<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML//EN"> <html> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> <meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 2.0"> <title>Zinn Forum Comment on George Kennan</title> </head> <body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" link="#FF0000"> <blockquote> <blockquote>   Zinn Forum Comment on George Kennan <a href="weluser.htm">Back to the Welcome User Page</a>   Yes, Kennan was certainly one of the most important, perhaps the most important (Dean Acheson was another) theoreticians of the Cold War, early on. He was head of the State Department planning staff until 1950. And Noam Chomsky quotes him often from a study he did for the State Dept. planning staff in 1948, where Kennan says the US has 50% of the world's wealth with only 6% of the population, and therefore will be the object of envy, and so the U.S. must maintain that inequality, and in order to do that it must dispense with sentimentality and idealism and get real.  He was the author of a famous unsigned article in  FOREIGN AFFAIRS laying out the strategy of "containment" of the Soviet Union, which he later claimed was misinterpreted as calling for military action, while he really was calling for political and economic tactics,  and a waiting game, on the supposition the Soviet Union would ultimately collapse from within. In recent years he has been a "dove" on matters of foreign policy, criticizing the arms buildup of the United States, saying it was based on a made-up threat of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, and was a huge waste of U.S. wealth, while at the same time posin great dangers to world peace. </blockquote> </blockquote> </body> </html>