Post date: Apr 29, 2013 7:38:31 PM
1. The passage below is from "Training for Statesmanship" (1953), an article written by George F. Kennan, one of the principal architects of United States foreign policy during the period following the end of the Second World War. Read the passage carefully and select what you believe is Kennan's most compelling observation. Then write an essay in which you consider the extent to which that observation holds true for the United States or for any other country. Support your argument with appropriate evidence.
In our country, the element of power is peculiarly diffused. It is not concentrated, as it is in other countries, in what we might call the "pure form" of a national uniformed police establishment functioning as the vehicle of a central political will. Power with us does exist to some extent in courts of law and in police establishments, but it also exists in many other American institutions. It exists in our economic system, though not nearly to the degree the Marxists claim. Sometimes, unfortunately, it exists in irregular forces-in underworld groups, criminal gangs, or informal associations of a vigilante nature-capable of terrorizing their fellow citizens in one degree or another. Above all, it exists in the delicate compulsions of our social life, the force of community opinion within our country-in the respect we have for the good opinion of our neighbors. For reasons highly complex, we Americans place upon ourselves quite extraordinary obligations of conformity to the group in utterance and behavior, and this feature of our national life seems to be growing rather than declining. All these things can bring us to put restraints upon ourselves which in other parts of the world would be imposed upon people only by the straightforward exercise of the central police authority.