The End of Containment

Matt Welch has a short and sweet tribute to George Kennan, a primary architect of American foreign policy in the Cold War. The man was, is, a legend and a man at least partly responsible for containing Soviet expansion after World War II. Certainly, the policy of containment had major flaws (like, oh, the fiasco that Vietnam turned out to be), but it could be argued that it did what it was intended to do: halt the spread of Communism in Asia and Europe by demonstrating American resolve.