A new biography of George Kennan ( George Kennan: An American Life, by John Lewis Gaddis) has been published and it reminds us that the man who recommended to President Truman the Containment Policy and who shaped it throughout his famed State Department career, lived to see the Soviet Union dissolve, as he had predicted many years before. In the New York Review of Books, in 1999, he said this about american exceptionalism, a doctrine some of our Republican worthies still espouse:
"This whole tendency to see ourselves as the center of political enlightenment and as teachers to a great part of the rest of the world strikes me as unthought-through, vainglorious, and undesireable. If you think that our life here at home has meritorious aspects worthy of emulation by peoples elsewhere, the best way to recommend them is, as John Quincy Adams maintained, not by preaching at others but by the force of example. I could not agree more."
Try explaining this to the kooks. The statement is obviously valid but the right will never get it.
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