Free Republic

...We have treated Russia with amazing stupidity. Now we pay the price for that. We had the chance to make her an ally, friend and partner. Instead we turned her into an enemy by insulting a great and proud country with greed, unearned superiority, cynicism, contempt and mistrust. I have to endure, often several times a day, listening to people who are normally pefectly sensible and reasonable, raging wildly against Russia and Russians. Once, I was just like them. I had the normal anti-Russian prejudice of so many Western people. But, by great fortune, I am not like them now....

On the foreign policy front . . . I find myself 
wondering why we cannot regard another country, in this case Iran, 
as just that, as one more country which we would regard as neither friend nor foe, with whom we are prepared to deal on a day-to-day basis, neither idealizing it nor running it down, keeping to ourselves (here, of course, I am speaking about our government) our views about its domestic political institutions and practices, and interesting ourselves only in those aspects of its official behavior which touched our interests—maintaining in other words, a relationship with it of mutual respect...

October 14, 2007, 0:00 a.m. The Ideologues Have ItGetting comfortable. By Mark Steyn Peter Robinson, a Reagan speechwriter in the last years of the Cold War, posed an interesting question on “The Corner” the other day. He noted that on February 22, 1946, a mere six months after the end of the Second World War, George Kennan, a U.S. diplomat in Moscow, sent his famous 5,000-word telegram that laid out the stakes of the Cold War and the nature of the enemy, and that that “Long Telegram” in essence shaped the way America thought about the conflict all the...

Many people have good ideas, but few live to see those ideas define an era and even win a war. George Kennan did, even though he eventually backed away from the ramifications of his idea. In 1946, as the United States was trying to decide how to deal with the post-World War II world, Kennan weighed in with the famous “Long Telegram” from Moscow. The Soviet Union is “impervious to the logic of reason,” Kennan warned his superiors at the State Department, but “it is highly sensitive to the logic of force.” Thus began the policy of containment -- a...

AGAINST GEORGE F. KENNAN, who died last week at the age of 101, "there was no official complaint, / And all the reports on his conduct agree / That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint." He was not just "the nearest thing to a legend that this country's diplomatic service has ever produced" (Ronald Steel), but "a phenomenon in international affairs" (the New York Times), as well as "our greatest diplomat" (Richard Holbrooke). Even in an age of casual superlatives, this is high praise indeed. And not least among Kennan's long list of distinguished...

America's most revered foreign policy strategist of the twentieth century -- perhaps of any century -- passed away this month. America and the world lost George F. Kennan: former Ambassador to the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, author of numerous articles and books on history, philosophy, and foreign policy, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, but most famous for creating the strategy of "containment". For over four decades, various forms of containment (often involving details of implementation not pleasing to Kennan) guided America to victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War. Ironically, the success...

On Friday, the man the Boston Globe called America's "greatest living diplomat" died at age 101. George Kennan was the last survivor of the group of so-called Wise Men who guided American foreign policy at the onset of the Cold War, along with Averell Harriman, Dean Acheson, Robert Lovett, Charles Bohlen, and Jack McCloy. Kennan also became the most celebrated, including winning a Pulitzer Prize and a Presidential Medal of Freedom. These accolades came despite, or perhaps because of, the seemingly huge reversal Kennan's views underwent in the past three decades on virtually everything, from the Cold War and the...

George F. Kennan, who died last week at 101, was a unique figure in American history. I greatly admired him but disagreed with him profoundly on many critical issues, and, in the 35 years I knew him, I often reflected on this strange paradox. His extraordinary memoirs had made the idea of a life in the Foreign Service seem both exciting and intellectually stimulating to me. He had watched Joseph Stalin at close hand, and sent Washington an analysis of Russia that became the most famous telegram in U.S. diplomatic history. This was followed closely by the most influential article...

George Kennan, R.I.P. (1904-2005) George Kennan, the first director of policy planning for the State Department, is dead at the age of 101. The New York Times obit by Tim Weiner and Barbara Crossette has more detail and background, but the Washington Post obit by J.Y. Smith has a paragraph that best captures Kennan's love-hate relationship with the U.S. foreign policy establishment: Despite his influence, Mr. Kennan was never really comfortable in government or with the give-and-take process by which policy is made. He always regarded himself as an outsider. It grated on him when his advice was not heeded,...

George F. Kennan, the American diplomat who did more than any other envoy of his generation to shape United States policy during the cold war, died on Thursday night in Princeton, N.J. He was 101. Mr. Kennan was the man to whom the White House and the Pentagon turned when they sought to understand the Soviet Union after World War II. He conceived the cold-war policy of containment, the idea that the United States should stop the global spread of Communism by diplomacy, politics, and covert action - by any means short of war. As the State Department's first policy...

Toogood Reports [Thursday, February 27, 2003; 12:01 a.m. EST]URL: http://ToogoodReports.com/ Cold War thinking was dominated in the West by "Containment Theory," one of whose implications was the Domino Theory. Containment Theory, as originally formulated by diplomat George Kennan, stated that America had to aggressively confront the power of the Soviet Union, wherever the latter made inroads, or threatened to make them. The main means of confrontation was in putting American troops in the Soviets' path. The "Domino Theory" held that the fall of any government to communism likely would topple neighboring governments. The Domino Theory began making a comeback regarding...

Toogood Reports [Tuesday, February 25, 2003; 12:01 a.m. EST]URL: http://ToogoodReports.com/ For over forty years, America pursued the foreign policy, first developed in an anonymously penned, 1947 article by George Kennan (as "X," in what was probably the most important article ever published in the journal Foreign Affairs), of the "containment" of Soviet communism. One of the factors that made containment workable was the very bifurcation of the world that the policy addressed. A world without an Iron Curtain, is a world without containment. Containment Theory was heavily influenced by World War II, in which Nazi Germany toppled one European country...