Kennan characterizes himself as a realist distrustful of absolutes in an ever-changing, increasingly insecure world. Kennan in fact opposed all three, as both Mearsheimer’s introduction and John Lewis Gaddis’s recent biography of Kennan have demonstrated.
In part the misconception is due to the occasional absolutism of Kennan’s own phrasing, as in his calling for “a policy of firm containment, designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counter-force at every point.” In part, it is due to Walter Lippmann’s dubbing Kennan’s concept of containment a “strategic monstrosity.” But in the main, the misconception derives from confusing Kennan’s model of containment with later historical developments: the assumption that Russia sought military conquest, the terrifying rigidity of the reciprocal arms buildup and even, in some quarters, serious consideration of the “first use” of the atomic or hydrogen bomb as governmental policy. Mearsheimer, is to become aware of how Kennan’s original concept of containment was later to be both misunderstood and abused.Ī popular image persists of Kennan as a hawkish academic prepared to justify the buildup of military arsenals and even to risk brinksmanship in the service of containing Soviet power. However, to reread the entirety of American Diplomacy in 2012, with the aid of a superb new introduction by John J. Thousands of undergraduate Political Science majors and would-be governmental officials have read American Diplomacy (1950), or at least “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” the Foreign Affairs article that in 1947 first set forth the argument for containment. George Kennan’s formulation of the policy of “containment” of Soviet Russia has by common consent been the most influential force in American foreign relations during the second half of the twentieth century.
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