IN FEBRUARY 1946In the depths of a Moscow winter, an American diplomat sent a remarkable cable to Washington. On paper, George Kennan’s “Long Telegram” was an answer to a question about the Soviet worldview. In reality, Kennan proposed a strategy for dealing with superpower competition—an approach he later called “containment.” The Soviet Union had no interest in friendship, but did not seek a third world war, Kennan explained. Communist rulers were impervious to the “logic of reason”, but understood the “logic of force” and knew that their regime was weaker than a united West. If Soviet expansionism was countered around the world, a “general military conflict” could be avoided, until one day USSR either softened or crumbled.