In this 1998 NYT interview, George
Kennan, a former US Ambassador to the USSR best known as "the father of
containment" and the author of "Long Telegram" from Moscow in
1946, reacted to the Senate’s ratification of NATO expansion. He predicted that
this was the beginning of a new cold war. To our dismay, his predictions remain
relevant and timely 10 years later.
by
Thomas Friedman, New York Times, May 2, 1998
Foreign Affairs; Now a Word from X
His voice is a bit frail now, but the
mind, even at age 94, is as sharp as ever. So when I reached George Kennan by
phone to get his reaction to the Senate's ratification of NATO expansion it was
no surprise to find that the man who was the architect of America's successful
containment of the Soviet Union and one of the great American statesmen of the
20th century was ready with an answer.
''I think it is the beginning of a new
cold war,'' said Mr. Kennan from his Princeton home. ''I think the Russians
will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think
it is a tragic mistake. 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. [NATO expansion] was simply a
light-hearted action by a Senate that has no real interest in foreign
affairs.''
''What bothers me is how superficial and
ill informed the whole Senate debate was,'' added Mr. Kennan, who was present
at the creation of NATO and whose anonymous 1947 article in the journal Foreign
Affairs, signed ''X,'' defined America's cold-war containment policy for 40
years. ''I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country
dying to attack Western Europe. Don't people understand? Our differences in the
cold war were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our
backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in
history to remove that Soviet regime.
''And Russia's democracy is as far
advanced, if not farther, as any of these countries we've just signed up to
defend from Russia,'' said Mr. Kennan, who joined the State Department in 1926
and was U.S. Ambassador to Moscow in 1952. ''It shows so little understanding
of Russian history and Soviet history. Of course there is going to be a bad
reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always
told you that is how the Russians are -- but this is just wrong.''
One only wonders what future historians
will say. If we are lucky they will say that NATO expansion to Poland, Hungary
and the Czech Republic simply didn't matter, because the vacuum it was supposed
to fill had already been filled, only the Clinton team couldn't see it. They
will say that the forces of globalization integrating Europe, coupled with the
new arms control agreements, proved to be so powerful that Russia, despite NATO
expansion, moved ahead with democratization and Westernization, and was
gradually drawn into a loosely unified Europe. If we are unlucky they will say,
as Mr. Kennan predicts, that NATO expansion set up a situation in which NATO
now has to either expand all the way to Russia's border, triggering a new cold
war, or stop expanding after these three new countries and create a new dividing
line through Europe.
But there is one thing future historians
will surely remark upon, and that is the utter poverty of imagination that
characterized U.S. foreign policy in the late 1990's. They will note that one
of the seminal events of this century took place between 1989 and 1992 -- the
collapse of the Soviet Empire, which had the capability, imperial intentions
and ideology to truly threaten the entire free world. Thanks to Western resolve
and the courage of Russian democrats, that Soviet Empire collapsed without a
shot, spawning a democratic Russia, setting free the former Soviet republics
and leading to unprecedented arms control agreements with the U.S.
And what was America's response? It was
to expand the NATO cold-war alliance against Russia and bring it closer to
Russia's borders.
Yes, tell your children, and your
children's children, that you lived in the age of Bill Clinton and William
Cohen, the age of Madeleine Albright and Sandy Berger, the age of Trent Lott
and Joe Lieberman, and you too were present at the creation of the
post-cold-war order, when these foreign policy Titans put their heads together
and produced . . . a mouse.
We are in the age of midgets. The only
good news is that we got here in one piece because there was another age -- one
of great statesmen who had both imagination and courage.
As he said goodbye to me on the phone, Mr. Kennan added just one more thing: ''This has been my life, and it pains me to see it so screwed up in the end.''
Photo source: www.nytimes.com
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