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Quote:


The first stage of Kennan's strategy, it will be recalled, had been to restore the balance of power left unstable by the defeats of Germany and Japan, and by the simultaneous expansion of Soviet influence in Europe and Asia.  Kennan had based that prescription on a particularist rather than a universalist conception of American security interests:  what was required was not to remake the world in the image of the United States, but rather to preserve its diversity against attempts to remake it in the image of others.  He had also stressed the necessity, imposed by limited means, of establishing hierarchies of interests, of differentiating between the vital and the peripheral.  And he had insisted that if competition was to take place, it do so on terrain and with instruments best calculated to apply American strengths against Soviet weaknesses, thereby preserving the initiative while minimizing costs.  The ultimate objective was to build an international order made up of independent centers of power, in which nations subject to Soviet pressure would have both the means and the will to resist it themselves.


Book:

Pages 54 -55, "Strategies of Containment," John Lewis Gaddis, Oxford University Press, 1982, 2005