The Kennan Diaries - NATO, Russia

[Brian4Liberty]

The Poet of Containment

In January 1997, a 92-year-old retired diplomat and prize-winning historian based out of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton confided in his diary the following thoughts with regard to the proposed expansion of NATO to include three former Warsaw Pact countries: “The deep commitment of our government to press the expansion of NATO right up to the Russian borders is the greatest mistake of the entire post-Cold War period. I stretched my mind … trying to find any reason for this colossal blunder. I could find none.”

A week later, George Frost Kennan—the “father of containment” and author of the fantastically influential “X” article in Foreign Affairs that spurred America’s Cold War strategy—would go public over his misgivings in an op-ed in the New York Times. He was, as he suspected he would be, promptly ignored by the upper echelons of the United States government.
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The knowledge that the respect with which he was heard never translated to influence was, as these diaries make plain, something that Kennan never reconciled himself to. It’s entirely possible that if his counsel, so eagerly sought yet so quickly discarded, was heeded, we—the United States and our NATO allies—may well have avoided the crisis with Russia we have lately found ourselves in.
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Upon reading the second volume of Isaac Deutscher’s biography of Trotsky, Kennan immediately recognizes that the portrait of Trotsky as a humane man of letters—a view, incidentally propagated by several generations of leftist intellectuals, including Christopher Hitchens—was nonsense.

In an entry from 1959, Kennan notes: “a man like Trotsky, whose life was one long outpouring of the most ferocious summons to class warfare and violence, became not a saint, not a prophet, not a high-minded benefactor of humanity, but something very close to a criminal.” His take on a worldview not dissimilar to Trotsky’s, that of America’s neoconservatives, elicits the thought that they “have the need to think that there is, somewhere, an enemy boundlessly evil, because this makes them feel boundlessly good.”
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More:
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-poet-of-containment/

 

[Brian4Liberty]

Another review and commentary:

Russia, Crimea and the wisdom of a cold war strategist: The Kennan Diaries

In many respects the debate about how the West should react to Russia’s recent annexation of Crimea and its ongoing threat to eastern Ukraine mirrors the debates of the cold war.

For President Obama and those of a more hawkish frame of mind, Russia’s sudden absorption of the Crimean peninsula is a direct threat to the “international order” and the ideals of freedom and democracy everywhere. Other Russian specialists have argued, however, that at least some of the blame lies with the West: for pushing the expansion of Nato to the east, for trying to lure the former Soviet republics of Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova into the western European economic and security orbit, and for failing to recognise Russia’s legitimate interest in these regions.
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The one voice missing from this important debate about the future of Russia’s relations with the West is that of George F Kennan, the author of the cold-war doctrine known as containment and widely regarded during his long career as the United States’ foremost authority on Russia and the Soviet Union.
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‘Colossal blunder’

Most interesting from the perspective of today’s crisis about Crimea, Kennan was opposed to the expansion of Nato in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. In May 1990, on the eve of the final collapse of the Soviet empire, he wrote in his diary: “I thought it always a mistake to take advantage of the momentarily weakened position of another great power to obtain advantages one could not have obtained under normal circumstances. To do this, I said, was something that always revenged itself at a later date.”

By 1997, when it became clear that the expansion of Nato to the east had become settled policy, Kennan spoke out publicly against it, noting in his diary in January that year that the “deep commitment of our government to press the expansion of Nato right up to the Russian borders is the greatest mistake of the entire post-Cold War period”. He regarded this “colossal blunder” as “the final failure of the effort to which I have given so large a portion of my life: the effort to find a reasonable area of understanding and sympathy between the great Russian people and our own.”
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More:
http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/b...d-war-strategist-the-kennan-diaries-1.1796979