Word: kennan
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George Frost Kennan, who died last week in Princeton, N.J., at 101, was an insecure outsider from Milwaukee, Wis., who was embraced, in ways that sometimes made him squirm, by the clubby coterie of wise men who shaped America's bipartisan foreign policy at the outset of the cold war. He was at heart an intellectual and a historian, which made him a little too edgy and anguished to be a natural diplomat. But while stationed in Moscow at the end of World War II, he became the most influential foreign-service officer in American history by authoring...
...Yugoslav People's Army was, according to the American diplomat George Kennan, the third strongest in Europe. A Croatian army did not exist in the early '90s. On the one hand, Tudjman managed to organize resistance and thus prevent the total crushing of a young democracy by tanks--a scenario that would have been comparable to the events in Tiananmen Square...
NATO enlargement is Bill Clinton's top foreign policy priority for his second term, the overseas equivalent of the balanced-budget deal just reached. He will get this one too. There has been some criticism, including from George Kennan, the 93-year-old dean of U.S. Sovietologists, who is worried that expansion could incite anti-Western factions in Russia. But there is currently no national figure around whom opposition is likely to coalesce. Congress backs expansion. As is often the case, conviction on Capitol Hill is wider than it is deep, but in this case two added factors undergird support...
...unfamiliar terrain and adds to it a people with unfamiliar language and cultural traditions. The origin of the Bosnian conflict is largely alien to the average American GI, and the rationale behind American intervention is further hidden in ambiguity. In as much as Vietnam became the manifestation of George Kennan's containment doctrine, so has Bosnia become the symbol of America's ambivalent role as the global superpower. If not with Vietnam, then similar comparisons are provided by the military disaster in Somalia, one whose hazy military objective resulted in the useless sacrifice of American lives...
...sweeping portrayal of historical forces that begins with Cardinal Richelieu and ends with the challenges facing the world today, Kissinger makes the most forceful case by any American statesman since Theodore Roosevelt for the role of realism and its Prussian-accented cousin realpolitik in international affairs. Just as Kennan's odd admixture of romanticism and realism helped shape American attitudes at the outset of the cold war, Kissinger's emphasis on national interests rather than moral sentiments defines a framework for ^ dealing with the multipolar world now emerging. He has produced one of those rare books that are both exciting...