from Paris in March 1947, ‘there has been a climate of indubitable and growing malaise in Paris, and perhaps all over Europe, as if the French people, or all European people, expected something to happen, or, worse, expected nothing to happen.’ The European continent, as she had noted a few months before, was slowly entering a new ice age. George Kennan would have agreed. In a Policy Planning Staff paper six weeks later he suggested that the real problem was not Communism, or if so then only indirectly. The true source of the European malaise was the effects of war and what Kennan diagnosed as
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