Remembering XGeorge Kennan’s analysis of U.S.-Russian relations in light of NATO expansion bears repeating.
By Bradley Devlin
March 21, 2022
Over the weekend, my friend Pedro Gonzalez of Chronicles directed my attention to a column published on May 2, 1998 in the New York Times titled “Foreign Affairs; Now a Word From X.” The piece, from their relatively new foreign policy columnist Thomas Friedman, centered on Friedman’s retelling of a phone conversation he had with George Kennan, the Cold War diplomat turned historian who spent his life trying to inject a sense of realism into America’s idealist-dominated foreign policy towards the Soviet Union and then Russia. It seems not much has changed in the almost twenty four years since: The Gray Lady still publishes Friedman’s self-aggrandizing explanations of foreign happenings through whatever mishmash of metaphors he manages to scribble down that week, and, despite his passing at the remarkable age of 101 in 2005, Kennan’s analysis of U.S.-Russian relations bears repeating.
During their 1998 phone call, Friedman asked Kennan about the Senate’s approval of a planned NATO expansion, to which Kennan replied, ”I think it is the beginning of a new cold war.” At the Madrid Summit the year prior, NATO member nations agreed to invite Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic to begin accession negotiations. On March 12, 1999, the three nations were granted full NATO membership and the protections that comes with it, bringing the total number of countries in the NATO alliance to 19.
“The Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake,” Kennan told Friedman. “There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves. We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way.”
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/state-of-the-union/remembering-x/
