The article explains that Kennan warned the U.S. about NATO expansion during the late 1990s, arguing that it would lead to aggression on part of Russia. Clinton proceeded with that, and that's what eventually happened.
Kennan came up with the idea of containment, which is in no way outdated. In fact, by the 1990s it became part of a grand chessboard strategy, employed by the U.S., which according to Carter is the most warlike country in modern history:
The only US president to complete his term without war, military attack or occupation has called the United States “the most warlike nation in the history
www.counterpunch.org
and has been at war with one country or another throughout much of its history:
The US Has Been at war for more than 92 percent of the time
www.thenews.com.pk
and part of it involves decades of attacking, destabilizing, and intervening in various countries:
Part of that warmongering involved the containment strategy that Kennan was talking about, but with the fall of the Soviet Union became illogical. Why, then, did the U.S. pursue the same in the form of encirclement, which included using 400 out of over 700 bases to encircle countries like China?
The reason has to do with two ideologies: neoconservatism and neoliberalism.
The first argues that the U.S. is the sole superpower of the world and the beacon of freedom and democracy. All countries, therefore, but follow it, and those that do not are considered a threat to freedom and democracy and must thus undergo coercion, destabilization, or even intervention in order to implement regime change.
Ukraine experienced that through Vicky Nuland and co.
Neoliberalism argues that the U.S. economic system, which is free market capitalism, is the only way to ensure prosperity, and thus avoidance of conflict. That means all countries that do not follow the same are subject to structural adjustment, and thus their economies must be pried open.
Ukraine is about to experience that through Zelensky's deals with Wall Street:
The transformation of Ukraine into untarnished, saintly victim, symbol of democracy and civil society savaged by brutish Russia, has been nothing less than
countercurrents.org
Why are these ideologies important? Because they make countries dependent on the U.S. and on the dollar, and the U.S. needs that because of the Triffin dilemma: the creator of the currency used as a global reserve eventually experiences chronic trade deficits because its exports become too expensive and imports too cheap. With that, in order to maintain spending, it has to borrow continuously, which is what the U.S. has been doing since the early 1980s:
Investors are celebrating an incipient “recovery,” but the interventions that were responsible for it are sowing the seeds of a more violent contraction...
seekingalpha.com
This explains why Kennan's containment became Clinton's encirclement. This also shows that that encirclement is part of a long history of warmongering by the U.S., leading to neoconservatism starting after WW2 then followed by neoliberalism, all needed to keep the dollar propped up, and with that endless borrowing and spending. That endless borrowing, in turn, is dependent on everyone else using the dollar, and to do that they must be kept weak and dependent on the U.S., which in turn has to remain the sole superpower of the world.
The problem is that the same Triffin dilemma has led to increased wealth for the Global South: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS) and forty emerging markets. They are now answering back at the U.S. and NATO, forming new bilateral and multilateral relations, and slowly moving away from the dollar. You can read about it in the news today: Brazil, China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia, India, Mexico, and more, now planning to buy and sell oil and trade using various currencies.
In conclusion, what is now emerging is a multipolar world, and that should be the perspective of separatism in Ukraine and more, especially given the point that Ukraine, which the West was pushing to be part of NATO and to trade only with EU, is part of the same Global South:
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Of course, there will always be counter-arguments to this, especially from the chicken hawks and neocons who argue that these are "nothingburgers," that it's impossible for such countries to take over because they're corrupt or authoritarian or evil, etc., similar to what one NATO adviser said:
That is, the future is a "liberal, post-modern life," and that the only ones who can experience that are "Europeans." Everyone else is hopeless, and thus must be dealt with.
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