Word: kennan
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...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...
...many prices the West paid for keeping the war going, according to Kennan, was the Bolshevik Revolution. Had the war ended as late as 1917, he suggests, the Kerensky government might have been able to ride out the revolution and maintain itself in power...
Postwar treatment of Germany by the Allies not only crippled the Weimar Republic and laid the basis for Hitler's rise, but also prepared the way for the Nazi-Soviet Pact. The West could not afford to treat two Great Powers as outcasts, Kennan says...
World War II was "unwinnable." The Western democracies had allowed themselves to become so weak that they could only defeat Germany with Russian aid. The inevitable price they had to pay was the extension of Soviet powers into Eastern Europe. Kennan thinks, nevertheless, that this extension could have been contained more effectively had the West kept this danger in mind through...
...difficult to quarrel with Kennan's hindsight. One can however, criticize Kennan for falling to treat in sufficient detail the role of foreign policy in a democracy. Like Lippmann in The Public Philosophy, Kennan moans about democracies liability to pursue an effective foreign policy, but he gives no realistic suggestion as to how this can be corrected...