World Order

by Henry Kissinger

Kennan replied in a five-part telegram of nineteen single-spaced pages. The essence of the so-called Long Telegram was that the entire American debate over Soviet intentions needed to be reconceived. Soviet leaders saw East-West relations as a contest between antithetical concepts of world order. They had taken a “traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity” and grafted onto it a revolutionary doctrine of global sweep. The Kremlin would interpret every aspect of international affairs in light of Soviet doctrine about a battle for advantage between what Stalin had called the “two centers of world significance,” capitalism and Communism, whose global contest was inevitable and could end with only one winner. They thought the battle was inevitable, and thus made it so.