Jim Rickards’ Managing Editor Frank DeVechio and I were sitting on the veranda here on Jekyll Island on a wonderfully warm Tuesday night, sipping on some adult beverages, and talking about just how infantile the U.S. foreign policy establishment is.

I won’t mince words here: they’re a damn disgrace to the country. Diplomacy may be more art than science, but at the very least, you have to be in the room with your adversary. Infantile America (and its European vassals) don’t do that anymore. They’d rather ignore Putin and his formidable Foreign Secretary, Sergei Lavrov, than get in the room and negotiate a peace deal. Ambassadors and embassies were created to get in the room with the people you don’t like, not to squander taxpayer funds on lavish dinner parties with your allies.

At that moment, I thought, “What would George Kennan do?”

Who’s George Kennan, you ask? The man was a Cold War genius of a strategist whose legacy has been buried by those who are embarrassed by it: namely, the current, out-of-its-depth U.S. diplomatic corps.

Let’s look at what Kennan stood for, and why he’d be such an asset to us were he still alive.

Who Was George Kennan?

George F. Kennan died in 2005 at the age of 101. A century of life, half a century of being right. Right about the Soviet Union. Right about the Cold War. Right about containment. And—most hauntingly right now—dead right about NATO expansion.

In case your history teacher missed it, Kennan was the architect of America’s Cold War strategy. In 1946, while stationed in Moscow, he wrote what became known as the “Long Telegram”—a 5,400-word masterclass in understanding your adversary. It was part psychology, part history, and part prophecy. The Soviets, he warned, would never be cooperative partners in a Western-led order. Their Marxist-Leninist ideology, baked into a centuries-old Russian insecurity complex, made them inherently expansionist. But Kennan also understood something America’s trigger-happy policy crowd never did: the Soviet system wasn’t built to last. It would, in time, collapse under the weight of its contradictions—if only the United States could resist the urge to poke the bear.

A year later, writing anonymously as “X” in Foreign Affairs, Kennan laid out a strategy for containing Soviet influence not through endless war or regime change, but through strategic patience. Strength, consistency, and a quiet confidence in the superiority of Western institutions—those were the tools he recommended. Not missiles. Not tanks. Not moral crusades. This came to be known as containment theory.

What Would Kennan Think?

Fast forward to 2025, and one can only imagine Kennan’s horror and disgust at the current state of U.S. foreign policy. Ukraine is a bleeding wound. Russia is more isolated than ever. NATO has swollen into a tax-sucking bloc that seems to exist primarily to justify its expansion. Diplomacy is treated like a weakness. And American officials sound more like Marvel villains than strategists: it’s good vs. evil, democracy vs. autocracy, Putin vs. the world.

Kennan would have wanted no part of it.

He made his opposition to NATO expansion crystal clear in the 1990s, calling the first wave of membership offers to Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic “a tragic mistake.” He warned—presciently—that expanding the alliance eastward would provoke Russian nationalism, undermine reformers in Moscow, and destroy any chance at post-Cold War reconciliation.

Kennan wasn’t defending autocracy. He was defending stability. He knew that pushing military infrastructure to Russia’s borders would be seen as a betrayal of verbal commitments made after the collapse of the USSR. To Moscow, it would confirm their oldest fear: that the West would never accept them, and never stop encircling them.

This wasn’t guesswork. Kennan had spent his entire career studying Russia. He understood that their strategic culture is shaped by centuries of invasion, from Napoleon, Wilhelm II, and Hitler. Security for them doesn’t begin at the border. It starts with buffers—territorial, diplomatic, psychological. To ignore that history in the name of idealism, Kennan believed, was not just foolish. It was dangerous.

When it came to Ukraine, Kennan almost certainly would have argued for neutrality. Not because he wanted to hand Kyiv to Moscow, but because he wanted to spare it from being torn apart. He would have proposed something closer to Finland’s Cold War stance: sovereign, democratic, and non-aligned. You can read here an earlier Rude I wrote about Finland joining NATO. As you can imagine, I wasn’t thrilled about it.

Finland was a state that could trade with both East and West without becoming a proxy for either. In short, Ukraine could have been a bridge. Instead, it’s become a battlefield.

Diplomacy Trumps Morals

Kennan had little patience for those who moralized foreign policy. He understood that turning every international conflict into a holy war guarantees perpetual escalation. By demonizing your adversary, you strip yourself of the ability to engage in effective negotiation. By pretending your side is always right, you close your eyes to the possibility that you might be provoking the very aggression you fear.

Today’s foreign policy elite—what Ben Rhodes once called “The Blob”—would never tolerate a voice like Kennan’s. He believed in diplomacy before drones, negotiation before no-fly zones. He would have rejected today’s foreign policy X complex, where serious issues are debated in memes and moral grandstanding takes the place of sober judgment. He didn’t care for press conferences. He believed that real diplomacy occurred in private, with adults in the room, not influencers chasing retweets.

Perhaps most importantly, Kennan believed that America’s strength came not from its military might, but from its internal coherence. He thought the U.S. should lead by example, with a strong economy, a functional government, and a healthy civic culture. If America could be a beacon, others would follow. But if it tried to impose its values at the barrel of a gun, it would exhaust itself and alienate the world. It’s incredible how prescient Kennan was.

If Kennan Were Alive Today…

What would U.S. foreign policy look like today if Kennan were still alive? For starters, it would be guided by restraint. Russia wouldn’t be treated as an irredeemable rogue state, but as a state actor with legitimate security concerns. Ukraine would likely be a sovereign and safe nation, neutral, neither an outpost of NATO nor a pawn of the Kremlin. Washington would be focused on diplomacy, not domination. Ambassadors would act like statesmen, not salesmen for the military-industrial complex. And, most radically of all, America might stop trying to run the world and start trying to fix itself.

Wrap Up

Kennan warned us, over and over again, that the biggest threat to U.S. power wasn’t a foreign army. It was American hubris. “Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial complex would have to remain, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented,” he said.

Well, the USSR did sink. And rather than dismantling our global war machine, we found a new villain in Putin. That decision is the biggest unforced error of this century. Because for all of Putin’s sins—and there are many—the war in Ukraine was never inevitable. It was built, brick by brick, over three decades of arrogant policy choices that Kennan begged us not to make.

George Kennan isn’t here anymore. But his ideas are. And maybe, just maybe, if we’re willing to listen, we can still pull back from the edge and choose strategy over spectacle. After all, the best way to defeat authoritarianism isn’t through war. It’s by being better. Stronger. More resilient.

Kennan never asked America to be a saint. He just asked it to be smart.

Let’s try that for a change.