George F. Kennan Quotes
It cannot be too often reiterated that this Government does not possess the weapons which would be needed to enable it to meet head-on the threat to national independence presented by the communist elements in foreign countries. This poses an extremely difficult problem as to the measures which our Government can take to prevent the communists from achieving success in the countries where resistance is lowest.
Indeed, many of the countries went communist as Kennan predicted.
George F. Kennan, 1904-2005, Historian & U.S. Ambassador to Russia and Yugoslavia, U.S. Foreign Policy: Review of Current Trends, February 24, 1948
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This quotation illustrates the derogatory and disrespectful attitude that many high level American officials then had towards Arab leaders. No one objected to or reprimanded Symmes for his use of the word “mongrels”. And he was the State Departments leading expert on the Middle East and Arab Cultures. In the photo, Symmes is the gentlemen on the right.
Like many in the 1920s, Dewar saw the Communist Soviet Union as the biggest potential risk to peace. However, although the Russian leaders constantly castigated the West, they did not have a large military, and were for the most part highly anti-war as they saw war as the product of Capitalistic competition and the tool of the aristocracy. They had little military equipment and almost no training or officer corps with which to build any Army. Germany in contrast had the skill, experience, officers, a history of aggression, and huge resentment over what they considered their humiliating WWI defeat and peace terms. They would start WWII, not Russia.
The British suspected that the Turks of Anatolia were complicit with Bolshevism
Vladimir Lenin
There were many who thought that the Russians would view the Mutual Security Act as aggressive and they might respond with some kind of aggressive retaliation and this could lead to war. Others felt that containment would reduce the likelihood of war.
This quotation illustrates White’s extreme naivety about Stalinist Russia. At the time the Soviet Union had been backing communist insurgencies blatantly in China, Greece, and Korea for example. Most historians agree that White passed classified information to the Russians. He was accused of being a Communist, but there was never any evidence of that. Some people believe that he was a spy for the Russians and committed espionage, but others disagree observing that White was very much his own man and felt that much information that was classified never should have been. White substituted his own judgment, it is believed, about what could be given to the Russians. He was an admirer of what Russian socialism had accomplished economically, educationally and medically since the 1917 revolution deposing the Czar. Russia had been a valuable military ally, which had taken the brunt of both military and civilian casualties in WWII. White’s economics were certainly not Marxist but very much Keynesian. He was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee where he was accused of being a Communist which he denied (see {634907}). He died of a heart attack 3 days later.
This was only 6 years after the Russian Revolution. Communist Russia had extended its influence to much of the world without firing a shot. To many, communism looked like the future. The Russian inability to make communism work economically in the next 70 years destroyed most of its influence.
Assad was the autocratic ruler of Syria. In the second decade of the 21st century, a number of dissident groups started a rebellion. The Unied States and most of the EU countruies wanted to assist the rebels as Assad had been butchering his own people to put down the rebellion. Russia, in addition to having an allaince with Assad for a Navel Base in Syria, was very coincerned about the people replacing Assad if the revolution succeeded. The coalition of rebels was not at all a coalition and there was considerable fighting and hatred between them ISIS was one of the stringest groups and the Russians were worried that they might take over so they supported Assad and in 2016 actually intervened using Russian air power to support the Government troops. That turned the tide and teh rebellion was prevented from succeeding. The Russian leadership was distressed that the United States did not take their concerns seriouly enough and indeed after they were in teh fight, the United States had to deal with them about the fate of Syria, so it was a successful tactic.
Kennan was one of the few people who saw the possibility of Soviet rule of Eastern Europe crumbling as it did almost 50 years later. Most Americans thought that the Soviet Union was so militarily entrenched that they would never be ousted short of war.
Greek invaders were marching on Istanbul
George Frost Kennan was an American diplomat and historian. He was best known as an advocate of a policy of containment of Soviet expansion during the Cold War. He lectured widely and wrote scholarly histories of the relations between the USSR and the United States. He was also one of the group of foreign policy elders known as "The Wise Men".
