Word: kennan
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Last Stands, Hilary Masters ∙The Nuclear Delusion, George F. Kennan...
...Kennan, now 78, will probably be best remembered by future historians for the 1946 cable he wrote while a diplomat in Moscow, urging that the U.S. dedicate itself to the containment of Soviet expansionism. He published a version of the cable in Foreign Affairs under the pseudonym "X." He has spent much of his life since then criticizing the way in which eight successive Presidents have followed his advice. Significantly, he has not included that famous Long Telegram in this collection of past writings. Instead, he reprints a 1950 memorandum to Dean Acheson warning against putting much faith in nuclear...
...Kennan believes that American leaders have excessively "militarized" policy toward the U.S.S.R. partly because they have "dehumanized" their Soviet counterparts. He views the Politburo as "a group of troubled men-elderly men, for the most part-whose choices and possibilities are severely constrained." They are driven by a paranoid, secretive and conspiratorial view of the world rather than by a master plan for its domination. He urges more and closer analysis of Soviet objectives and less preoccupation with Soviet capabilities. Despite the vast numbers of tanks and missiles in the Warsaw Pact, Kennan argues, the U.S.S.R. has "no intention...
Nevertheless the Kremlin has every intention, if possible, of neutralizing Western Europe and driving the American military presence from the Continent. Kennan is too sanguine about the extent to which Soviet power has been-and might be again-an effective instrument of intimidation. But he is quite right that strident, bellicose countermeasures have played into the hands of the Soviet propaganda and diplomatic campaign to split NATO...
...demonization of the Soviet enemy and the militarization of the American response have reached their apotheosis in the Reagan Administration. It sometimes seems to Kennan that we are "already in a state of undeclared war-an undeclared war pursued in anticipation of an outright one now regarded as inevitable...