‘There are more important things than where the border runs’: the other side of George Kennan’s containment theory
Year: 2016

Washington DC from the US Embassy in Moscow. The telegram, in turn, resulted from Kennan’s frustration with American policy-makers who still took the Soviet Union for an ally. As a result, a signiﬁcant part of the article was focused on providing a detailed explanation of why Stalin’s Russia should be seen as a potential enemy. This is what both Putin and current advocates of containment in the West have in mind: The world as we thought – or at least spoke – of it since 1989 has changed; and in