Kennan vs. Talbot

In light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, there’s naturally been a huge excavation of studies, along with re-evaluations, of how we got here after the Cold War. And the best source for that is Not One Inch, M. E. Sarotte’s gripping and forensic account of how the West and Moscow managed the collapse of the Soviet Union, and then the rounds of NATO expansion afterward.

Adding to these studies is an article by Frank Costigliola in Foreign Affairs, “Kennan’s Warning on Ukraine.” While Costigliola chastises George Kennan — the author of the Long Telegram and source of our Cold War policy of containment — for underestimating the Ukrainian desire for independence, he also sees the diplomat’s prescient warnings about Russia’s reaction during the Cold War period and beyond. He also praises Kennan’s far-sightedness. Even during the Cold War, Kennan contemplated the idea of an independent Ukraine. He said such a country could only be maintained by force of arms, and that it would be “challenged eventually from the Russian side.”

Kennan wrote a series of letters to Bill Clinton’s deputy secretary of state, Strobe Talbott, who was managing relations with Russia in NATO’s Partnership for Peace program and the expansion of NATO to include Hungary and the Czech Republic. Kennan argued that the process was itself destabilizing, compelling Ukraine and other nations to feel like they must choose sides. “Nowhere does this choice appear more portentous and pregnant with fateful consequences than in the case of Ukraine,” Kennan warned Talbott.

And he was particularly worried about Western and Ukrainian joint military exercises being undertaken in the Black Sea. Kennan wrote:

And the question, in the face of all that, is: how are the Russians to interpret the participation of the NATO powers, and particularly the U.S., in this rather farcical (from the naval standpoint) but nonetheless serious (from the political one) undertaking? The anti-Russian nature of the planned exercise is indeed unmistakable. So is the motivation of the Ukrainians in inviting western participation in it namely the hope of involving the NATO navies on the Ukrainian side in case the conflict over the Crimea should at any time assume active military dimensions. And the question, I repeat, then presents itself: how is NATO’s involvement in this venture to be viewed in Russia? Can it really be made seriously to fit with the effort of the NATO powers to persuade Russia that the extension of the NATO borders toward the Russian frontier in Eastern Europe has no immediate military connotations?

And if there is no visible way of reconciling these two evidences of NATO policy, does this not suggest some serious lack of policy coordination somewhere along the line in both NATO and our own government?

Kennan’s question gets at the heart of the problem. How could NATO be at once a “defensive alliance” and yet an expanding one, with political and economic ambitions that would make Russia the net loser of expansion?

Talbot believed that America’s total preeminence after the Cold War would shock the Russians into integrating with Western ways of life and politics. It was a faith misplaced.

Read the whole thing.