Question

George Kennan (author of the long telegram) and Paul Nitze (author of NSC-68) had very different views of the Soviets, their intentions, and what U.S. foreign policy should be in the late 1940s/early 1950s. Discuss in detail the views of both Kennan and Nitze. Explain how/why their viewpoints differed from one another and why that mattered.

Answer 1

George kennen-

Noting the large-scale Mexican immigration to the South western united states,Kennan said in 2002 there were "unmistakable evidences of a growing differentiation between the cultures, respectively, of large southern and southwestern regions of this country, on the one hand", and those of "some northern regions". In the former, "the very culture of the bulk of the population of these regions will tend to be primarily Latin American in nature rather than what is inherited from earlier American traditions ... Could it really be that there was so little of merit [in America] that it deserves to be recklessly trashed in favor of a polyglot mix-mash?"Mayers argues that Kennan throughout his career represented the "tradition of militant nativism" that resembled or even exceeded the know Nothings of the 1850s. Mayers adds that Kennan also believed American women had too much power.

2 Paul Nitze

Ever since 1950, when as head of the policy planning staff of the State Department he was principal author of a study on the Soviet threat, Mr. Nitze took a dark view of Soviet intentions, seeing in the Kremlin a drive for world hegemony.

That study A known as N.S.C.-68 A which conceived of deterrence in military rather than diplomatic terms A warned against sole reliance on the nuclear deterrent and urged a buildup of conventional forces. Its precepts became a cornerstone of American policy. In succeeding years, when the American nuclear monopoly was broken, Mr. Nitze warned regularly that the Soviet Union was trying to achieve preponderant nuclear strength as a tool of blackmail, or, in the worst case, to win an all-out war.

Later, when Mr. Nitze took his walk in the woods near Geneva to work out an arms deal, he confounded his critics, who considered him too hard-line because of his pessimistic views of the Russians.