After World War II when the conflict between Stalin's ambitions and American wishes to hand Europe back over to the Europeans, the Americans found they had to face Stalin flatly. After confusion as to Stalin's behaviour Truman denied territorial concessions in Turkey and the Mediterranean. Additionally the US Sixth Fleet was stationed in the Mediterranean permanently and indefinitely.

Stalin did not conduct foreign policy through the European great power policies or Realpolitick; instead his policies were ideological and stemmed from a Marxist reading of capitalism being inherently at war with itself and unsustainable. Stalin believed democracies were the same and in short order America, Britain and France would all be at war with each again.

To explain all this George F. Kennan sent a 'long telegram' of 8,000 words from the embassy in Moscow to the US. Telegrams at the time were short as the technology was laborious and had bandwidth issues. Kennan's telegram broke with accepted conventions but ended up informing Truman's policy of containment and the Marshall Plan.

Gaddis writes:

Moscow's intransigence, Kennan insisted, resulted from nothing the West had done: instead it reflected the internal necessities of the Stalinist regime, and nothing the West could do within the foreseeable future would alter that fact.

Soviet leaders had to treat the outside world as hostile because they provided the only excuse "for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not dare not to inflict, for sacrifices they felt bound to demand".

Kennan argued that long string of failures would be needed before Soviet leaders would see the fallacy of their internal governance, however, war would not be necessary. Kennan wrote that what was needed was a;

long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansionist tendencies.

Marshall was concerned that the breakdown of Western Europe after the ravages of war made it ripe for Marxist-Leninist doctrine. He asked Kennan for a quick and simple solution to this issue. The consequent policy was the reconstruction of Europe which became known as the Marshall Plan.