George Kennan, himself a Cold War veteran and the man who first propounded the country’s containment policy against Russia, said in a 1998 interview to The New York Times after the first phase of expansion. “I think it is the beginning of a new Cold War. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else.” Madeleine Albright, former secretary of state in the Clinton administration, was candid in her memoir about the Russian reaction, “[Russian President Boris] Yeltsin and his countrymen were strongly opposed to enlargement, seeing it as a strategy for exploiting their vulnerability and moving Europe’s dividing line to the east, leaving them isolated.” Both Gorbachev and Yeltsin, regarded as pro-western leaders, were uneasy about the NATO expansion.