Compare And Contrast Kennan And Nitze

It’s not wrong to find it contradictory to read that a man described as a dove along with a man described as a hawk had an overwhelming amount of political influence during the Cold War era. George Kennan, the dove, was a born in Wisconsin to a middle class family and known for his poetic writing. Known as a hawk, Paul Nitze was from Massachusetts and raised in an elite family. Although these men come from different social classes and regions of the United States, their differing beliefs helped shape US foreign policy during the Cold War as Kennan was a strong believer of nuclear disarmament, and Nitze believes in nuclear armament. Neither of the men held a position in office, let alone a cabinet position, but behind the scenes they were key

Nitze urged the U.S. Government to use military power, but this was due to his history of being a doer and his experience in Japan after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. Kennan strongly favored diplomacy over military action, this being due to his quiet upbringing in the Midwest and his first hand knowledge of living in Russia and knowing that military action would not stop Stalin. As tensions grew between the United States and the Soviet Union, Nitze continued to strongly favor military power and as a participant in the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks/Treaty (SALT) conferences he fear continued to grow because he believed the Soviets would be the first to attack as their forces grew. When he failed to come to an agreement with the government he led the foundation of the Committee on Public Danger in 1976 and critiqued SALT II due to it’s ineffectiveness. Being more of a political philosopher, Kennan saw the Soviet Union as a political threat and not the military threat that Nitze saw it as. Kennan believed that Nitze’s preoccupation with the fear of the Soviets being the first to launch a missile was undershot, and that we needed to be more worried about the nuclear arms race that he believed was the only true threat of the Cold