2/2: #PRC: George Kennan needed. Richard Fontaine @RHFontaine; president, Center for a New American Security (CNAS) @CNASdc.
Jan 29, 2022, 01:27 AM
Photo: George Frost Kennan (February 16, 1904 – March 17, 2005)
By late 1948, Kennan became confident that positive dialogue could commence with the Soviet government. His proposals were discounted by the Truman administration and Kennan's influence was marginalized, particularly after Dean Acheson was appointed Secretary of State in 1949. Soon thereafter, U.S. Cold War strategy assumed a more assertive and militaristic quality, causing Kennan to lament what he believed was an abrogation of his previous assessments.
. . . Noting the large-scale Mexican immigration to the Southwestern United States, Kennan said in 2002 there were "unmistakable evidences of a growing differentiation between the cultures, respectively, of large southern and southwestern regions of this country, on the one hand", and those of "some northern regions". In the former, "the very culture of the bulk of the population of these regions will tend to be primarily Latin American in nature rather than what is inherited from earlier American traditions ... Could it really be that there was so little of merit [in America] that it deserves to be recklessly trashed in favor of a polyglot mix-mash?" It's argued that Kennan represented throughout his career the "tradition of militant nativism" that resembled or even exceeded the Know Nothings of the 1850s. Kennan also believed American women had too much power.
2/2: #PRC: George Kennan needed. Richard Fontaine @RHFontaine; president, Center for a New American Security (CNAS) @CNASdc.
Richard Fontaine, @RHFontaine; president, Center for a New American Security (CNAS) @CNASdc.