Word: kennan
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Both impulses have shared a very American respect for legalistic thinking -- not surprisingly, since so many American diplomats were Wasp lawyers. They searched, as George Kennan put it, for "formal criteria of a juridical nature by which the permissible behavior of states could be defined." The rest of the world was often baffled by our devotion to this search, even as it made the rest of the world baffling to us. "To the American mind," Kennan added, it was "implausible that people should have positive aspirations more important to them than the peacefulness and orderliness of international life." Still, whether...
...Americans keep behaving like Americans, we will keep on encountering the same problems. One potential problem, as Kennan suggested and Saddam demonstrated, is that other countries will misunderstand us -- although the gulf war should clarify our notion of the boundaries of "permissible behavior," at least for the time being...
...much more loosely organized but still viable and stable federation -- an outcome consistent with the wishes of the people as expressed in the referendum -- would be powerful enough to guarantee its own security, but not to be perceived by other nations as a threat. The emergence of what George Kennan foresaw in 1947 as a "mellowed" Soviet Union is not only in the interests of those of us who live there but of the rest of the world as well...
THIS IS NOT TO SAY that we must resort to complete non-intervention and Washingtonesque isolationism in our foreign policy. Kennan did not call for complete withdrawal from the international arena. Instead, he proposed that we develop a more conservative, more realistic attitude when determining whether to intervene in the affairs of external states...
Before we embark upon Bush's plan for a new world order, we should listen to Kennan...