Word: kennan
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...countless international responsibilities America has assumed in the past thirty years have serenely taxed the country's diplomatic resources. The fact that a number of able diplomats have arisen during this period. Therefore, is a one. Kennan and Acheson are two of the most outstanding products of the period, and their recent publications attest to the thoughtfulness and sensitivity they were able to bring to their work...
...Kennan's latest volume, Russia and the West, is really two books, thinly disguised as one. The first deals in great detail with the period of the allied intervention, 1917-81. Based on a lecture series given at Oxford, it is a convenient summary of his two-volume published work on Soviet-American relations during the period...
...both sections, Kennan pursues one of his favorite themes--that "the standard component for a rousing Soviet diplomatic success" is "one part Soviet resourcefulness and two parts amateurism, complacency and disunity on the part of the West...
...Kennan remains from using the phrase, but there is little doubt that he belongs to the "Realistic School." Foreign policy should not strive to recorder the world, but only to protect a nation's interests and preserve peace. "There is nothing absolute in itself, no friendship without some element of antagonism, no enmity without some rudimentary community of interest...
...West's first great blunder, according to Kennan, was World War I. Following the military deadlock of the fall of 1914, he says, there should have been a compromise peace. For total victory was impossible, due to the fact that modern warfare is too blunt and undiscriminating an instrument for the accomplishment of any aim other than mass destruction...