I'm now reading an interview book with this most excellent gentleman, Alexandre de Marenches [1] (the book was published in the late 1980s, the gentleman has passed away in the meantime), who used to be head of for French foreign intelligence services in the 1970s (among many other things he did in his life). Even back then he was saying pretty much the same thing, i.e. that in the whole free West there were at most 10 people who really understood diplomacy and how geopolitics works, and Kissinger was one of them.

Back to the current intellectual nous (or lack thereof) of the current State Department, is telling when you compare how much Kennan intellectually prepared himself prior to him getting posted to Moscow in the 1930s to the low level of intellectual discourse coming from present-day State Department luminaries.

Kennan actually took a dive in the dark and visited inland Russia just to experience it and its people, and all this during Stalin's times, during the purges. Something tells me a guy like McFaul (former US ambassador to Moscow) would have never done that, has never done that, but that hasn't stopped him from writing a book on Russia which is taken seriously by some powers that be.

As you say, the only hope for the West, from an intellectual coupled with an understanding of geopolitics pov, comes from the Pentagon people.

Later edit: More on the Marenches gentleman, who was just a very interesting guy: at some point during the interview (this was happening back in 1986) he did mention as an actual potential threat for the West the possibility of the Shiites getting control of the whole area from the Mediterranean all the way to the border with Pakistan, i.e. Iran managing to extend its control over Iraq and Syria and "get" to the Shiites who live in Lebanon. That is just what has happened, more or less, ever since the West lost the plot in the Syrian Civil War, never mind the whole Iraq War debacle (caused by guys like Rove and his friends).

Also, and related to the tech world and this forum, towards the end of the 1970s the same Marenches made up a list of 8 rare metals which he was regarding as essential for modern industrial development (I'm too lazy to copy-paste the list in there, cobalt was part of the list, that I remember). He soon realised that the Russians has direct access to all those 8 metals, while the US and the free West more generally speaking had direct access to only 4 out of those 8. After he quit his job at the helm of the French foreign intelligence services in 1981 he actually presented Reagan with that list and with a map of where each metal was more heavily concentrated/located. Reagan kindly asked Marenches to hand him that list, which Marenches of course did.

Prior to that, the same Marenches and French foreign intelligence services were instrumental in setting up the 1978 Battle of Kolwezi, in Southern Congo. It so happens that the region around Kolwezi is very reach in cobalt, as can be seen in maps from this official German website [3]. The US authorities only now realise that they can't let Congo slip [4], but guys like Marenches and Kennan and Kissinger were ahead of the game by decades.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_de_Marenches

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kolwezi

[3] https://www.bgr.bund.de/EN/Themen/Min_rohstoffe/Downloads/st...

[4] https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...