George F. Kennan has died. Kennan was a leading diplomat and Soviet expert, and his famous "Long Telegram" of 1946 remains one of the prime documents in the formation of American attitudes toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War. However, Kennan felt that American policy makers misunderstood what he meant by "containment," as American policy makers tend to do when they have an agenda.
Read the Yahoo! obituary and the text of the "Long Telegram"
There is a lot more to Kennan that the "Long Telegram." I especially like this quote from 1948, when Kennan was head of the US State Department Policy Planning Staff:
We have about 50 percent of the world's wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population ... In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.
I heard of Kennan's death from the Los Angeles Times today. I was kind of shocked. I had no idea that Kennan was still alive. He was 101. I would like to have met him.
The Los Angeles also provided this quote:
I am startled to note the bleakness of the impressions of my own country ... I view the United States of these last years of the 20th century as essentially a tragic country, endowed with magnificent natural resources which it is rapidly wasting and exhausting, and with an intellectual and artisitic intelligentsia of great talent and originality of which the dominant political forces of the country have little understanding or regard. Its voice is normally silenced or outshouted by the commercial media. It is probably condemned to remain indefinitely, like the Russian intelligentsia in the 19th century, a helpless spectator of the disturbing course of a nation's life.
A few months before the invasion of Iraq, Kennan said:
[War] has a momentum of its own, and it carries you away from all thoughtful intentions when you get into it. Today, if we went into Iraq, like the president would like us to do, you know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end.
Rest in peace, George F. Kennan.