In February 1946, for the Minister Counselor of the US Embassy in Moscow, George Kennan, it was "unhappy," as he explains in the first volume of his Memories.
The ambassador, Averell Harriman, was packing up, and Washington had not yet appointed his successor. Kennan, therefore, was the acting ambassador. But he was sick with "colds, fever, sinusitis, and, finally, the effects of the sulfonamides" that "had been administered to relieve all those miseries." So he worked from his bedroom. There he received a telegram from Washington that made him feel worse.
"Among the messages I received in those unhappy days," Kennan recounts, "there was one that led me to a new level of despair, not with the Soviet government, but with my own. It was a telegram informing us that the Russians were showing their lack of interest in joining the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. It must be remembered that nowhere in Washington had hopes of post-war collaboration with Russia been more elaborately, more naively, and more tenaciously [perhaps one should say more fiercely] pursued than in the Treasury Department. Now [...] the dream seemed to have been shattered, and the State Department passed on to the embassy, with a tone of bureaucratic innocence, the anguished cry of perplexity that hovered over the White House and the Treasury."
The "dream" of global cooperation after the end of Nazi Germany was fading. It had been a dream without a real basis, mainly embraced by the United States, which never foresaw the Cold War. When, with just over two and a half months before the fall of Berlin, the three victorious powers - the United States, Great Britain, and the USSR - met in Yalta - which is precisely in Crimea, the peninsula disputed by Russia and Ukraine in 2025 - US Secretary of State James Byrnes declared: "The United States will prevent rivalry between the USSR and the United Kingdom in Europe." The Soviet-American alliance was taken for granted.
Little did Byrnes imagine that the rivalry would be in Europe, but between his country and the USSR. When the Soviets took Berlin, the United States had based its post-war plans on the idea that history risked repeating itself, so it was essential to prevent a re-edition of what happened after World War I, where American isolationism and the French desire to punish Germany and leave it reduced to an agricultural country sowed the seeds of World War II.
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill did not want to go to Yalta because he thought there was not much to discuss with the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. It was US President Franklin D. Roosevelt who insisted on the meeting, in an effort - which he believed was successful and that Stalin promptly destroyed - to integrate the USSR into the emerging multilateral system conceived by Washington and London to prevent another war that would likely end with humanity and undoubtedly with Europe. When Berlin fell on May 8, Washington's plan was a world led by two powers - the US and the USSR - and a half - Great Britain. But what actually happened was a Cold War of over forty years between the first two of those countries.
The Cold War began precisely in Berlin on June 14, 1948. That day, Stalin blocked the land access to the city, attempting to starve it and force its fall within the Soviet occupation zone of Germany. Nine months later, when the two million inhabitants of Berlin were still receiving all their food, fuel, and medicine by air, the NATO, the symbol of the US commitment to the Defense of Europe, was born. It was not just Defense. It was also about the economy. The first loan from the International Monetary Fund was for France. The second, for a country that opposed in every possible way the rescues of economies affected by the euro crisis: the Netherlands.
The transatlantic alliance, which is actually the basis of the current idea of the West, was born not out of fear of fascism or Nazism, which had been defeated and - it was assumed - banished from the face of the Earth, but out of panic that Soviet communism would take over Europe. It was not the same if the communists took control of Angola, South Yemen, Vietnam, Laos, or Iraq as they did with Germany. The latter was simply untouchable, under penalty of the use of atomic bombs.
Therefore, SEATO and CENTO - two of the three military alliances with which the United States surrounded the Soviet Union - were dissolved in, respectively, 1977 and 1979. Only NATO survived. Moreover, it survived the fall of the USSR. What no one knows today is if it will withstand the internal challenges brought by the 21st century, with a new Russian dictator who considers "the fall of the Soviet Union the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century," and an American president who views Europe as the real enemy to his country, and Moscow as a political model.
The transatlantic alliance, thus, began out of fear, but quickly expanded to other dimensions. Europe and the United States shared values. Both were heirs of the Enlightenment and the Christian and Greco-Roman traditions. Both had market economies, albeit with differences. In the United States and, with the arrival of Margaret Thatcher, also in the United Kingdom, the Anglo-Saxon capitalism prevailed, more based on the free market, bonds, and financial markets. Continental Europe has tended towards the so-called Rhenish capitalism, based on the German social market economy, with more state intervention, seeking stability, and emphasizing redistribution.
After security and economy, politics came into play. Starting in the 1970s, the United States began promoting democracies out of pragmatism. Dictatorships, despite their appearance, were more unstable and weaker in containing communism. This idea would eventually cause the biggest crisis in transatlantic relations a quarter of a century later when the United States, against the opinions of France and Germany, invaded Iraq. But in the 1970s, it allowed Greece, Portugal, and Spain to transition from autocracy to democracy, with the support of Europeans and Americans. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it was the United States that promoted German reunification, despite the reluctance of François Mitterrand's France, which seemed stuck in the 1945 mindset. Washington's policy of defending democracy was validated with the end of the communist dictatorships in Central and Eastern Europe.
Although the United States was the unquestionable leader of the relationship, it changed profoundly. Before the Cold War, Washington was a supporter of colonial independence (though not its own) and the self-determination of peoples. However, during the over four decades of confrontation with the USSR, it became the financier and arms supplier of the struggling French and British empires, replacing the former in Indochina and explicitly defending the UK's most brutal colonialism in the Malvinas.
Washington was also behind European integration. The 1950 declaration by then French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman of the European Coal and Steel Community, which led to the birth of the European Union, had been coordinated with its creator, Jean Monnet, and the Harry Truman administration. The United States did not just act from a distance to avoid European rivalries, as Byrnes said after Yalta. It directly engaged in creating a Fortress Europe to give a voice to defeated Germany to counter the Soviet Union. It was certainly not an easy relationship.
Europeans - especially a country not known for its humility, France - struggled to accept their secondary role in relation to Americans. And the Americans directly complained about what U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger called "European paranoia: if you don't negotiate with the Russians, they think you will start a nuclear war in their countries, and if you negotiate, they believe you will make agreements with Moscow without considering them." Nevertheless, the experiment worked. That's why it is now incomprehensible to see U.S. Vice President JD Vance criticizing the supposed lack of democracy among Europeans at the Munich Security Conference, or the same Vance with Donald Trump attacking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House, essentially for resisting a Russian invasion in what is the first major war in Europe since May 8, 1945.
So now, 80 years after the fall of Berlin and 79 years after the State Department telegram to the Moscow embassy, Kennan's account sounds alarmingly close and, at the same time, despairingly distant. Surprisingly close for one reason: the United States in 2025 once again has an uncertain faith in cooperation with Russia.