While reading the article about
George F. Kennan's death in the LA Times, I came across this paragraph:
Kennan argued that the Soviets dismissed and held in contempt the idea that international agreements must be respected or given the stature of law. Josef Stalin and his negotiators, he believed, would invariably seek to turn all negotiations and treaties to their advantage and were unlikely to honor past agreements if they felt such treaties were not in their best interests.
The problem I have with it, is that I am hard put to think of any international agreement that the Soviet Union dismissed or held in contempt either prior to the date of the telegram or since. If anything, Kennan is projecting the behaviour of the United States onto the Soviet Union.
That Joseph Stalin and his negotiators would invariably seek to turn all negotiations and treaties to their advantage is only natural. To imply that the United States would do otherwise, as this statement suggests, is pure hypocrisy. We have only to look at the recent behaviour of the Bush administration to see how unlikely the government of the United States is to honour past agreements when such treaties are not in its own best interests.