident in the noncommunist world, namely the relationship of the non-communist powers to Communist China and to Asiatic problems in general. The Kremlin sees that the U.S. is encumbered (a) by strategic interests in Japan which the other non-communist powers share only in minor and varying degrees, and (b) by internal political inhibitions of the heaviest sort which make it impossible for it to compete on favorable terms for the exploitation of nationalist feeling in Asia or even to come to any real meeting of the minds with other important countries, notably the British and the Indians, on Asiatic matters. They will continue to drive at this weak point in the hope that we can be thus discredited with the peoples of Asia and isolated from the other non-communist powers; that our position in Japan and the Philippines, in particular, can thus be psychologically undermined; and that we can finally be placed before the choice of continuing to try to police Japan in the face of a violently hostile and aroused popular resistance or agreeing to a treaty of peace which will throw open the field for the pursuit of Soviet political purposes and the eventual integration of Japan, with its war potential, into the Soviet satellite area.

The Soviet leaders no doubt feel that they have good grounds to hope not only that this result can be achieved, but that our position in Europe will by that time be so seriously undermined as to assure satisfactory progress in the accomplishment of Soviet global objectives even in the absence of general war. It suffices to point out that the ensuing train of events might logically be expected to lead to the break-up of the Atlantic Pact organization, the political defection of Germany, and the eventual strategic withdrawal of the U.S. from the European continent.

George F. Kennan

1. Mao Tse-tung was Chairman of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and from October 1949 the Chairman of the Government of the People’s Republic of China.
2. Charles E. Bohlen was United States Minister in France, who had been temporarily in Washington after the outbreak of hostilities in Korea. See his memorandum of July 13, p. 1220.
3. Treaty of Friendship between the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic and Persia, signed at Moscow on February 26, 1921. For text, see League of Nations Treaty Series, vol. ix, p. 384. Articles 5 and 6 are here pertinent.