Inside the expert bubble all talk is of war with Russia

After two world wars, states divided by ideology nonetheless built a common international order. Faced now with the dangers of climate change, AI and rising militarism, they must find ways to cooperate again.

In 1997 George F Kennan warned that NATO expansion would be ‘the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era’. So the architect of the West’s cold war strategy of containing the Soviet Union was angered and dismayed when the US Senate approved the accession of three former Eastern bloc states – Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic – the following year.

Now, he predicted, ‘the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies.’ By 1998 Kennan, the first director of policy planning at the State Department and author of an important article in Foreign Affairs recommending that the US confront the Russians with ‘unalterable counterforce at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interest of a peaceful and stable world’. had come to believe that the West, having won the cold war, was squandering the possibility of that peaceful and stable world through its aggressive posture.

‘I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe,’ he told Thomas L Friedman. ‘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’.

Kennan’s warning went unheeded. And, as he had foreseen, the Russians did indeed react ‘quite adversely’ and invaded Ukraine in order, they claimed, to prevent Kyiv from joining NATO. In putting the issue back on the agenda in 2008, and even more directly in 2020-21, NATO members knew Moscow regarded it as a casus belli, as former German chancellor Angela Merkel acknowledged in her memoirs.

After four and a half years of bloody conflict, Russia has probably quashed the prospect of Ukraine’s NATO membership, but at the cost of a triple failure: military (its initial offensive became bogged down), strategic (Finland (…)

Full article: 3 282 words.

(4) Angela Merkel, Freedom: Memoirs, 1954-2021, Macmillan, London/St Martin’s Press, New York, 2024.

(9) Ursula von der Leyen, ‘State of the Union 2026’, European Commission, Brussels, 16 September 2026, commission.europa.eu/.

(10) According to Brown University’s Costs of War project, costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/.