DON'T PANIC

For a nation struggling to know what to make of the newly dawned nuclear age, Kennan’s prescription seemed a firm and reassuring guide. It is not too much to say that his analysis, greatly amplified and expanded beyond his wildest dreams, led to the wars in Korea and Vietnam; to various lesser conflicts and adventures then and since; and even to the country’s ongoing entanglements in Iraq and Afghanistan. For all this — in speech after speech and interview after interview — Kennan expressed profound regret. He had intended to argue for political containment of Soviet ambitions, he insisted, until Russian Communism could collapse of its own internal contradictions (as, indeed, it eventually did). Instead, Kennan’s words helped prompt the abandonment of the settled understanding of American foreign policy that had prevailed since John Quincy Adams’s day — that the country “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy” — in favor of a view of America as the world’s policeman. The transformation, accomplished bit by bit over many decades, was ultimately so complete as to create a country that Kennan himself, near the end of his long and lucid life, confessed he no longer recognized.