Although best known as the father of “containment,” the mainstay of American Cold War policy, Kennan first revealed his radical decentralist tendencies in his 1993 book entitled Around the Cragged Hill. “We are…a monster country…And there is a real question as to whether ‘bigness’ in a body politic is not an evil in itself, quite aside from the policies pursued in its name.” He also noted “a certain lack of modesty in the national self-image” of the U.S. He proposed decentralizing the U.S. into a “dozen constituent republics” including New England, the Middle Atlantic states, the Middle West, the Northwest, the Southwest (including Hawaii), Texas, the Old South, Florida, Alaska, New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles. “To these entities I would accord a larger part of the present federal powers than one might suspect – large enough, in fact, to make most people gasp.”
He was a realist with respect to foreign policy. Can he also be considered to be a part of the Old Right?
John Lukacs, George Keenan: A Study of Character
C-SPAN presentation
George F. Kennan and the Origins of Containment, 1944-1946: The Kennan-Lukacs Correspondence
George F. Kennan & Jonh Lukacs
Lukacs and Kennan: Reflections on a Friendship
Related:
Not So Huddled Masses: Multiculturalism and Foreign Policy by Scott McConnell
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