‘America is desperate for the kind of strategic nous Kennan once personified.’

‘In 1947 X penned his history-changing “Sources of Soviet Conduct” in Foreign Affairs.’

• ‘The piece, which crystallised America’s cold war containment strategy, was the making of George F Kennan’s life-long reputation as a master of geopolitics.’

‘The Kennan we need today is someone who would be clear-eyed about the world America faces.’

• ‘It is just as rapidly changing as it was in 1947.’

‘Kennan helped Washington grasp that the Soviet Union was the same old paranoid Russia behind a Leninist mask.’

• ‘It was “impervious to reason” but sensitive to force.’

‘Kennan provided a framework to break through the bitter divide between those who believed America should return to its prewar isolationism, and those who believed the USSR was itching for a dramatic showdown with the capitalist west.’

• ‘Neither was true. Either path would have been disastrous.’
• ‘Kennan’s crisp analytical mind sidelined both schools.’

‘He was later to regret the indiscriminate use of his doctrine — most egregiously in Vietnam.’

• ‘But he earned his spurs as the architect of a doctrine that won the cold war.’

‘America today faces a more complicated global picture.’

• ‘Most of the foreign policy establishment sees China as America’s real 21st-century rival.’
• ‘Russia is still Russia but it is far more easily containable than during the cold war.

‘China, on the other hand, poses a new kind of headache.’

• ‘Unlike the Soviet Union, China’s economy is deeply intermeshed with the global supply chain.’
• ‘It owns more than $1tn of American debt.’
• ‘And it is capable of blunting America’s technological edge.’

‘Containment makes little sense when your prosperity is so intertwined.’

• ‘A trade war is self-defeating.’
• ‘Military confrontation is unthinkable, though deterrence must be maintained.’

‘What can be done?’

‘America is desperate for the kind of strategic nous Kennan once personified.’

• ‘A few years ago we may have looked to people such as Zbigniew Brzezinski or Henry Kissinger to offer some kind of answer.’
• ‘The first is dead and the second places too high a value on his access to Trump, Putin, Xi Jinping and others, to risk plain talk.’

‘We need new minds.’

• ‘All of us in Washington can point to dozens of smart foreign policy specialists in their own fields.’

‘But where is the grand strategist?’