[george f kennan] genius or liberal intellectual lightweight

Richard Holbrooke, United Nations ambassador, wrote for the Washington Post in March, 2005:

George F. Kennan's warning that enlarging NATO would destabilize Europe - "an enormous and historic strategic error" - carried the dinner audience [at Columbia University] with its eloquence and sense of history. Events, of course, proved Bill Clinton right, and Kennan - and the bulk of the liberal intellectual community - wrong.

No events didn't prove anything of the sort. Quite the opposite. Events proved that wherever NATO sticks its oar in, the killings soon escalate. Kennan was quite astute in this. Holbrooke continues:

He had accurately predicted, at the end of the Cold War, the outbreak of ethnic violence in Yugoslavia, but he did not understand the need for American involvement in the problem, let alone the use of military force to end the Balkan wars.

Again, spot on and the antithesis of the thinking at the time at state department level. So who was George F. Kennan? Wiki says about him:

In the late 1940s, his writings inspired the Truman Doctrine and the U.S. foreign policy of "containing" the Soviet Union, thrusting him into a lifelong role as a leading authority on the Cold War. His "Long Telegram" from Moscow in 1946, and the subsequent 1947 article "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" argued that the Soviet regime was inherently expansionist and that its influence had to be "contained" in areas of vital strategic importance to the United States.

These texts quickly emerged as foundational texts of the Cold War, expressing the Truman administration's new anti-Soviet Union policy. Kennan also played a leading role in the development of definitive Cold War programs and institutions, most notably the Marshall Plan.

The only trouble was - he didn't go along with this:

Kennan's influence was increasingly marginalized—particularly after Dean Acheson was appointed Secretary of State in 1949. As U.S. Cold War strategy assumed a more aggressive and militaristic tone, Kennan bemoaned what he called a misinterpretation of his thinking.

So what was his solution to the Soviet menace?

The solution, Kennan suggested, was to strengthen Western institutions in order to render them invulnerable to the Soviet challenge while awaiting the eventual mellowing of the Soviet regime.

Thus he was the apostle of 'containment' rather than aggression. The trouble was the State Department didn't want to hear that, as they wanted to 'shake Americans out of their isolationist tendencies'. Truman seized on the 'Long Telegram' with it's dire warning and the result we all know.

Kennan and his associates on the policy planning staff hoped to bring about a split between the Soviet Union and the world Communist movement as a way of achieving the goal of containment. In turn, this would help make possible the peaceful withdrawal of U.S. and Soviet forces from the positions that they had been occupying since the end of the Second World War.

Kennan's argued for direct economic aid and covert political help to Japan and Western Europe in order to revive Western governments and prop up international capitalism. By doing so, the U.S. would help to rebuild the balance of power.

In addition, in June 1948, Kennan proposed covert support of leftwing parties not oriented toward Moscow and to labor unions in Western Europe in order to engineer a rift between Moscow and working class movements in Western Europe.

NSC-68, the blueprint for the Cold War and corollary to the Marshall Plan saw the USSR going all out for world conquest, though Kennan warned they weren't strong enough. He opposed the building of the hydrogen bomb and the rearmament of Germany.

Interestingly, Eisenhower was for tackling the Soviet Union only when the US could afford to act and not in a costly and protracted struggle. Kennan adds to this:

Anyone who has ever studied the history of American diplomacy, especially military diplomacy, knows that you might start in a war with certain things on your mind as a purpose of what you are doing, but in the end, you found yourself fighting for entirely different things that you had never thought of before...

Iraq?

W. Averell Harriman, the U.S. ambassador in Moscow when Kennan was deputy between 1944 and 1946, remarked that Mr. Kennan was "a man who understood Russia but not the United States."

I think he understood U.S. foreign policy very well.