American Diplomacy 1900-1950.

KENNAN, George F.

Item Number: 95689

London: Secker & Warburg, 1952.

First British edition of Kennan’s classic work. Octavo, original cloth. Signed by George Kennan on the front free endpaper. Near fine in a very good dust jacket. Rare and desirable signed.

For more than sixty years, George F. Kennan’s American Diplomacy has been a standard work on American foreign policy. Drawing on his considerable diplomatic experience and expertise, Kennan offers an overview and critique of the foreign policy of an emerging great power whose claims to rightness often spill over into self-righteousness, whose ambitions conflict with power realities, whose judgmentalism precludes the interests of other states, and whose domestic politics frequently prevent prudent policies and result in overstretch. Keenly aware of the dangers of military intervention and the negative effects of domestic politics on foreign policy, Kennan identifies troubling inconsistencies in the areas between actions and ideals—even when the strategies in question turned out to be decided successes. “These celebrated lectures, delivered at the University of Chicago in 1950, were for many years the most widely read account of American diplomacy in the first half of the twentieth century" (Foreign Affairs).