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Deja Vu In 1946: Reinterpreting The Origins Of Containment, Jonathan Barry

Honors Theses

For nearly fifty years, mainstream Cold War historians have credited George Kennan with ushering in a new age in foreign policy. Kennan did, after all, send a "Long Telegram" from Moscow on February 22, 1946 that crystallized for the US government a policy of "containing" the Soviet regime. Kennan, a State Department official and expert on Soviet affairs, submitted to Secretary of State James Byrnes an 8,000 word telegram depicting a communist government bent on upholding the expansionist tradition of the Russian czars. He further claimed that "all Soviet efforts on... [an] international plane will be negative and destructive in …