The great Kennan, long considered the most important diplomat in the 20th century played a crucial roll in US battle against Communism during the Cold War.
As US Ambassador to the Soviet Union in the early 1950's Kennan's famous letter to DC outlining the imperial aspirations of Communism in the USSR single-handedly set in motion political, military, and economic warfare that luckily ended without bloodshed.
In a short article Kennan wrote for the New York Times on October 28, 2002, he sharply debunks beliefs that the Republican GOP "won the war."
He even continues to call such rhetoric "intrinsically silly," and "childish." Kennan explains how those living in the USSR in the years leading up to the war noticed its brewing lack of interest in domestic affairs and i's ignited interest in the global spread of their ideologies.
Kennan also sites events including 1960's U2 spy plane drowning and growing anti-American sentiment in Russia.
I found this article to be quite interesting. Notably, it was written by Kennan in 2002, post 911 but pre Iraq War. This may indicate that the Republican Party was trying to legitimize itself and its case for entering Iraq, citing the end of the Cold War as evidence of previous success. However, Kennan quickly debunks the notion that the Republican party was the primary force in the Soviet breakdown. He writes "[i]t is not a fit occasion for pretending that the end of it was a great triumph for anyone, and particularly not one for which any American political party could properly claim principal credit." Rather, the USSR was flawed to begin with and financial strain in the 1980's was the final trigger of its collapse.
ReplyDeleteThe following article shows Kennan’s skepticism about entering Iraq: http://hnn.us/articles/997.html