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Broken promises provoked the Ukraine invasion
By Lee Harding
Is the West good and Vladmir Putin evil? Although that’s the general impression made by most commentators in the West, a more nuanced perspective is in order. Putin has made the same complaint about the eastward expansion of NATO since 2007, and before him, Russian president Boris Yeltsin did the same. This expansion betrays past assurances by Western powers, a history unknown and ignored but every bit worth remembering.
A popular lecture on YouTube has opened some eyes on this longer-term view. In 2018, journalist Vladmir Pozner explained “How the United States Created Vladmir Putin” to an audience at Yale University since viewed 7.9 million times. He said even then that Russian-American tensions were the highest they had been in thirty years, with NATO expansion eastward being a major factor.
Pozner, a former frequent guest on ABC’s Nightline, has a unique vantage point. He was born in France in 1934, raised in the U.S., then moved to Russia when he was 19. He told the audience how the unification of Germany was not a certainty when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. However, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker assured Soviet Union president Mikael Gorbachev NATO would not go “one inch eastward” should Germany be reunited. With that, the Soviet Bloc handed over 108,333 km2 and 16 million people as East Germany rejoined its Western counterpart on October 3, 1990.
Late in 1991, Russian President Boris Yeltsin and his counterparts from Ukraine and Belarus agreed to part ways, thereby ending the Soviet Union. But, unlike the Marshall Plan that give the losers of World War II a hand up, the post Cold-War Wolfowitz / Bush Doctrine called for the U.S. to remain the world’s sole superpower, never to be rivaled by Russia again.
As the nineties wound down, NATO welcomed Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary into its fold, contrary to the promise to Gorbachev. An angry Yeltsin said, “We’re not Haiti. We’re a big country with great history. We can’t be humiliated like this.”
Some Americans warned of the danger. In 1998, George Kennan, a former U.S. diplomat responsible for the Cold War policy of containing the Soviet Union, told the New York Times that NATO expansion represented “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.”
The 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia also inspired strong language from Yeltsin. "I told NATO–the Americans–the Germans–don’t push us towards military action," Yeltsin said. "Otherwise there will be a European war for sure and possibly world war." No such aggression came. Pozner says Yeltsin and Gorbachev are remembered poorly by today’s Russians for their perceived deference to the West.
Putin took the reigns, and according to Pozner he wanted Russia to join NATO and the E.U. However, he was not welcomed. After 9/11, Putin phoned President Bush and said American soldiers would be welcome in Central Asia to address terrorist threats. Pozner said Russia did nothing to provoke the U.S. for the 22 years that followed Gorbachev’s ascension in 1985.
In March 2004, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia joined NATO. As a former CATO foreign policy director Ted Carpenter recently pointed out in The Guardian, these Baltic countries were part of the Russian empire both in the days of the Czar and of the Soviet Union.
Putin is no fool, In 2007, he told a gathering of G20 leaders in Munich, “NATO has put its frontline forces on our borders…[This] represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact?”
NATO gave no heed and soon welcomed Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, and Macedonia in its pact. In 2008, Georgia and Ukraine were promised NATO membership, and in the years that followed Russia took military action in both countries. In 2017, Putin said, “Our biggest mistake was that we trusted you too much. You interpreted our trust as weakness, and you exploited that.”
In recent weeks, NATO officials have strongly indicated Finland and Sweden could join, should they so choose. This, despite Putin’s complaint on February 8 the West had “complete disregard for our concerns” of NATO’s reach eastward. He said NATO was stronger than Russia, but because of the latter’s nuclear weapons, “There will be no winners.” And here we are.
This week’s writing…Click on the title to read….
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