|
|
Article: Theology and the Clash of Civilizations.
- Article from:
- CrossCurrents - The Journal of Addiction and Mental Health
- Article date:
- January 1, 2002
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 Association for Religion and Intellectual Life. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
|
In the 1940s, the most important foreign policy intellectual in the United States was George E Kennan. Kennan, who served briefly in the Truman Administration, was among the first to recognize that the United States could not defeat communism outright but could contain it and the nations infected by it, beginning with the Soviet Union. What came to be called the Cold War seems in retrospect to have been inevitable, but it was not inevitable at all. Instead of the Cold War, the world could all too easily have fought World War Ill. Containment was the bold and politically creative alternative to that war. The 1947 article in Foreign Affairs in which Kennan, writing as "X," ...