George Frost Kennan was an American diplomat and historian. He was best known as an advocate of a policy of containment of Soviet expansion during the Cold War. He lectured widely and wrote scholarly histories of the relations between the USSR and the United States. He was also one of the group of foreign policy elders known as "The Wise Men".
Kennan in 1947
Kennan c. 1950
On the desk is George F. Kennan's newly published book, Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin, shown here at the Atomic Energy Commission in Oak Ridge in 1961.
Belgrade
Containment was a geopolitical strategic foreign policy pursued by the United States during the Cold War to prevent the spread of communism after the end of World War II. The name was loosely related to the term cordon sanitaire, which was containment of the Soviet Union in the interwar period.
United States Information Service propaganda poster distributed in Asia depicting Juan dela Cruz ready to defend the Philippines from the threat of communism
A 1962 nuclear explosion as seen through the periscope of a US Navy submarine. The goal of containment was to 'contain' communism without a nuclear war.