Gravitas Plus: Did NATO push Ukraine into war?

WION ^ | 3/6/22 | Staff

[Its All Over Except ...]

Gravitas Plus: Did NATO push Ukraine into war?

[Its All Over Except ...]

If one NATO member is attacked then all NATO members are attacked.

Hmmm.

Then what was Odumba’s explanation for NATO helping to bomb Libya (with the U.S. “leading from behind” per his words) on unproven allegations Gaddafi was going to attack 10k of his own people?

[Its All Over Except ...]

Check this out if you haven’t seen it:

The Next News Network

Sean Hannity Caught Suggesting NATO Should Get Involved Against Russia

https://youtu.be/M0etmyOO32I

[logi_cal869]

Funny: I don’t recall MC/Visa terminating services to the US over that highly questionable assault (which left the nation in chaos).

/s

[BobL]

“Gravitas Plus: Did NATO push Ukraine into war?”

If the Cuban Missile Crises ended up with us invading Cuba, how would the following question be answered: “Did the Soviet Union push Cuba into war?”

The answer to the above question answers the NATO question.

[Its All Over Except ...]

Hypothetical from you which hasn’t had decades of incidents leading up to WION positing the question it did.

Hypothetical of my own:, what would the U.S. do if China, Russia, etc, put troops in Mexico?

In conclusion: replace NATO with a unified European military under European control, which would have a side benefit of the U.S. not gettimg shafted over funding issues. Time for Euripe to grow up

[nathanbedford]

When the United States slapped an oil embargo on Japan just because Japan had invaded China and was killing thousands of people every day, did we push Japan into war?

When Haile Selassie stood before the League of Nations begging for the survival of his country nakedly invaded by Italy, did we avoid World War II because we kept silent?

When we accommodated Hitler's Dolchstoss (stab in the back) fantasy of the loss of World War I and the need to protect Germany with Lebensraum, or when we appeased Hitler at the Rhineland, in Austria, in the Sudetenland, in Czechoslovakia, why did we not appease him again in Poland to avoid world war two? Appeasement was working so well up until then.

When the American diplomat observed that neither Russia nor China should feel discomfited because South Korea was not within the orbit of America's defense perimeter, did we save South Korea from invasion?

When the American diplomat observed that Kuwait stood like Korea, did we avoid an invasion of Kuwait?

Looking up and down line of historic examples, one concludes that it is very dicey business running foreign policy in the nature of your own country's interests by reference only to the smacked-ass feelings of your enemies.

[Its All Over Except ...]

Correction: replace NATO in Europe with a unified European military.

[BobL]

Good point...let them decide if it’s worth vaporizing their cities over Ukraine. They may think differently.

[BobL]

Sorry, but I just think Cuba is the best analogy. We were worried about nukes there that could reach the US in seconds, Russia is worried about the same in Ukraine.

We ignore their concerns at our risk (and Ukraine’s risk), as we now see.

[JJBookman]

OF COURSE they did, they needed a distraction from the vaccine injuries and deaths now breaking into the “news” (snerk).

[Its All Over Except ...]

Yep. The U.S. is broke. $30 trillion plus in debt, and don’t even take care of our own borders.

[logi_cal869]

If the Cuban Missile Crises ended up with us invading Cuba, how would the following question be answered: “Did the Soviet Union push Cuba into war?”

The answer to the above question answers the NATO question.

____________________________________________________________

I've stated exactly the same logic pertaining to the Ukraine situation, the difference being that I used facts:

The US caused the Cuban Missile Crisis, pushing the USSR & the US to the brink of nuclear war due to their policy - and military - failures. If you cannot grasp that fact, then you - and others - should read this:

The Real Cuban Missile Crisis: Everything you think you know about those 13 days is wrong.

on october 16, 1962, John F. Kennedy and his advisers were stunned to learn that the Soviet Union was, without provocation, installing nuclear-armed medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Cuba. With these offensive weapons, which represented a new and existential threat to America, Moscow significantly raised the ante in the nuclear rivalry between the superpowers—a gambit that forced the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear Armageddon. On October 22, the president, with no other recourse, proclaimed in a televised address that his administration knew of the illegal missiles, and delivered an ultimatum insisting on their removal, announcing an American “quarantine” of Cuba to force compliance with his demands. While carefully avoiding provocative action and coolly calibrating each Soviet countermeasure, Kennedy and his lieutenants brooked no compromise; they held firm, despite Moscow’s efforts to link a resolution to extrinsic issues and despite predictable Soviet blustering about American aggression and violation of international law. In the tense 13‑day crisis, the Americans and Soviets went eyeball-to-eyeball. Thanks to the Kennedy administration’s placid resolve and prudent crisis management—thanks to what Kennedy’s special assistant Arthur Schlesinger Jr. characterized as the president’s “combination of toughness and restraint, of will, nerve, and wisdom, so brilliantly controlled, so matchlessly calibrated, that [it] dazzled the world”—the Soviet leadership blinked: Moscow dismantled the missiles, and a cataclysm was averted.

Every sentence in the above paragraph describing the Cuban missile crisis is misleading or erroneous. But this was the rendition of events that the Kennedy administration fed to a credulous press; this was the history that the participants in Washington promulgated in their memoirs; and this is the story that has insinuated itself into the national memory—as the pundits’ commentaries and media coverage marking the 50th anniversary of the crisis attested.

Scholars, however, have long known a very different story: since 1997, they have had access to recordings that Kennedy secretly made of meetings with his top advisers, the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (the “ExComm”). Sheldon M. Stern—who was the historian at the John F. Kennedy Library for 23 years and the first scholar to evaluate the ExComm tapes—is among the numerous historians who have tried to set the record straight. His new book marshals irrefutable evidence to succinctly demolish the mythic version of the crisis. Although there’s little reason to believe his effort will be to any avail, it should nevertheless be applauded.

Reached through sober analysis, Stern’s conclusion that “John F. Kennedy and his administration, without question, bore a substantial share of the responsibility for the onset of the Cuban missile crisis” would have shocked the American people in 1962, for the simple reason that Kennedy’s administration had misled them about the military imbalance between the superpowers and had concealed its campaign of threats, assassination plots, and sabotage designed to overthrow the government in Cuba—an effort well known to Soviet and Cuban officials.

In the 1960 presidential election, Kennedy had cynically attacked Richard Nixon from the right, claiming that the Eisenhower-Nixon administration had allowed a dangerous “missile gap” to grow in the U.S.S.R.’s favor. But in fact, just as Eisenhower and Nixon had suggested—and just as the classified briefings that Kennedy received as a presidential candidate indicated—the missile gap, and the nuclear balance generally, was overwhelmingly to America’s advantage. At the time of the missile crisis, the Soviets had 36 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), 138 long-range bombers with 392 nuclear warheads, and 72 submarine-launched ballistic-missile warheads (SLBMs). These forces were arrayed against a vastly more powerful U.S. nuclear arsenal of 203 ICBMs, 1,306 long-range bombers with 3,104 nuclear warheads, and 144 SLBMs—all told, about nine times as many nuclear weapons as the U.S.S.R. Nikita Khrushchev was acutely aware of America’s huge advantage not just in the number of weapons but in their quality and deployment as well.

Kennedy and his civilian advisers understood that the missiles in Cuba did not alter the strategic nuclear balance. Moreover, despite America’s overwhelming nuclear preponderance, JFK, in keeping with his avowed aim to pursue a foreign policy characterized by “vigor,” had ordered the largest peacetime expansion of America’s military power, and specifically the colossal growth of its strategic nuclear forces. This included deploying, beginning in 1961, intermediate-range “Jupiter” nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey—adjacent to the Soviet Union. From there, the missiles could reach all of the western U.S.S.R., including Moscow and Leningrad (and that doesn’t count the nuclear-armed “Thor” missiles that the U.S. already had aimed at the Soviet Union from bases in Britain).

[more at source]

The US - and others - has spent over a decade recklessly percolating this conflict and Palki Sharma did a great job exposing those facts.

[Its All Over Except ...]

My bad. I guess I misread what you stated earlier.

And weren’t there Minuteman missles in Turkey during the 1960’s?

[ballplayer]

Read Miranda Devines article in New York Post today,see who encouraged Ukraine to apply to be let into NATO,knowing what Putin had threatened to do.
This is all a big setup folks

[nathanbedford]

Superficially Cuba seems to be the best analogy because of its proximity to our heartland but this is not 1962, rather today we live in must conduct policy and wage war in the age of hypersonic missiles that render the protection of oceans nearly irrelevant. Atomic attack submarines lurk off our coast within a time – speed range of targets in America unheard of in 1962.

The origin of a keyboard strike that knocks out our infrastructure systems and kills hundreds of millions from thirst, exposure and starvation is relevant only to prevention but is not in any way associated with being safer because it is more distant.

Our fears are not limited to rockets propelled from afar or near but include threats from underwater, outer space and digital space where the origin of the attack is utterly irrelevant.

Putin is not living in the age of Napoleon when the Russian steppes and the Russian winter were real, decisive facts of war. He may believe it is so but it is not so in the space-age.

We cannot shape policy on outmoded beliefs, no matter how earnestly held, of our adversaries unless we want to submit ourselves to a whole new realm of warfare beyond geography, beyond space, beyond digital space to include the paranoia of a madman.

To do so is to strip ourselves utterly naked before our enemies.

[BobL]

“The US - and others - has spent over a decade recklessly percolating this conflict and Palki Sharma did a great job exposing those facts.”

You won’t get me to argue that about Cuba. Should have take out Castro the moment he seized power, and if not, definitely during Bay of Pigs.

[FreedomPoster]

You do realize that Cuba was the Soviet reaction to US nuclear IRBMs in Turkey, right? And on the back side of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviets removed theirs, and we quietly removed ours.

[BobL]

“And weren’t there Minuteman missles in Turkey during the 1960’s?”

Yea I remember that as the (secret) part of the deal to get the Soviets to back out of Cuba, and it may have played a big role in the Soviets setting up ICBM bases in Cuba.

So, our fault again!

[FreedomPoster]

Great post. Thanks.