In 1997, veteran U.S. diplomat George Kennan stated that ‘expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American foreign policy in the entire post-Cold War era’. Twenty-eight years later, who would say he was wrong?
George Kennan famously authored the U.S. policy of containment of the Soviet Union, in an article in the New York Times of 1947, which he signed X, to maintain his anonymity. His view was that containment would lead to the eventual break up or mellowing of Soviet power and, as it turns out, the former prediction came to pass.
Yet, he was opposed to the expansion of NATO after the collapse of the Soviet Union and argued that asking European nations to choose between NATO and Russia would eventually lead to conflict.
In an article in the New York Times of 5 February 1997 he asked: ‘Why, with all the hopeful possibilities engendered by the end of the cold war, should East-West relations become centred on the question of who would be allied with whom and, by implication, against whom in some fanciful, totally unforeseeable and most improbable future military conflict?’
His article was intended to influence discussions ahead of the July 1997 NATO Summit in Madrid which would consider the planned expansion of NATO to include the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia. Each state had suffered under Soviet repression after World War II but were now free and democratic after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact.
Kennan’s warning went unheeded, the NATO Summit agreed to the inclusion of three of the four former Warsaw Pact countries within NATO, excluding Slovakia which had not received the required number of votes in a referendum.
Hellbound and Down 