Free Republic

https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017-12-12/nato-expansion-what-gorbachev-heard-western-leaders-early Declassified documents show security assurances against NATO expansion to Soviet leaders from Baker, Bush, Genscher, Kohl, Gates, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Hurd, Major, and Woerner U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous “not one inch eastward” assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991, according to declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted today by the National Security Archive...

<p>George F. Kennan's 100th birthday this week has prompted a round of effusive praise for the contributions of the man who has been dubbed "the architect," "the great theorist" and "the founding father" of containment -- the vaunted Cold War method by which the Soviet threat to the West was not so much confronted as "contained." Discussing Mr. Kennan's famous "X" article, published in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs, led no less an authority than Henry Kissinger to suggest that Mr. Kennan "came as close to authoring the diplomatic doctrine of his era as any diplomat in our history."</p>