The X-Article

In the summer of 1947 George Kennan published an article in the foreign policy magazine, Foreign Affairs , identifying himself as "X," in "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" a.k.a. the "X-article." The article introduced the term "containment" to a larger audience. As the U.S. response to the origins of the cold war, containment wanted a persistent and patient long-term strategy to guarantee a change in the nature of the Soviet Union.

The X-article was not thought to be an official government statement. It drew a lot of criticism by

Walter Lippmann, who early on criticized Kennan's thoughts for what Samuel Huntington in the 1990s called the Lippmann Gap and what Paul Kennedy then named imperial overstretch : a mismatch between objectives, commitments and resources, a criticism that Kennan quickly accepted as his own.