Tara McKelvey considers how Cold War policy relates to today’s nuclear threats:
Throughout his life, George Kennan felt a great love for the Russian people. He was an admirer of Anton Chekhov’s plays and enjoyed taking long walks in the Russian countryside. However, he had no illusions about their despotic leaders. During the Stalinist trials, Kennan worked as an interpreter for the U.S. ambassador and witnessed “the dictator’s madness and demonic suspicion,” writes Nicholas Thompson in his new book, The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War
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Kennan’s understanding of the complexity of the Soviet Union and the savage brutality of Stalin led him to create an enduring doctrine known as “containment,” in the late 1940s which “was used more than any other to describe America’s Cold War policy,” Thompson writes. The strategy was seen as a way to avoid a nuclear world war, and it continues as a theme in U.S. foreign policy today, with analysts relying on containment as a way of dealing with possible threats from Iran and North Korea.
