George Frost Kennan

By the way, just a side note, you were right.

It was George Kennan, not John McCain, of course.

George Kennan, yes.

Yeah, yeah, the great diplomats.

So now we got it square.

Catastrophic.

And as some very prominent diplomats like George Kennan and stuff said, this is stupid.

We should not be pressing his buttons this way.

It would be the equivalent if Russia started arming the Mexicans.

And so at the end of-

Let's just pretend we had wise men in Washington, DC right now, that we had people like George Marshall, that we had people, you know, like Averell Harriman, that we had people like, you know, uh, Geo- George Kennan, that we had wise men, uh, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger.

Let's pretend we had wise men in Washington.

What would they do? Looking back at history, what would a commission, what, what would an approach to this possible, you know, humanity-ending technology, what would the best approach be?

But that's that's why even even thinkers far more kind of orthodox in their thinking than Yaki.

Understood this George Kennan, who I have a whole lot of respect for, as I think people know.

He made that point again and again, and he was criticized for it roundly by, you know, what was then the equivalent of deep state types.

And, you know, Zionist types who just hated the Soviet Union for their own kind of ethno-sectarian reasons.

So I mean, there is an active debate in the US foreign policy community about US foreign policy grand strategy in the early 1990s.

It's very comparable to the debates we had in the '70s around Nixon or the, the f- '40s and '50s, um, at the start of the Cold War, right? It's people in Washington debating, you know, well, the, the existing framework that we use to understand the world, which is containment of the Soviet Union, you know, that's, that's gone, right? The Soviet Union's gone, so what is our framework for the world? I remember reading a quote, somebody once jokingly referring to this in the early '90s as the Kennan sweepstakes.

Who's gonna be the next George Kennan with our new grand strategy for the post-Cold War period? And you know, you start to see this reflected even in official documents.

The Clinton administration, one of the national security strategies was a strategy of enlargement and engagement, right? That was the- that was their grand strategy.

And so the, the notion that starts to take hold pretty quickly is that the US should try and effectively expand the sphere of sort of liberalism globally, whether that's democracy domestically or human rights, or whether that is sort of open free trading, things like opening the WTO to China.

That has to be factored in.

And most of all, I wanna see a Democrat who comes in and says what George Kennan, the famous foreign policy specialist, said in his Long Telegram in 1947, and that is that while we face threats around the world, the place we must begin if we wanna be secure is with the wellsprings of our own strength at home.

We have to make sure we have a good economy.

We may have to make sure we do not have a divided society.