George Kennan who in his Long Telegram of February 22, 1946 said the US should contain Soviet Russia and later opposed the cold war, Nato and the arms race

"Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented." In his foreword to the book The Pathology of Power by Norman Cousins (1987).



"I think this is the beginning of the new Cold War. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves." On NATO expansion, 1997.

"He [George Kennan] was absolutely not pleased by the events of the late 1980s. He thought Ronald Reagan was the most dangerous leader of the cold war, despite the fact that Reagan actually came close to implementing Kennan's recommendations from the late 1940s. The cold war ended as Kennan had predicted it would, but it was extremely difficult to get him to see this. When the Berlin wall finally came down and Germany finally reunified, he wrote in his diary that nothing good can come of this. The wall came down, he wrote, because of East German youths lusting after the fleshpots of West Berlin. He never accepted his own vindication." John Lewis Gaddis, in his biography of Kennan.

George Kennan "claimed that containment was meant to be economic and political, not military. He was one of the main architects of the post-first world war Marshall Plan. He opposed the formation of NATO". Robert, Lord Skidelsky

I wrote the following in April 2022.


"I doubt if the cold war and arms race were necessary. George Kennan thought not. But that was a struggle for or against Leninism. I want Russia to be a pariah state but I predict a pointless cold war based on fears that Putin is Hitler. In fact Stalin, Nasser, Milosovic, Saddam were not Hitler. I don't think even Hitler was Hitler if by that you mean a crazy man bent on conquering Europe. He was bent on undoing the consequences of WW1 in Central and Eastern Europe and conquering Russia, reducing Russians to helots or starving them to death, which was bad enough. I heard an intelligent friend tell me Putin would reach Paris if it were not for Nato."


I was right but since then the world faces a man who does resemble Hitler in Netanyahu in a lot of respects, aided and abetted by US President Trump