"NO NATO"

...from 1997.

We’ve been critiquing Putin’s brain-damaged and egotistical war in Ukraine from the Russian side. But I’ve thinking of writing something about the whole NATO expansion debacle, and have started to dig into some material about it. I was an immigrant kid in San Francisco in high school when this NATO business was being plotted and carried out. Looking back on it all now, it does not surprise me that at the center of this mess stands President Bill Clinton and his corrupt revolving door military industrial consultancy apparatchiks — like Anthony Lake, who went from being a hawk pushing for NATO enlargement and to going into private security state contracting to now running UNICEF, helping children in need worldwide!

While I sort things out, there’s a great short op-ed published in the New York Times, written by George Kennan — the architect of “containment” and probably the most respected foreign policy brain in modern American history. He was also one of the masterminds of weaponizing anti-communist emigres against the Soviet Union. And, as it turns out, he also deeply hated America and was a giant antisemite and bigot! A real package this guy. But then…who wasn’t a giant bigot back then?)

There is no one who has more cred in foreign policy circles than Kennan. His strategy is credited with defeating the USSR. And yet he was very very much against the NATO that exists today. As he wrote back in 1997:

The view, bluntly stated, is that expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era.

Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.

Welp, sounds about right. And here we are. One thing he got wrong, though. I think a lot of people in Washington DC really do like the direction that Putin’s war on Ukraine has taken. In fact, they’re loving it.

Anyway, here’s the op-ed. Will be back soon.

—Yasha Levine