Word: kennan
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Kennan...
...views of Mr. George F. Kennan [TIME, Sept. 17] pack the realistic wallop that somehow should be roundhoused to the chin of the formulators of our foreign policy...
...hardheaded, cold-blooded world, Kennan argues, U.S. leaders impressed nobody but themselves by such legalistic arrangements as the Kellogg Peace Pact, the various schemes for international disarmament, the League of Nations and even the United Nations. By & large, they ignored delicate power balances, and the "strategic, political and economic necessities...
Price of Failure. The conferences of Moscow, Teheran and Yalta were relatively unimportant in themselves, says Kennan. By the time they were held, "there was nothing the Western democracies could have done to prevent the Russians from entering [Eastern Europe and Manchuria] except to get there first, and this they were not in a position to do." A far more realistic policy would have been to cut off Lend-Lease aid from Russia "subsequent to the midsummer...
...learn to operate its foreign policy on a cold, calculating, day-to-day basis? Can it break the cycle of military lethargy and emotional fist-shaking, learn to think in terms of "rational and restricted purposes" and withstand the shrill cries of press and politicians who demand extremes? Says Kennan: "History does not forgive us our national mistakes because they are explicable in terms of our domestic policies . . . A nation which excuses its own failures by the sacred untouchableness of its own habits can excuse itself into complete disaster...