Rubric “One Day from History”: several years after writing his famous works Russia Leaves the War (Princeton; for which the author received the Pulitzer Prize), Russia, the Atom, and the West, and Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin, George Kennan explained that by “containing the Soviet Union” he had meant political and economic activity, not military confrontation. George Kennan was an opponent of the creation of NATO and considered U.S. policy toward post-Soviet Russia to be mistaken. He called the fourth enlargement of NATO in 1999 a “fatal mistake” which, in his view, was capable of once again reviving for Russia the image of an external enemy and thereby harming the country’s democratization. He predicted, right at the very beginning of NATO’s eastward expansion, that this “strategic mistake of epic proportions” made a new Cold War a perfectly realistic scenario, and a “hot war” a possible one.
Excerpt from George Kennan’s article on NATO enlargement of 2 May 1998 👉🏻
“I think it is the beginning of a new Cold War. 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. From that the founders of our country would turn over in their graves. 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.”

For reference: George Frost Kennan was an American diplomat, political scientist and historian, founder of the Kennan Institute (a division of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars). He is best known as the chief “architect of the Cold War” and the ideological father of the containment policy of the Harry Truman Doctrine. Author of works on the history of relations between Russia and the countries of the West.
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