Cold War | The United States Should Contain Soviet Expansion
George F. Kennan was in charge of long-range planning for the State Department following World War II. In July 1947, having recently returned from the Soviet Union where he had worked at the U.S. embassy in Moscow, Kennan published a letter, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” under the pseudonym Mr. X in the quarterly journal Foreign Affairs.
In the following viewpoint, excerpted from that letter, Kennan argues that a fundamental antagonism between communism and capitalism rule out any lasting cooperation with the Soviet Union; the Soviet Union is a rival, not a partner. Kennan...
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