If we are seeking guidance from the past on how to make foreign policy decisions in a deliberative rather than improvisational fashion, preferably like past decisions that we now know proved prescient, George Kennan deserves special notice. Kennan was the chief architect of the doctrinal framework for American strategy in the Cold War that came to be called “containment.” His central insight, made public in his “Sources of Soviet Conduct” (1947), was to turn the ideological prophecy of Marxism-Leninism on its head, for he argued that communism, not capitalism, was sown with the seeds of its
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