The Telegram: our new guide to a dangerous world
IN FEBRUARY 1946, in the depths of a Moscow winter, an American diplomat sent a remarkable cable to Washington. On paper, George Kennan’s “Long Telegram” was a reply to a query about the Soviet worldview. In reality, Kennan was proposing a strategy for managing superpower competition—an approach that he later called “containment”. The Soviet Union had no interest in friendship, but did not seek a third world war, Kennan explained. Communist rulers were impervious to the “logic of reason”, but understood the “logic of force” and knew their regime to be weaker than a united West. If Soviet expansionism were countered around the world, then a “general military conflict” could be avoided, until one day the USSR either mellowed or crumbled.
Washington policymakers were struggling to respond to Soviet hostility. Kennan illuminated their choices with unrivalled clarity. The eventual cold war was more militarised than his vision of containment, but he cannily predicted its shape and its ending.
It says a lot that in 2024 it is not hard to meet foreign-policy types nostalgic for the original cold war. True, that four-decade confrontation involved horrors, as both East and West waged proxy wars and propped up loyal tyrants. But there was a simplicity to the contest. One camp promised capitalist plenty, consumer technology and expanding personal freedoms. The other offered a grimmer, greyer socialist utopia of central planning, autarky and jackbooted order. The world offers no such neat choices now.
This article marks the launch of “The Telegram”, The Economist’s new weekly column on geopolitics. This first column draws on interviews with political leaders, ambassadors, business bosses and scholars from Beijing to London, New York and Washington. This is an unsettling, vertiginous moment, as fundamental principles and rules of war are tested to breaking point from Ukraine to Gaza and Sudan. Popular consent for pillars of the post-1945 international order is crumbling. Take the Geneva Convention on Refugees signed in 1951, with its guarantees of asylum for those fleeing conflict or persecution. It could never be agreed today.
This is hardly the first time that countries have turned inward. Writing in 1947, Kennan described two tasks for American foreign policy. First, his country had to check and contain Soviet aggression on every continent. As importantly, it needed to avoid crippling social and political divisions at home, and to show other countries that America was coping with “the responsibilities of a world power”. Arguably, though, strategists of Kennan’s generation had it easy. The USSR was a potent ideological and military rival, but a commercial irrelevance. No Western democracy asked the Soviet Union to build its telephone exchanges. Drivers in capitalist countries did not covet Soviet cars. No multinational corporations depended on Soviet supply chains. As Kennan bluntly wrote from Moscow: “We have here no investments to guard, no actual trade to lose.” Today the stakes are far higher.
A world of barriers
These words are being typed in China, on an American laptop packed with Chinese-made components. Chinese companies are building 5G networks and smart grids around the world. Governments worldwide are vying for Chinese firms to open factories making electric cars and batteries. In Beijing, Chinese officials point to American export controls on semiconductors and European tariffs on Chinese electric cars, and accuse a declining, selfish West of a new policy of containment. In reality, no country can afford to contain China.
It is an exaggeration to claim that globalisation is dying. Chinese exports have set new records this year. But the global economy is fragmenting. Business bosses and investors describe new curbs on trade, technology, capital and data. Such barriers are rising in the name of national security and protecting domestic workers from unfair competition. Whoever wins America’s presidential election on November 5th, its closest trade partners will be asked to further limit dealings with China in key sectors.
Other powers are determined not to choose sides. “Our values are with the US,” says a Latin American diplomat. But his country’s trade with China is booming, and the technology offered by Chinese firms is “better and cheaper”. Nor is the global south in a mood for lectures. Its governments remember when envoys from Western capitals or from bodies such as the IMF told them to open their markets. Yet now that competition from Chinese firms threatens Western corporations, they see America and other advanced economies resorting to tariffs and industrial policies.
This writer will try to make sense of this unhappy, chaotic moment, drawing on successive postings as The Economist’s columnist in Brussels, London, Washington and Beijing. The column will look for patterns and trends. It will report from leaders’ summits and street markets, and explore how global problems are changing local politics and everyday life.
Faced with angry populations, political leaders of all stripes are pledging to put the national interest first. Kennan might have approved. An advocate for realpolitik in its most pitiless form, he scorned democracy, and saw no vital American interest in defending human rights far from home. After recent disasters involving regime change and democracy promotion, it is not puzzling that realism is in vogue. Still, after a quarter-century as a foreign correspondent, this columnist suspects the pendulum is swinging too far. Rich-world politicians are missing the diplomatic costs of overt selfishness, and discounting the value of magnanimity and respect for individual freedoms and rights.
This column is not named “Kennan”, then. But a telegram—a concise, timely dispatch, informed by facts on the ground—is a worthy model. The world needs explaining. To work. ■
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