Word: kennan
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Eighteen years ago, just after the U.S. formally recognized the Soviet Union, an unknown young U.S. Foreign Service officer named George F. Kennan sat down with the Russians to negotiate the lease on a new seven-story building at 13-15 Mokhovaya, only a stone's throw across a square from the Kremlin. It became the main building of the U.S. Embassy. Last week Kennan, now the U.S. Ambassador to Russia, got his eviction notice. He was told...
Beyond its shrillness, the propaganda drive differs in two ways from the kind George Kennan became accustomed to in his two previous stints in the U.S. embassy at Moscow: 1) no longer do the Russians limit their attack to U.S. leaders, military men and "Wall Street imperialists," while professing to accept the U.S. people as misled, peace-loving friends; now Americans in general are depicted as beasts and cannibals; 2) previously the Russians learned most of their anti-American blasts outside of Russia, to stir up distrust and dissension; now the campaign, which began back in January 1951, is primarily...
Time to Reexamine. Kennan recommended to Washington that the U.S. re-examine its assumptions about Russian intentions. The assumptions to be re-examined are Kennan's own, for it is his analysis of Russia which for the past five years has formed the heart of U.S. policy. Containment is Kennan's catchword. As "Mr. X" writing in Foreign Affairs in 1947, he argued that Russia would not risk war to attain its expansionist objectives, that it could be checked by cool-headed applications of U.S. strength at points around the perimeter, and that ultimately the "seeds of decay...
...theory this kind of analysis called for a cool foreign policy; in practice it encouraged a complacent one. It seemed to say that time was on the side of the U.S. and its allies. Last week George Kennan was feeling not a bit complacent. Some hate-Americanisms in the Soviet press during Kennan's first six weeks...
...Poles in the days before his Wehrmacht started World War II and as venomous as anything Soviet Russia hurled at Nazi Germany during the war. It was the kind of technique a dictatorship must use to put an oppressed population in a mood to fight a war. Yet neither Kennan nor the Russian Desk analysts in the State Department are ready to push their conclusions that far. For one thing, they doubt that 72-year-old Joseph Stalin, a man who believes that patience and the inner weakness of capitalism are on his side, is now willing to begin...