Question

the long telegram February 1946 how does Kennan classify the Soviet regime

Answer 1

What Kennan did, in his famous “Long Telegram” from Moscow in February 1946 and through a briefly anonymous article in Foreign Affairs in 1947 was to lay out a third path between the extremes of war and appeasement—containment. Stalin, he said, is not Hitler. He does not have a fixed timetable for aggression. He is determined to dominate Europe and, if possible, the world, but there is no hurry about it. If the US and its allies could be patient and contain Soviet expansionism without war or appeasement over a sufficiently long period of time the Russians would change their priorities. If we could develop a coherent strategy on non-provocative resistance, this third path would lead to a settlement with the Soviet Union or even to the break-up of the Soviet Union. Kennan foresaw internal contradictions within the Soviet system that would probably cause it to fall apart. The first major initiative that he proposed was the Marshall Plan, providing American aid for the recovery of Western Europe so that Europe would not despair and feel it had to look to the Soviet Union as an alternative.