kennan from the grave

Came across this interesting old interview with George Kennan, then 94 years old, from August 1999. Here is what America's premier diplomat and architect of containment had to say about Baltic-Russian relations an an interview with Richard Ullman. It's interesting for me that so many of these old issues -- NATO expansion, the Kosovo War -- seem so ancient and done with. But the Russian leadership today is the same leadership that came to power in 1999. They are stuck in the past.

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G.K.: We are now being pressed by some advocates of expansion to admit the Baltic countries. I think this would be highly unfortunate. I agree that NATO, as we now know it, has no intention of attacking Russia. But NATO remains, in concept and in much of its substance, a military alliance. If there is any country at all against which it is conceived as being directed, that is Russia. And that surely is the way the Poles and others in that part of the world perceive it.

These are sensitive borders—these borders between Russia and the Baltic countries. I will not go into the history of Russia’s relations with those Baltic peoples, other than to ask you to remember that they were included in the Russian empire for nearly two hundred years in the two centuries before World War I, and much of their advance into modern life was achieved during that time. And then, for a period of almost another two decades, they were quite independent, and this was accepted by the world community and, with the exception of the Communists, by most of the Russians themselves. It took Hitler to virtually compel the Russian government to take them over in 1939, and then to put an end to their independence in 1940. And the later entry of Russian forces onto their territory occurred (and this we should remember) in the process of pushing the German army out of that region—a process which had our most complete and enthusiastic approval.

In other words, the Russian relationship to the Baltic peoples has had many ups and downs. They have been a part of Russia longer than they have been a part of anything else. For a time they were fully independent. I never doubted or challenged the desirability of their independence. I never ceased to advocate it in the years when they didn’t have it. But I don’t think that it would be a good thing for NATO to try to complicate that historic relationship by taking these countries into what the Russians are bound to see as an anti-Russian military alliance.

R.U.: What do you think the relationship between Russia and the former Soviet republics will look like say a decade or so from now?

G.K.: Oh, I don’t think it will be too troubled. After all, the Russians, under Yeltsin, took the lead in pushing them into independence ten years ago. He left them no alternative but to accept it. Why should the present Russian government wish to reverse it? By and large, Russia has been better off without them.

Of course, there are the problems of Russian minorities in two or three of those countries. In the case of Ukraine, in particular, there was the thoughtless tossing into that country, upon the collapse of Russian communism, of the totally un-Ukrainian Crimean peninsula, together with one of the three greatest Russian naval bases. For that we, too, must accept a share of the blame. But even in this case, all the recent Russian aspirations have been limited to the alleviation of the effects of these blunders; they have not taken the form of any encroachments upon Ukrainian independence.