George Kennan por Vasco Rato

(No Independente) Aproveita o que interessa do pai da estratégia da guerra fria mas esquece-se que:

Via Economist: "He wanted America to withdraw from its public advocacy of democracy and human rights: "this whole tendency to see ourselves as the centre of political enlightenment and as teachers...strikes me as unthought-through, vainglorious, and undesirable" Behind this ...was the old George Kennan who had always advocated caution, subtley and patience in the use of power, without shirlness or pushiness..."

Via Chicago Tribune:

"(...) As today's neoconservatives praise Kennan for his call to arms against the Soviet Union, they miss the deeper and darker conservatism that motivated him.Kennan belonged to a conservative tradition that dated back to and celebrated the 18th Century world, an era when conservatives sounded like the political philosopher Edmund Burke, not today's Straussians. Kennan desired a world of fixed hierarchies, in which wise statesman acted on behalf of subjects, not one in which politicians followed popular polls. He called himself "an expatriate in his own time," more suited to the 18th Century than the 20th or 21st, even though he would hardly have prospered in such a time, being born to immigrants in the provinces.
(...)
His call for "realism" in foreign relations--acting solely on the basis of national interest--was a plea for the fickle American public to leave diplomacy to diplomats like himself better able to discern the country's interests.This realism led him to propose "containing" the Soviet Union through the application of "counter-pressure" in the two writings that catapulted him to fame, his "Long Telegram" of 1946 and "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" in 1947. (...) He quickly complained that containment became too militaristic and too political for reasonable men like himself to pursue American interests. While no friend of the USSR, he envisioned an era of coexistence, where superpowers opposed each other without risking mutual destruction. For this reason, he criticized the accelerating arms race. Realism amounted to self-preservation of a nation, but also of elite prerogatives to shape policy.

(...) He opposed the American war in Vietnam because he doubted that the nation could ever become a democracy. Besides, he added, no direct U.S. interests were at stake.

Kennan's last published statement, a little-noticed 2002 interview appearing in a weekly for Washington insiders, applied this same logic to Iraq. He castigated President Bush for pushing the nation to war and congressional Democrats for not slowing the president down. (...) Saddam Hussein, though dictatorial, did not threaten American interests directly--and besides, were Iraqis really likely to end up with anyone better?

(...) As the Bush administration seeks to bring democracy to some parts of the world where it is least known, its diplomats have tried to associate Kennan's ideas with their plans to radically remake the Middle East through war, nation-building and the export of democracy. These appeals show just how far conservatism has evolved. One of the last words to associate with Kennan is "neo." Rather than remaking the future around American ideas, he sought to conserve a bygone world, even if it was a world he had never known."