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George Frost Kennan (February 16, 1904 - March 17, 2005) was a U.S. diplomat and scholar, who worked in the U.S. foreign service starting in 1926, and later served as Ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1952 and to Yugoslavia in 1960-63.[1] His legacy is closely associated with the initial development of the U.S. "containment" policy toward the Soviet Union.[2] He was also involved in designing the Marshall Plan,[3] which he regarded as integral to his conception of containment.[4]
Among Kennan's influential writings are "The Long Telegram" (1946), presenting his analysis of the Soviet Union's policies at the time[3] and his proposals for how to approach U.S.-Soviet relations, which reportedly became "required reading for hundreds of senior military officers"[5] as well as an influential article in Foreign Affairs, titled "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" (1947), written under the pseudonym "X".[6] Kennan is also known for his decades-long association with the Institute for Advanced Study, which he was invited to join by Manhattan Project nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer.[7]
Kennan has emphasized that the concept of containment as he meant it originally was in regard to political matters rather than to military. As he states in a 1984 lecture, neither he nor others "who knew the Soviet Union well" imagined that the Soviet Union would launch a military attack on any major Western power or Japan.[8] Kennan claimed to be unable to understand why Washington emphasized a military threat from the Soviet Union. He states that though he opposed such interpretations of the situation, the military interpretation prevailed.[8]
References
- ↑ "George Frost Kennan." Institute for Advanced Study. Archived 2024-07-20.
- ↑ "Kennan and Containment, 1947". United States Department of State: Office of the Historian. Archived from the original on 2024-10-07.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 "Remembering George F. Kennan" (2007-03-01). Wilson Center. Archived from the original on 2024-07-09.
- ↑ George F. Kennan (1996). At a Century's Ending: Reflections, 1982-1995: 'Flashbacks (1985)' (p. 38). New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
- ↑ "The Long Telegram". Institute for Advanced Study. Archived from the original on 2024-08-06.
- ↑ "X" (George F. Kennan). The Sources of Soviet Conduct, vol. Vol. 65, No. 4 (Spring, 1987), pp. 852-868. Foreign Affairs. doi: 10.2307/20043098 [HUB]
- ↑ Frank Costigliola (2010). "George F. Kennan and the Institute" Institute for Advanced Study. Archived from the original on 2024-07-20.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 “The concept which I had been so bold as to put forward in 1947, had been addressed to what I and others had believed was a danger of the political expansion of Stalinist Communism—and especially the danger that local Communists, inspired and controlled by Moscow, might acquire dominant positions in the great defeated industrial countries of Germany and Japan. I did not believe, nor did others who knew the Soviet Union well, that there was the slightest danger of a Soviet military attack against the major Western powers or Japan. This was, in other words, a political danger, not a military one. And the historical record bears out that conclusion. Yet for reasons I have never fully understood, by 1949 a great many people in Washington—in the Pentagon, the White House, and even the Department of State—seemed to have come to the conclusion that there was a real danger of the Soviets unleashing, in the fairly near future, what would have been World War III.”
George F. Kennan (1996). At a Century's Ending: Reflections, 1982-1995: 'America's Far-Eastern Policy at the Height of the Cold War (1984)' (pp. 93-4). New York: W.W. Norton & Company.