YoN FEBRUARY 1946In the depths of Moscow’s 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 was proposing a strategy for managing superpower competition, an approach he later called “containment.” The Soviet Union had no interest in friendship, but it was not seeking a third world war, Kennan explained. The communist rulers were immune to the “logic of reason,” but they understood the “logic of force” and knew that their regime was weaker than a united West. If Soviet expansionism were countered throughout the world, then a “general military conflict” could be avoided, until one day the USSR either softened or crumbled.