!['In Search of Today’s George Kennan'](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/5a3e922cf6b9a40001bc2d70/60be820ee58668d93f055efe_YreZ0Gtz__so_SzqYdoJJjl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBWpnB4YU4myT9-8UqDpoJyK.png)
‘America is desperate for the kind of strategic nous Kennan once personified.’
‘In 1947 X penned his history-changing “Sources of Soviet Conduct” in Foreign Affairs.’
- ‘The piece, which crystallised America’s cold war containment strategy, was the making of George F Kennan’s life-long reputation as a master of geopolitics.’
‘The Kennan we need today is someone who would be clear-eyed about the world America faces.’
- ‘It is just as rapidly changing as it was in 1947.’
‘Kennan helped Washington grasp that the Soviet Union was the same old paranoid Russia behind a Leninist mask.’
- ‘It was “impervious to reason” but sensitive to force.’
‘Kennan provided a framework to break through the bitter divide between those who believed America should return to its prewar isolationism, and those who believed the USSR was itching for a dramatic showdown with the capitalist west.’
- ‘Neither was true. Either path would have been disastrous.’
- ‘Kennan’s crisp analytical mind sidelined both schools.’
‘He was later to regret the indiscriminate use of his doctrine — most egregiously in Vietnam.’
- ‘But he earned his spurs as the architect of a doctrine that won the cold war.’
‘America today faces a more complicated global picture.’
- ‘Most of the foreign policy establishment sees China as America’s real 21st-century rival.’
- ‘Russia is still Russia but it is far more easily containable than during the cold war.
‘China, on the other hand, poses a new kind of headache.’
- ‘Unlike the Soviet Union, China’s economy is deeply intermeshed with the global supply chain.’
- ‘It owns more than $1tn of American debt.’
- ‘And it is capable of blunting America’s technological edge.’
‘Containment makes little sense when your prosperity is so intertwined.’
- ‘A trade war is self-defeating.’
- ‘Military confrontation is unthinkable, though deterrence must be maintained.’
‘What can be done?’
‘America is desperate for the kind of strategic nous Kennan once personified.’
- ‘A few years ago we may have looked to people such as Zbigniew Brzezinski or Henry Kissinger to offer some kind of answer.’
- ‘The first is dead and the second places too high a value on his access to Trump, Putin, Xi Jinping and others, to risk plain talk.’
‘We need new minds.’
- ‘All of us in Washington can point to dozens of smart foreign policy specialists in their own fields.’
‘But where is the grand strategist?’