The greatest risk to the US is its own imagination  A cult of
secrecy only increases the grave danger of terrorism The article
by "X" which appeared in the American magazine Foreign Affairs
in July 1947 would become the most famous commentary on foreign
policy of modern times. Entitled The Sources of Soviet Conduct,
it argued that communist Russia was a cautious power whose
ideology laid down that capitalism would eventually fail because
of its own contradictions. The USSR would therefore try to wait
the capitalist world out rather than frontally attack it. The
piece further proposed that the Soviet Union's own weaknesses
were far more serious than any on our side and would in time
lead to its demise, and that the west's best policy was one of
judicious containment. Events proved George Kennan to have been
about as right as any man can hope to be on such matters - and
yet, as the former senator, Patrick Moynihan, has written - "The
history of American foreign policy in the second half of the
20th century coul