"X", who was George Kennan, was arguably the best Russian/Cold War analyst ever produced by this country.
What did he have to say about the NATO expansions made in 1999-2017, pushed by the increasingly suspect State Department and blessed by a series of either stupid, malevolent, or hoodwinked Presidents?
... ”I think it is the beginning of a new cold war.” At the Madrid Summit the year prior, NATO member nations agreed to invite Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic to begin accession negotiations. On March 12, 1999, the three nations were granted full NATO membership and the protections that comes with it, bringing the total number of countries in the NATO alliance to 19.
“The Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake,” Kennan told Friedman. “There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves. We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way.”
Kennan also pilloried how the Senate, which “has no real interest in foreign affairs,” so casually and “light-hearted[ly]” went about its business with respect to NATO expansion. ”What bothers me is how superficial and ill informed the whole Senate debate was,” Kennan went on to say. ”I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe. Don’t people understand? Our differences in the cold war were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.”...
A Senate in which Hillary Clinton was a member, along with McConnell, Graham, and Bidenš¤”.
Marvelous.
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