Word: kennan
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...under pressure to behave like a Western country, competing for capital and markets, lowering the barriers to foreign investment and even making its currency convertible. "The present seems to be an unusually promising time for doing business with the Soviet Union," says Peter Reddaway, director of the Washington-based Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies. A senior U.S. diplomat in Moscow agrees, saying that Gorbachev "may be for real, in the sense that he's tackling the fundamentals...
...George Kennan, the prescient diplomat who formulated the U.S. doctrine of containment shortly after the end of World War II, ruminated at a reunion of State Department planners about how these global changes have made the East- West ideological struggle less relevant to how the world is ordered. Says Kennan, who in recent years has adopted a more benign view of the Soviet Union: "The whole principle of containment as that term was conceived when it was used by me back in 1946 is almost entirely irrelevant to the problems we and the rest of the civilized world face today...
...plan was an overwhelming success in economic regeneration, not all the strategic objectives of its originators were as adequately fulfilled. George Kennan, appointed by Marshall to head the State Department's Policy Planning Staff in drafting the initiative, hoped that the Plan would be the first step toward a politically unified continental Europe. He envisioned French leadership of a continental federation, with a reunited and disarmed Germany serving as a buffer between East and West. Britain would join with Canada and the U.S. in an allied but separate political coalition. Eastern European states would be wooed into the neutral continental...
...happened, Kennan's vision of a politically neutral or centrist "Mittel Europa" was not fulfilled in the post-Hiroshima world, and the fate of the continent has remained in thrall to U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenals. While the U.S. did not attempt to dominate Europe economically either during or after the Marshall Plan, our military position on the continent has influenced all aspects of Western relations, including economic agreements. Misuse of American strategic power in the region threatens to undermine the Western alliance which Marshall helped to create...
...followed Kennan as director of policy planning -- s/p (for staff and planning) in the curious jargon of the State Department -- all had their brushes with epochal events. Paul Nitze, who at 80 is still active as President Reagan's arms-control adviser after service under eight Presidents, recalls a 1953 fight with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to exclude a sentence on Chinese expansionism from an Eisenhower speech just before the Korean War armistice. (Nitze won.) In the summer of 1962 Walt W. Rostow and his staff predicted that Nikita Khrushchev would soon embark on high-risk foreign policy...