Posted on 03/31/2023 11:00:18 PM PDT by ganeemead
Putin is a bumbler, caught up in a self-destructive fantasy of a recovery of Russian power to Cold War levels based on oil and gas wealth and a quick, cheap military victory.
“Russia invades Ukraine, but somehow, America is to blame.”
Just as when we helped Kuwait drill horizontally and suck oil from Iraqi reserves, and then had our ambassador tell Iraq that we wouldn’t object to them invading Kuwait.
We often do DUMB things, and often pay, BIG TIME.
In the Middle East, there are frequent disputes over boundaries and drilling into oil fields that are subject to competing rights of access. These disputes though get worked out by negotiations that are usually led by diplomats, industry experts, and Western oil majors. Such essentially commercial disputes simply do not cause wars, any more than friendship spats between girls in middle school are the cause of gun battles between drug gangs.
The origin of the Gulf War was that Kuwait had long been an ally of Saddam Hussein's Iraq against Iran and had extended billions of dollars in loans and grants.
Kuwait though tired of Saddam's thuggish corruption and mismanagement of Iraq's economy. They declined to forgive previous loans or extend new loans and grants to help an increasingly dangerous and erratic Saddam. With Iraq's economy stagnant and its population restive, Saddam decided to invade Kuwait, expecting that he would soon be given money and oil fields to leave. In effect, by invading Kuwait, Saddam was robbing his banker.
American warnings not to invade were ignored by Saddam because, after all, America was far away and surely had no desire to fight for Kuwait's fabulously wealthy and lazy ruling elite composed of party boys. And, as Saddam's Russian pals assured him, America's military was overrated and would be no match for Saddam's crack troops and their Russian weapons. Oddly, decades later, Putin made a similar mistake in invading Ukraine.
“We often do DUMB things, and often pay, BIG TIME.”
I’m talking about Putin and his entourage in the Moscow leadership. Without whom we wouldn’t be having any revisionist assertions.
Your well cited source is not the only one. The Boris Yeltsin library covers off how those discussions all became redundant in 1991...
https://www.prlib.ru/en/history/619792
And Gorbachev repeatedly said that NATO expansion into the Warsaw Pact or even the USSR was never discussed.
Gorbachev even confirmed that I’m his memoirs.
Like I said, I’d trust the opinion of Scheherazade and Gorbachev as they were party to every meeting and every conversation that mattered, far more than I care what taxi driver Putin and burger flipper Prighozin thought was real.
It wouldn’t be complicated at all if second, third and fourth level witnesses miles away from the negotiating parties forned their opinion on what actually happened rather than focusing on the perceptions of the likes of Putin.
CIA Director Robert Gates’s criticism of “pressing ahead with expansion of NATO eastward [in the 1990s], when Gorbachev and others were led to believe that wouldn’t happen”.
As illustrated by https://natowatch.org/newsbriefs/2018/how-gorbachev-was-misled-over-assurances-against-nato-expansion
Which views reality not through agreed facts, declassified notes and the direct answers to direct questions from people who were actually there... But instead thru the filters of Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton, and CIA Director Robert Gates’s post-fact opinions combination with James Baker overstating the future vision and “misspeaking” so off script that even the Russian negotiators effectively marked his statements as personal opinions not the opinions of the negotiating parties.
Let’s look at Gates. At the time of these prolonged negotiations he was Deputy National Security Advisor, or Deputy Director of Central Intelligence. Let’s just say he wasn’t exactly showered with trust. He’s a spook.
In fact there was testimony against the CIA that alleged “Gates was part of an agency leadership that proliferated false information and ignored ‘reality’” and he’d “transgressed professional boundaries.” That includes repeatedly overstating USSR capabilities and threat vectors.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Gates
In other words, your source and many others fail to take into account Gates has had a massive spook chip on his shoulder, exaggerating risks to benefit the CIA and injecting his own personal political opinions into what are supposed to be objective professional assessments.
All of which is obfuscation. The biases that are most relevant are those who were actually signing the agreements, and the people painstakingly ensuring that not a single word of the contract amounted to overstated commitment, runaway opinion, open-ended promise, or something that the other side could exploit.
The end result was a set of agreements with a tightly controlled scope, confined to NATO expanding into East Germany after the Soviet Union ALLOWED Germany’s reunification.
To apply the agreement to anywhere else, the Supreme Soviet in Moscow would have to agree in principle with, say, Poland leaving the Warsaw Pact, and then sign that off formally while both the USSR and Warsaw Pact continued to exist without Poland. A highly implausible scenario.
And the Belovezha Accords tore that scenario up.
The USSR was abolished. The Warsaw Pact was ripped up. Russia formally agreed that there was no more “Supreme Soviet”. Russia FURTHER agreed that the countries in the Soviet Union were all now separate and equal. None of them could dominate another. The minute Belarus, Ukraine and Russia agreed all that, any promises to the Soviet Union that restricted NATO expansion became irrelevant and unenforceable.
Its an opinion piece by, surprise, Svetlana Savranskaya
p.s. I think Tsar Alexander the III could not care less if Tchaikovsky was a homosexual, but his old classmates at the conservatory had something of a court of honor and they told Tchaikovsky that they would expose his perverted stuff unless he committed suicide. I believe that is the real story.
Having reviewed again the GWU National Archives material, I find it difficult to come up with your conclusion. They seem more reliable than Wikipedia.
Exploring these matters doesn’t put anyone in the Putin’s camp. I would like to find a site where truth is important. I want to know what is actually going on. Frankly I favor neither side. I side for peace. I fault them all for destroying all they have in the USA. But most of all I blame Biden.
Part of the price of being the global superpower and avoiding nuclear war is to fight small wars while also being ready for big wars so as to avert them. In return, to keep the globe's policeman on duty, the world uses dollars as the primary trade and reserve currency and finances America's massive public debt. In effect, the world pays for medical care for America's seniors in order to assure that their children and grand kids will provide the military strength that keeps the world from falling into chaos on the way to Armageddon.
In the context of NATO and Europe, that means the US keeping Russia in check, not just for our sake but for NATO allies in Europe who have good reason to fear Russian aggression and see Ukraine as the place and time to stop it. And here's a little something to chew on. If Ukraine begins to collapse, Poland, with British support, will send its air force and troops in to keep Russian forces from taking control of western Ukraine.
To keep a potentially catastrophic Polish-Russian armed clash from happening, it makes sense to me for the US to pay and send enough weapons for Ukraine to defeat Russia and its army in Donbas and Crimea. It matters little whether or not Russia trusts our promises of favor as long as they trust that our promises of pain and destruction will be carried out.
You’re never going to get a single definitive source of truth that is completely unbiased, covers what you want to hear AND what you don’t want to hear, and cannot ever be contradicted.
The best approach is to use a range of curated source of FACTS that collectively cover the FACTS from multiple angles and do it without prejudice. That’s why I cite Kremlin sources and their western counterparts, encyclopaedias of agreed facts, and academic sources to review content before relying on blogs and editorials.
The minute you fall into the trap of consuming filtered opinions as if they’re reporting unfiltered facts, you end up being drawn into the confirmation bias held by whoever wrote the source material.
Mill bloggers and op-ed pieces are not reporting FACTS. They are discussing OPINIONS. As the pro Putin analysis of the James Baker statements demonstrate.
If you listen to the people who were actually there signing the finalised deals, they all say Baker didn’t make any enforceable promise. But that’s what happens in ANY negotiation.
The deal is the thing that gets signed. It isn’t the entirety of the haggling. You don’t get a deal by pissing the other side off but you also don’t get the best deal by giving the other side of the table more than they ever asked for, without quid pro quo. Trump wrote a book on it. He doesn’t treat every schmoozing statement in a negotiation as an enforceable part of the final signed deal. Nobody does.
Mature negotiation teams know how to separate schmoozing during the negotiations from the reality of the final signed deal. Gorbachev and Scheverazade both knew that NATO couldn’t and shouldn’t even entertain the conceit of Romania, Poland or Hungary joining their alliance while the Warsaw Pact was still a geopolitical reality.
Baker, Bush Senior and Thatcher would’ve known that too.
Introducing such a diplomatic faux pas into the draft would’ve been as bonkers as saying to China, “Sure, so let’s add a clause to cover off what we’ll do in the event that you get very weak and are forced to abandon your claim over Taiwan...”
So no matter what flowery rhetoric flowed verbally from Bush, Baker and the German leaders in the drafting phase of the treaty, in relation to not expanding into the Warsaw Pact let alone into a Soviet Socialist Republic next door to Russia, the Soviets would’ve gone postal if it had ever been codified, published and communicated to audiences across the Soviet empire.
It was NEVER going to be in the final agreements between the USSR and NATO because the Soviet Union wasn’t ever going to even entertain the idea that the Soviet Union or Warsaw Pact might collapse, so THEY wouldn’t have allowed it to make the final draft.
And Gorbachev actually did explain that.
If we had Gorbachev, Scheverdnaze and a whole host of Russian negotiators from the 88-93 period disputing this explanation then fair enough, look at what they say instead.
But we don’t. Their interpretations were consistent.
You have the opinion of Putin, who wasn’t anywhere near the negotiations and whose bias is framed around the “calamity” of the collapse of the USSR and Warsaw Pact.
You have the opinion of a CIA spook who even at the time was being accused of vastly overstating the strength and hostility of the USSR, and who thinks he knows what Gorbachev thought better than Gorbachev himself.
You have philosophical ramblings from a range of total nobodies biased towards “we broke our word” or “we didn’t break it” depending on whose side they took. They didn’t start out as impartial analysts, they are cherry picking the evidence to support the position they already held and fastidiously ignore any contrary evidence.
But none of them were there. It’s speculation and bias, not fact.
So you are saying the mean old west unfairly beat the Ussr? That is literally what you a..
Wait don’t puss out. Admit you. Wish the Ussr won
No. I’m saying the West knew just as well as Scheverdnaze and Gorbachev knew that the Soviet Union was not in any way threatened by the reunification of Germany... It was far more threatened by internal collapse, and that’s why they were willing to entertain reunification.
The Supreme Soviet had already ceded some powers to the Republics in an attempt to arrest the terminal decline. It wasn’t enough. Russia needed a face saving way to cut the cost of maintaining the Cold War.
The German reunification was meant to be the USSR demonstrating more of its move towards trade and peace instead of bankrupting itself on maintaining the cold war infrastructure, but the move had to be framed as something that would maintain the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact as a “geopolitical reality”.
The people who think the USSR should’ve won or that we promised anything to the USSR in relation to NATO in the Warsaw Pact are the ones whose views align most closely with Putin’s, ie that we betrayed Russia in those negotiations.
I’m in the other camp. Gorbachev, Baker, Bush, Reagan, Scheverdnaze and Thatcher were all negotiating to arrest the collapse of the USSR, by redirecting its focus away from militarism, towards reconciliation and an end to the Cold War.
Often demons will try to play with people’s minds
Are you saying you supported the Soviet Union?
No. Like most normal rational people, I think the best way to end the USSR was by its own member countries ending it by mutual agreement. Which is indeed what really happened.
Putin and his supporters here are not in that camp. They all think we won the Cold War. Not only that, they think we only won because we cheated.
According to those dimwits, We’re guilty of winning by humiliating Russia. Without firing a shot. Without threat. Without starting a war. Without doing anything harder than urging Gorbachev to take a wall down.
The insane levels of alt history needed to convince themselves that promising not to expand NATO before the mighty invincible USSR disbanded, we tricked it into disbanding itself.
That’s why they think Putin’s got a point when he really hasn’t.
I don’t know how people that stupid can remember how to stand the right way round at a urinal. The only people feeding them this garbage are people who DO want to resurrect the Cold War. People who lament the fact it ended over 30 years ago.
People who couldn’t cope with the idea that Russia had the exact same opportunities as Poland to come in from the cold while having access to a vastly larger pile of assets to get the ball rolling... And did nothing remotely useful with those opportunities.
We didn’t have to lift a finger. The USSR was flat broke, 20 years behind the West on every measure, nearly nuked itself at Chernobyl, and facing war on 12 fronts if it tried to limp on.
Putin might’ve banged his head in a taxi prang, and only thinks that we in the West are responsible for its collapse because he is brain damaged. If so, at least he’s got an excuse for being a total nutter.
What’s the putinards’ excuse?
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