In the late 1940s, the celebrated US diplomat, George Kennan, held a rare distinction among Western officials. He was among the few with profound insights into the intriguing universe behind Joseph Stalin’s Iron Curtain.
While serving as Chargé d’Affaires in Moscow, Kennan became renowned as the architect of the Cold War “Containment” policy, which laid the foundation of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. His expertise continued to influence US foreign policy thinking in the post-Cold War era. On 5 February 1997, his Op-Ed in the New York Times titled “A Fateful Error” carried a forewarning:
[B]luntly stated…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 hurt 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 …
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