What is emerging as a result is a long-term struggle for global power and influence that could easily outlast the first Cold War. Especially when it comes to the challenge from China-which has replaced the Soviet Union as the major geopolitical threat to the United States-politicians on both sides of the aisle see political gain in out-hawking each other by calling for a tougher stance against Beijing.
Yet almost no debate or discussion about these policies is taking place in Washington. Because public posturing is mostly what we’re seeing as the United States finds itself spiraling toward a new kind of cold war with both China and Russia. The so-called Stalin Note from March 1952-an offer from Moscow to hold talks over the shape of post-World War II Europe-showed that the United States had ignored the possibilities of peace accomplished through “ negotiation, and especially real negotiation, in distinction from public posturing (italics original),” Kennan wrote in 1999.
A decade after that 44-year conflict ended, Kennan, the somewhat dovish father of the United States’ Cold War containment strategy, contended in a letter to his more hawkish biographer, John Lewis Gaddis, that while Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was alive, an early way out might have been possible.
Even at the advanced age of 94, George Kennan was still arguing that the Cold War hadn’t been inevitable-that it could have been avoided or, at least, ameliorated.
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