A Newly Declassified Document Suggests Things With Russia Could Have Turned Out Very Differently

[Xolodno]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/newly-declassified-document-suggests-things-190929591.html

Once in a great while, a diplomatic memorandum—the outline of a proposed change in policy sent from a foreign service officer to his political masters back in Washington—has momentous impact. The most famous of these is George Kennan’s “Long Telegram” of February 1946, which urged “a long-term patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.”

The newly discovered memo, written in March 1994 by Wayne Merry, chief of the U.S. Embassy’s internal politics division at the time, didn’t make the same impact as Kennan’s for two reasons. First, Merry did not go public. Second, unlike Kennan’s memo, Merry’s was at odds with U.S. policy and was ignored, then buried, and its author was blackballed, by the policymakers at the time. In fact, it was buried so deeply that it was declassified just last week as the result of a lawsuit filed under the Freedom of Information Act by the National Security Archive, a private research firm at George Washington University.

As we learned from his first term in office, Trump thinks he knows everything about everything; he doesn’t read; he demands that even policy memos be no longer than a page or two; he tends to dismiss those who dispute his assumptions.

We are in a lot of trouble.