Free Republic

George Kennan, the intellectual father of America’s containment policy during the cold war, perceptively warned in a May 1998 New York Times interview about what the Senate’s ratification of Nato’s first round of expansion would set in motion. “I think it is the beginning of a new cold war,” Kennan stated. ”I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else.”

Most fascinating thing about the Ukraine war is the sheer number of top strategic thinkers who warned for years that it was coming if we continued down the same path. No-one listened to them and here we are. The first one is George Kennan, arguably America's greatest ever foreign policy strategist, the architect of the U.S. cold war strategy. As soon as 1998 he warned that NATO expansion was a "tragic mistake" that ought to ultimately provoke a "bad reaction from Russia". Then there's Kissinger, in 2014 He warned that "to Russia, Ukraine can never be just a foreign country"...

The Russia-Ukraine war will likely end in one of three ways: Russia will annex all of Ukraine and reincorporate it into Russia; Russia will install a puppet regime in Kyiv and exercise effective political control over Ukraine's foreign policy; or Russia will militarily occupy parts of Ukraine and suffer the resistance of an insurgency that may be armed and supported by outside powers. Regardless of which scenario plays out, this is and will be a tragic and unnecessary war — entirely preventable, if only the Europeans and Americans had heeded the warnings of George F. Kennan about the likely unintended...

When he died in March at the age of 101, George F. Kennan was remembered principally as America’s leading Cold War strategist, one of the “Wise Men” who took control of American foreign policy in the pivotal years after World War II and molded the institutions that shaped the world for the next 50 years. The containment doctrine most associated with him—espousing the need to confront Soviet postwar expansion with an American “counterforce” and holding out the prospect that a Soviet communism denied significant military or political expansion would eventually wither and die—was the central skein of American strategy for...

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...

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 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...

Paul H. Nitze, an expert on military power and strategic arms whose roles as negotiator, diplomat and Washington insider spanned the era from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan and helped shape America's cold war relationship with the Soviet Union, died Tuesday night at his home in Washington. He was 97. The cause was pneumonia, said his wife, Elisabeth Scott Porter. From the beginning of the nuclear age, whether in government or out, Mr. Nitze urged successive American presidents to take measures against what he saw as the Soviet drive to overwhelm the United States through the force of arms....

<p>George F. Kennan's 100th birthday this week has prompted a round of effusive praise for the contributions of the man who has been dubbed "the architect," "the great theorist" and "the founding father" of containment -- the vaunted Cold War method by which the Soviet threat to the West was not so much confronted as "contained." Discussing Mr. Kennan's famous "X" article, published in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs, led no less an authority than Henry Kissinger to suggest that Mr. Kennan "came as close to authoring the diplomatic doctrine of his era as any diplomat in our history."</p>