One guy simply parroting the thoughts of another one as always. What jokes. And both revealing themselves to be utterly clueless as always.
https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/kennanAntarctica wrote:
I dont know, this pretty meh.
Kennan is taught alongside Samuel Huntington in any 200 level IR course when they're going over the hyper realist dogma that follows the autopsy for the two world wars. Great power politics, ruthlessly self interested parties. I think there's a ton of merit to, but mastermind of the Cold War?
Nah, that's a bit too far. The USA was certain to eventually confront the truths of the USSR with or without George Kennan. I usually dont like that thought-process, the fatalist determinism where people and individuals dont matter, but if you're going to tell me that there would be no Cold War without George Kennan you've taken things to a bit of an extreme.
I already know what follows with be a lengthy debate on the definition of the term "mastermind", and I'm just no interested in that. I guess its an interesting name, I was worried you were going to say Hitler. Still, its wrong. But I guess its wrong for the right reasons.
Quote:
Kennan and Containment, 1947
George F. Kennan, a career Foreign Service Officer, formulated the policy of “containment,” the basic United States strategy for fighting the cold war (1947–1989) with the Soviet Union.
Kennan’s ideas, which became the basis of the Truman administration’s foreign policy, first came to public attention in 1947 in the form of an anonymous contribution to the journal Foreign Affairs, the so-called “X-Article.
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WaitingforRuffcorn wrote:
How do you mastermind a 50 year period of history? He might have helped to design early American strategy, but this was a complex half century conflict. Was Hitler the "mastermind" of World War 2?
This is a childish premise, using imprecise and immature language. Mastermind sounds like a term used on an animation series. I'm sure it will be refuted with a dictionary definition of mastermind now.
Quote:
Despite all the criticisms and the various policy defeats that Kennan suffered in the early 1950’s, containment in the more general sense of blocking the expansion of Soviet influence remained the basic strategy of the United States throughout the cold war. On the one hand, the United States did not withdraw into isolationism; on the other, it did not move to “roll back” Soviet power, as John Foster Dulles briefly advocated. It is possible to say that each succeeding administration after Truman’s, until the collapse of communism in 1989, adopted a variation of Kennan’s containment policy and made it their own.
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The Hawk wrote:
This is going to reach a head pretty soon.