Posted on 03/09/2022 7:02:19 AM PST by DIRTYSECRET
Putin's a thug, but he's an excellent politician and a strong leader. And he’s not crazy, as some seem to surmise. He is a cold, calculating, strategic thinker who has disciplined his mind and body for decades. He’s a Russia first guy. Think Donald Trump minus all that hot air, Big Macs, and add a willingness to off his enemies.
We promised Russia we would not expand NATO when the Soviet Union fell. We went back on that promise and incorporated almost the entire Eastern Bloc into NATO.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Are you saying you are truitt ?
“search still works” :)
You’ve reposted the same article that is being discussed in detail already here:
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/4045075/posts
*We promised Russia we would not expand NATO when the Soviet Union fell. We went back on that promise and incorporated almost the entire Eastern Bloc into NATO.
Then after 9/11, Bush II unilaterally cancelled the ‘72 ABM treaty*
*Bush was a decent man, but the more time goes by, the more he looks like an absolute moron to me.*
These are OUR people who did their part. Cheney, Bolton, all the others. I can’t blame Clinton for expanding NATO or the Kenyan for what he did there in 2014. WE’RE supposed to know better.
*We promised Russia we would not expand NATO when the Soviet Union fell. We went back on that promise and incorporated almost the entire Eastern Bloc into NATO.
Then after 9/11, Bush II unilaterally cancelled the ‘72 ABM treaty*
*Bush was a decent man, but the more time goes by, the more he looks like an absolute moron to me.*
These are OUR people who did their part. Cheney, Bolton, all the others. I can’t blame Clinton for expanding NATO or the Kenyan for what he did there in 2014. WE’RE supposed to know better.
Putin’s a thug, but he’s an excellent politician and a strong leader. And he’s not crazy, as some seem to surmise. He is a cold, calculating, strategic thinker who has disciplined his mind and body for decades. He’s a Russia first guy. Think Donald Trump minus all that hot air, Big Macs, and add a willingness to off his enemies.
Tell me you didn’t have an emotional reaction to that. Think of how a liberal would react to that.
My bad for the reposted article. It does call for repeating. How are we gonna take in Islam or Chicom expansion when we turn off a potential ally. Didn’t Russia warn us about the Tarnov brothers? Lotta good we did with that info.
“Contrary to popular opinion, the Ukrainians are not making a heroic stand against the Russkies. They’re getting their asses kicked. They’re hiding in population centers, and Russia, trying to get to them, is killing a lot of civilians as collateral damage.”
Ow.
This is Biden’s War: He set the stage in the first hours of residency with the closing of Keystone and 7 other US pipelines, cancelling the Israeli line, thus allowing Russian Oligarchs to rake in big bucks to finance Putin’s ambitions of attaching the Russian title “The Great” to his name while ‘saving’ ethnic Russians across Europe starting with Ukraine.
Strange mishmash of personal opinion and Russian propaganda. One example: We did not ever “promise Russia not to expand NATO when the USSR fell.” That never happened, but Putin has purveyed the story to justify his aggressive posturing.
The story was based on a conversation between James Baker and Gorbachev, and was limited only to the reunification of Germany. There was no “promise to Russia” because at the time USSR was still intact and the prospect of it “falling” was not conceivable. There never was a formal agreement with anybody, but it was understood that expansion of NATO was a decision to be made by NATO a and not the USSR.
Just because someone writes a blog piece doesn’t mean he knows what he’s talking about.
Thanks for the post. Really good incisive no nonsense article and credible analysis
*the first casualty of war is the truth*, as they say...
So... Putin is destroying property and killing a whole country just because he is pissed? I think he needs to be dead....
...but, I may be confused....
BO
We promised Russia we would not expand NATO when the Soviet Union fell. We went back on that promise and incorporated almost the entire Eastern Bloc into NATO.
Then after 9/11, Bush II unilaterally cancelled the '72 ABM treaty, which until then had frozen nuclear weapon development in the Soviet Union and the US, effectively ending the arms race . . .
To the first point, there was a lot of euphoria when the Soviet Union crumbled. Their first president, Boris Yeltsin to whom the promise was made, was comparatively pluralistic, tolerant and friendly toward western style democracy. IOW, the mirror opposite of the thug Putin currently in charge.
While I find it deeply regrettable that we did not do more to help them transition, there was really no historical model for helping a country transition out of communism at that time except Chile. And Augusto Pinochet, instead of being praised for the visionary patriot that he was got near total nasty press because he had made 1800 leftists "disappear" during the transition.
The result in 20-20 hindsight was predictable. Former members of the eastern bloc that had somewhat of a democratic tradition, including Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia had a very successful transition. Those with autocratic traditions including Russia, did not. And those in between, including Ukraine, were somewhere in between.
To the second point, this author ought to know better than to say that the 1972 ABM treaty ended the arms race. The ABM treaty simply ended the ability of the United States to defend itself with Anti-Ballistic Missiles. Reagan ended the arms race by ramping up star wars (the technological successor to ABMs) and, to the chagrin of domestic liberals, actually ramping up the arms race to the point that the Soviet Union fell apart.
Any author who fails to understand these two key points is either pushing a political agenda or is a moron. And I think the author is a neo-con (or worse) in sheep's clothing and not a moron.
See the post right above yours.
We/US promised to protect Ukraine after they gave up their nukes. No country should ever believe a demorat.
Ten years later, in an interview with the German newspaper Bild, Gorbachev complained that the West had tricked Moscow. "Many people in the West were secretly rubbing their hands and felt something like a flush of victory -- including those who had promised us: 'We will not move 1 centimeter further east,'" he was quoted as saying.
Gorbachev later appeared to reverse himself, saying the subject of enlargement in fact never came up in 1989 or 1990. "The topic of 'NATO expansion' was never discussed; it was not raised in those years. I am saying this with a full sense of responsibility. Not a single Eastern European country brought up the issue, not even after the Warsaw Pact had ceased to exist in 1991," he told the newspaper Kommersant in October 2014.
Thank you, Datura. I am aware there is a lot made about the debate whether we “promised” not to extend NATO to Warsaw pact countries. Whether or not we promised, the fact remains we did, placing NATO close to Russia’s border. And now there was movement afoot by Ukraine to place NATO right at their river’s edge with the potential of having foreign troops with advanced weaponry Putin perceives as hostile right on his border. Now a reasonable person would ask how do we distinguish that from Cuba. We did plan the Bay of Pigs invasion to establish a friendly government next door or, at least one that was neutral, much like Putin is attempting now with his war. We failed, and our mortal enemy showed up at our doorstep in Cuba a year later with foreign troops and nukes. They didn’t ask us whether they could show up there much like we did not ask whether we could extend NATO and its troops and weaponry next door to Putin We confronted them in Cuba to the point we were ready to go to a hot war. Were we paranoid and, if so, how was our paranoia different from Putin’s? In the end, after some negotiation, compromises were made and the USSR backed off which is what Putin is trying to do now. I get it. We.re good guys and they’re bad guys But, other than that, there may be a parallel here. Good chance we would be doing the same thing if we were in Russia’s place i.e, force negotiation of demands for security.In fact, we already did that in Cuba.
There were never any formal signed agreements, by anyone, that NATO would not or could not limit its membership in any way.
Nations freed from the yoke of the Soviet Union were free to chart their own path, not held to something that froze any relationship to Moscow.
Only if the rulers in Moscow wanted to continue to be an empire, as Putin does, would/should/could any matter of the choices of the former Soviet states be a concern. Putin chose to be the continuation of the Soviet state, at arms against the west after the fall of the Soviet Union. That was not a choice the west imposed on Russia.
I think he is missing the petrodollar connection.
Russia is an oil producer who has cooperated with China to break the petrodollar hegemony. Trump as a businessman believes that we can survive this form of competition. Is he right? The Hillary/Brandon/Barry Demwit or the Bush/Rino/Neocon can not even conceive such a thing believing that the petrodollar is the only way to maintain the spending borrowing binge of our congress. Is he right? They are probably both right.
As for the “four demands”, it is number four that is the hard one. He ought to know that. Number four presumes Ukrainian surrender. The other three are no issue whatsoever at that point. Please correct me with my thanks. I am not an expert, and I will listen to anybody except someone who thinks he is:-)
You said, Dirty Secret, that his article was a accurate as it can get. Not sure what you meant, but anything this complicated will at first appear true and valid to me because I need things oversimplified in order to relate them to my own worldview. We all do this, so I just wanna take guard about it if I can. Furthermore his conclusions do not necessarily depend on his reasoning path getting there, or I should say his conclusions may be right for completely different reasons than he gives.
Here is an example of what I mean. He mentions two facts from 2014 without relating them. 1) US orchestrated a coup replacing the Ukraine gov’t. 2) There was a plebiscite in Crimea overwhelmingly approving union with Russia. I find it very interesting that the number one reason given by the people of Crimea for their approval of annexation is the many, many years of neglect and mistreatment by the government in Kiev...that pro Russia one.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.