How ready you are to throw in with the globalists.
People would like to isolate NATO expansion as the only element to this, but the Reality is that NATO expansion took place even as the entire West was stiff-arming the Russian Federation after the Cold War.
Had the RF been, instead, escorted in to full trade normalization, and equitable participation in international policy affairs West of Moscow, and treated as an up-and-coming peer in the advancement of the peace and prosperity of Western Civilization NATO could’ve expanded right to their borders and they wouldn’t have batted an eyelash.
Look, you have an entire Soviet architecture that overcame the mass of it’s own Deep State (large chunks of which persist to this very day) to throw down 70 years of suffocating communism, and were they praised? Were they welcomed to the West?
Oh, HELL no!
Saith the accursed NeoCons: no former Soviet will EVER NOT be a Soviet; nor will they EVER be treated as anything BUT Soviets.
More, even, than NATO expansion, it is that damnable NeoCon notion, and it’s infernal philosophical children, propelled forward by our own diabolical cabal of Deep State actors, that has fueled every last iota of international friction with the Russian Federation since 1990. And it DAMN near sent them back into the arms of Stalin’s Ghost; the Russian Federation struggled so mightily economically that many felt they’d made a mistake, and wanted to go back to communism. Never a majority, by the grace of God, alone, but enough to make the threat credible.
WE HAD A GOLDEN WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY, from about 1989 to MAYBE as late as 1999, to affirmatively establish a constructive West/East peace partnership, actively aid in pulling Russia out of the rubble of the collapsed CCCP, and become fast partners in prosperity; bringing our combined influence in our respective global hemispheres to bear on an entire globe that could’ve well used the leadership of a more unified pair of superpowers.
COULD’VE
DIDN’T
So today we choke down the rotten fruit of our failure, as our own Deep State muppets, yes-men, and hangers-on comfort themselves on the thin gruel of taking cheap shots at Putin.
What you conveniently leave out is that NATO expansion was driven by eastern European nations seeking its protection from a hostile Russia, not by an aggressively expansionist policy by NATO. Also missing from your analysis is that the Europeans had allowed their militaries to atrophy to the point that they were not a credible threat to Russia. It was this weakness on the part of NATO that encouraged Putin to seize Ukraine, a goal that he had independent of any actions from the west.