George F. Kennan on the end of the Cold War

In this 1992 Op-Ed piece published by George F. Kennan we see a re-iteration of the same ideas he put forth in the beginning of the cold war in his "X" article. This article is a response by Kennan to the Republican Party's campaign claim that they won the cold war. Kennan finds this idea preposterous, saying "[t]he suggestion that any Administration had the power to influence decisively the course of a tremendous domestic political upheaval in another great country on another side of the globe is simply childish." Kennan stipulates, as he predicted in his X article almost 50 years earlier, that the Soviet Union would be the cause of its own downfall. Kennan goes on to put forth the idea that the "belligerent and threatening tone" in which the U.S. government carried out military preparations against did "hasten" but rather delayed the change that eventually undermined the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980's. It is rather interesting to see in this article the continuation of many of the same ideas and positions Kennan had 50 years earlier.

http://www.nytimes.com/1992/10/28/opinion/the-gop-won-the-cold-war-ridiculous.html