That coup is my most vivid childhood memory. My late father, John Keppel, a U.S. Foreign Service Officer, was Political Counselor of the U.S. Embassy in Rio de Janeiro. The President of Brazil was leftist Joao Goulart, and a debate raged among North Americans whether he was drifting toward communism. A recently declassified cable of March 27, 1964 from Ambassador Lincoln Gordon to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and CIA Director John McCone asks for an unmarked U.S. submarine to deliver weapons by night to right wing rebels in the Brazilian military, who overthrew Goulart and imposed twenty-one years of brutal dictatorship. Dilma Rousseff, a dissident at the time, was tortured by the regime. It would be a bitter irony if those forces regained power today in a quasi-constitutional maneuver.

For my father, it was the beginning of a long personal transformation. His first conclusion was that Washington had no business picking so-called friendly – that is, pro-corporate — leaders in other countries. Instead, he thought we should focus on issues such as food, clean water, public health, and access to family planning.

Source:

https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB118/bz02.pdf

America’s great Cold War diplomats—George Kennan, Charles Bohlen, and Lwellyn Thompson—were realists. They had no love for Soviet communism, but they warned repeatedly against Americans’ capacity to see their own actions as righteous and others as evil. They knew that that diplomacy depends on recognizing all parties’ essential interests, as well as allowing them to save face.

When the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, agreed to the reunification of Germany, the West promised him that we would not take advantage of the change to expand NATO. Yet today, Eastern European states are part of NATO. NATO installed missile defenses in Poland and Romania and set up a military outpost in the former Soviet republic of Georgia.

American diplomats and American money were involved in the ouster of Ukraine’s corrupt but democratically elected pro-Russian president. The new government, ratified by a rump parliament, includes far right-wing forces. It excluded Russian as a national language, alarming eastern Ukrainians, then reversed the decision.

I believe Kennan would have counseled President Obama not to take advantage of the conflict to threaten Russia, specifically through NATO membership, military integration, or deployments and to beware of using American money to support opposition groups, above all in Russia itself. Washington would insist on no less of Moscow if there were a socialist revolution in Mexico.