George F. Kennan

Historical assessment

John Lewis Gaddis, along with Michael Hogan and Melvyn Leffler, has helped establish a positive image of Kennan's vision of containment, a strategy he calls "strongpoint containment." {{fn|30}} In this view, Kennan called on the U.S. to use economic aid and covert action to shore up the balance of power in the strategically important industrialized nations of Western Europe and Japan. By doing so, the U.S. could create a balance of power that would contain Soviet influence and leave it to decline in isolation from the rest of the world. Gaddis has distinguished Kennan's approach from the less workable policy of "global containment", which Truman, Acheson, Eisenhower, and Dulles later adopted. Global containment, in contrast to strongpoint containment, drew the U.S. into unnecessary Third World conflicts and into an arms race with the Soviet Union.

Related Topics:
John Lewis Gaddis - Michael Hogan - Melvyn Leffler - Balance of power

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Cold War revisionist scholars, particularly Walter L. Hixson, disagree with this positive image. {{fn|31}} They argue that Kennan was a visceral anticommunist whose work between 1946 and 1948 contributed to U.S. hegemony rather than a balance of power. Irrespective of Kennan's attempts to clarify the "Mr. X" piece after its publication, his definition of strongpoint containment is seen to have been so broad in the key, early years of the Cold War that it resulted in global containment. Anders Stephanson joins Hixson among Kennan's critics, arguing that, regardless his plans for "disengagement" in later years, Kennan's advice during the period 1945?1948 made a neutral, disarmed Germany impossible, thereby helping to lay the foundation for a Europe divided between the two blocs. {{fn|32}}

Related Topics:
Walter L. Hixson - Anders Stephanson

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