President Mikhail #Gorbachev reached out to Washington and #Europe to build a new security pact that would include Russia
There was a near universal understanding among diplomats and political leaders at the time that any attempt to expand #NATO was foolish, an unwarranted provocation against Russia that would obliterate the ties and bonds that happily emerged at the end of the Cold #War.
How naive we were. The war industry did not intend to shrink its power or its profits. It set out almost immediately to recruit the former Communist Bloc countries into the European Union and NATO. Countries that joined NATO, which now include Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia were forced to reconfigure their militaries, often through hefty loans, to become compatible with NATO military hardware.
There would be no peace dividend. The expansion of NATO swiftly became a multi-billion-dollar bonanza for the corporations that had profited from the Cold War
The consequences of pushing #NATO up to the borders with #Russia — there is now a NATO missile base in Poland 100 miles from the Russian border — were well known to policy makers. Yet they did it anyway.
The #Obama administration, not wanting to further inflame tensions with Russia, blocked arms sales to Kiev. But this act of prudence was abandoned by the #Trump and #Biden administrations.
Once NATO expanded into Eastern Europe the #Clinton administration promised Moscow that NATO combat troops would not be stationed in Eastern Europe, the defining issue of the NATO-Russia Founding Act on Mutual Relations. This promise again turned out to be a lie.
The full-throated cries for war, echoed shamelessly by the #press, are justified by draining the conflict of historical context, by elevating ourselves as the saviors and whoever we oppose, from Saddam #Hussein to #Putin, as the new #Nazi leader.
