[...] the possibility of potential alignments between decolonizing nations and Soviet power was far less concrete and worrisome to the United States than the more definite and delineated material losses faced by the United States and the colonial powers with which it had aligned itself—namely, being deprived access to formerly “assured sources of raw materials, markets and military bases.” In other words, the challenge of the future, as Kennan had underlined, was to devise “formulae” to buttress the forms of political authority that sustained economic inequality (at a world scale) in the face of inevitable revolt and revolution against such authority and the social conditions it supported.