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A letter from America's greatest diplomat, George F. Kennan whose "Long Telegram" authored while Ambassador to the Soviet Union resulted in the containment Policy that eventually took down the Soviet Union. Kennan was strongly against NATO expansion.

[From the National Interest--Spring 1998]

The Dangers of Expansive Realism

I read your article [Owen Harries, ``The Dangers of Expansive Realism'', Winter 1997/98] with strong approval. It was in some respects a surprise because certain of your major arguments were ones I myself had made, or had wanted to make, but had not expected to see them so well expressed by the pen of anyone else. I can perhaps make this clear by commenting specifically on certain of your points. First, your reference to the implicit understanding that the West would not take advantage of the Russian strategic and political withdrawal from Eastern Europe is not only warranted, but could have been strengthened. It is my understanding that Gorbachev on more than one occasion was given to understand, in informal talks with senior American and other Western personalities, that if the USSR would accept a united Germany remaining in NATO, the jurisdiction of that alliance would not be moved further eastward. We did not, I am sure, intend to trick the Russians; but the actual determinants of our later behavior--lack of coordination of political with military policy, and the amateurism of later White House diplomacy--would scarcely have been more creditable on our part than a real intention to deceive.

Secondly, I could not associate myself more strongly with what you write about the realist case that sees Russia as an inherently and incorrigibly expansionist country, and suggest that this tendency marks the present Russian regime no less than it did the Russian regimes of the past. We have seen this view reflected time and again, occasionally in even more violent forms, in efforts to justify the recent expansion of NATO's boundaries and further possible expansions of that name. So numerous and extensive have the distortions and misunderstandings on which this view is based been that it would be hard even to list them in a letter of this sort. It grossly oversimplifies and misconstrues must of the history of Russian diplomacy of the czarist period. It ignores the whole great complexity of Russia's part in World War II. It allows and encourages one to forget that the Soviet military advances into Western Europe during the last war took place with our enthusiastic approval, and the political ones of the ensuing period at least with our initial consent and support. It usually avoids mention of the Communist period, and attributes to ``the Russians'' generally all the excesses of the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe in the Cold War period.

Worst of all, it tends to equate, at least by implication, the Russian-Communist dictatorship of recent memory with the present Russian republic--a republic, the product of an amazingly bloodless revolution, which has, for all its many faults, succeeded in carrying on for several years with an elected government, a largely free press and media, without concentration camps or executions, and with a minimum of police brutality. This curious present Russia, we are asked to believe, is obsessed by the same dreams of conquest and oppression of others as were the worst examples, real or imaginative, of its predecessors.

You, I think, were among the first, if not indeed the first, to bring some of the above to the attention of your readers; and this, in my opinion, was an important and valuable service.

George F. Kennan,

Princeton, New Jersey.

Kennan wrote for Spring 1998 publication, so his views would have been shaped leading into 1997, If the following quote from a Russian is valid, then I have some additional observations on what Kennan wrote.

“Dima Vorobiev, former Propaganda Executive at Russia
Answered Oct 9, 2017
Russian rulers had a big, expanding problem throughout the 1990s. The lack of legitimacy.

Ever since Yeltsin shot to smithereens the Russian parliament in 1993, and gave himself almost unlimited powers, he was increasingly losing support. He appeared more and more like usurper. It all was exacerbated by the faked elections in 1996, the general chaos, as well as the national bankruptcy in 1998. A real prospect of Communist re-taking political power was looming large all these years.”

I suspect that any earlier understandings that Kennan may have had from Gorbachev were probably largely canceled by the combined levels of amateurism occurring in both the US and Russian governments in the later 1990s. Also in the period immediately before Kennon wrote, the Russian powers (Oligarchs) did not have in mind that Putin would have a well developed mind and will of his own and the mental acquity and iron intention to follow his own dreams of power, riches, and fame. Their goals were mostly wealth and comfort and they did not read him very well if they expected someone they would control.

The kind of misunderstanding of Russia and their goals were clearly not well understand by most Americans during WWll, the absolute visciousness of Stalin was ignored to get him doing his share of the fighting in eastern Europe. The visciousness of Russian occupation was well understood by Germans who faced Soviet occupation. Two of my grandmother’s sisters were elderly single women, one a gynecologist, the other a dentist, living together in Berlin. My great aunt, the doctor, must have known what was being done to German women by the invading Russians. The 2 women turned on the gas and killed themselves. In America communists and fellow travelers excoriated Roosevelt for wanting to aid England while Stalin had a peace pact with Hitler, but completely flipped once Russia was the target. After the war ended, Stalin had the goal of taking over our major ports like New York and on the west coast with communist labor leaders like Gus Hall. My father was almost never home, because he was in a constant struggle and meetings to try to prevent communists seizing his white colar union using money given them by management. Fifty-five years later I have had political battles with a man raised by communist parents living in the same area I lived as a child, who still believes the red dream. Sadly, 20 years after Kennan’s letter, Russia is definitely moving in the Stalinist direction. Pity the Russian people.