ABSTRACT
Ever since the dramatic, revolutionary upheavals began in Central and Eastern Europe and, within the Soviet Union in 1989, the American foreign policy establishment has been searching for a new “Mr. X”—a new foreign policy guru who, emulating the original Mr. X, George F. Kennan, will set down on paper the broad outlines of a national security doctrine designed to guide American statesmen in the next decade and beyond. Kennan is credited with being the theoretical “father” of the “containment” doctrine which, arguably, served as a broad policy guide to every presidential administration from Truman through Reagan. Kennan’s “long telegram” from Moscow in 1946 and his seminal article in Foreign Affairs the following year, examined the nature of the Soviet military and political threat to the West and advocated a policy of “long term, patient but firm and vigilant containment” of Soviet/Russian expansionist tendencies. 1
