Strategies of Containment Quotes

“This, in a nutshell, was the threat: that having committed itself to maintaining the existing distribution of power in the world, the United States could not allow challenges to that distribution even to appear to succeed against its will, because perceptions of power could be as important as the real thing.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy during the Cold War

“I can’t take communism nor can you, but to cross this bridge I would hold hands with the Devil.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy during the Cold War

“safety depends,” Kennan told a National War College audience in December 1948, on our ability to establish a balance among the hostile or undependable forces of the world: To put them where necessary one against the other; to see that they spend in conflict with each other, if they must spend it at all, the intolerance and violence and fanaticism which might otherwise be directed against us, that they are thus compelled to cancel each other out and exhaust themselves in internecine conflict in order that the constructive forces, working for world stability, may continue to have the possibility of life.13”
― John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy during the Cold War

“The alternative Kennan described as the “particularized” approach. It was “skeptical of any scheme for compressing international affairs into legalist concepts. It holds that the content is more important than the form, and will force its way through any formal structure which is placed upon it. It considers that the thirst for power is still dominant among so many peoples that it cannot be assuaged or controlled by anything but counter-force.” Particularism would not reject the idea of joining with other governments to preserve world order, but to be effective such alliances would have to be based “upon real community of interest and outlook, which is to be found only among limited groups of governments, and not upon the abstract formalism of universal international law or international organization.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy during the Cold War