I knew I was on to something and now I have found a bit of a help. This piece from the NYTimes.
Writing 50 years after George Kennan’s famous containment missive, Nicholas Thompson says that whatever we may think of Kennan’s urging that the Cold War be fought with less military and more smart diplomacy, Kennan’s prescriptions are excellent for the so-called war on terror. Strikes me as exactly the case. And I would argue that had Truman and others not bought into the military-clandestine mode of cold war, we could have proved out Kennan’s view that Communism would topple of its own internal difficulties.
