In 1989 President George H. W. Bush awarded Kennan the Medal of Freedom, the nation's greatest civilian honor. Yet he remained a realist critic of recent U.S. presidents, urging the U.S. government to "withdraw from its public advocacy of democracy and human rights", saying that the "tendency to see ourselves as the center of political enlightenment and as teachers to a great part of the rest of the world strikes me as unthought-through, vainglorious and undesirable". These ideas were particularly applicable to U.S. relations with China and Russia. Kennan opposed the Clinton administration's war in Kosovo and its expansion of NATO (the establishment of which he had also opposed half a century earlier), expressing fears that both policies would worsen relations with Russia. He described NATO enlargement as a "strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions".