Word: kennan
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...taken hold in the new Soviet Union. There are republic leaders, legitimately elected mayors, legislators, independent journalists. The society is too various and too well educated for rulers to control in the old Stalinist way. Russians are not, as Marx called them, "rude Asiatics." Blair Ruble, director of the Kennan Institute of Advanced Russian Studies at the Woodrow Wilson Center, has observed, "There has been a general trend throughout the postwar period toward increasing education, urbanization and professionalization of the labor force. Those trends bring with them different attitudes toward authority and a greater desire to control one's destiny...
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...
Before we embark upon Bush's plan for a new world order, we should listen to Kennan...