Noooo... back when the Soviet Union fell, we invited Russia's Boris Yeltsin and other Eastern European countries to apply for NATO membership.
So in 1994 they all joined a Partnership For Peace (PFP) process to prepare for NATO membership, including Russia.
Even after Vladimir Putin took control in Russia, NATO membership was still on the table, and he discussed it in 2000 with US President Slick.
In 2004, seven Eastern European countries joined NATO -- Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia & Slovenia.
Still, even after Ukraine's 2004 Orange Revolution, Russia-NATO relations remained positive, until Russia's invasion of Georgia in 2008.
This caused US President GW Bush to recommend NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine, prompting Russia's first warnings against it.
So, 2008 was a watershed year.
However, Russian relations with NATO still remained somewhat positive, for example, as late as 2011 Russia and NATO participated in joint fighter exercises.
After Russia's invasion of Crimea in 2014, relations with NATO became almost entirely negative, even hostile.
WinstonSmith1984: "We ran a color revolution to dispose VLADs guy in Ukraine in 2014, that is not in dispute and well supported."
Again, you are confused & disoriented.
Ukraine's Color Revolution (Orange) was late 2004 to early 2005.
In it the 2004 presidential election was declared rigged and annulled and pro-Ukrainian Viktor Yushchenko then defeated Putin Puppet Viktor Yanukovych in new elections.
But Puppet-Yanukovych was far from finished.
In 2010 he won election as president and served until removed from office by Ukraine's parliament in 2014.
That was the Euromaidan Revolution against Puppet Yanukovych's veto of closer ties to the European Union, not NATO.
The result was an interim government and then Petro Poroshenko as president until 2019, when the current President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was elected.
I've seen no evidence that any of this was controlled or influenced by any non-Ukrainian besides Vladimir Putin.
WinstonSmith1984: "I am not saying that VLAD is a good guy, just that he is acting rationally. Try this on for size"
Over an hour of lies & nonsense? No thanks.
If Vladimir Putin were acting rationally, he would have applied for NATO membership, committed to a M.A.P. (Membership Action Plan) and become a NATO member in good standing.
Then ALL of his fears regarding supposed threats from Europe would have 100% disappeared -- that's rational behavior.
What Putin did instead was take a path leading to insanity and potential World War -- nothing rational about that.
WinstonSmith1984: "BROJOEK- you are referencing SNOPES which is a “Narrative Manager” not a fact finder.
The overall all vote is not the point, look at ALL the precincts that had more votes than voters... it comes out to about 750K over votes... not possible yet they certified the election."
I don't know who Snopes is, but the point of that quote is, your claim, that there were over-votes in Pennsylvania, is not an accepted fact.
Nor have I seen ANYONE in Pennsylvania challenge the findings quoted by Snopes.
So, you can claim whatever you wish, but so far as I can tell, it's all just talk, nothing else.
WinstonSmith1984: "BROJOEK- again we need to be adults...
Putin saw himself going the way of Khadafi, he likely is rational in his mind and in any case everything he did was predictable (Because he told us what he was thinking) ,"
But it's total nonsense! So you can blather about "adults" all you wish, the fact remains that Putin's most rational course of action was to JOIN NATO and thus secure forever his legacy as bringing Russia into Europe and securing Russia's western flank against any possible invasion.
What Putin did instead is utterly insane and there is no reason to excuse or justify it.
Putin turned evil, he became a little-Hitler now wanting to become a Big-Hitler.
And lest we forget, for many years Hitler himself was 100% rational, within the scope of his insane world views.
Indeed, to this day Hitler is sometimes credited with being a strategic or tactical genius in the war's early years.
So, for you to claim that Putin is rational is nothing, it's irrelevant, what matters is that he's made all the WRONG choices and now the world must pay the price for Putin's crazy.
WinstonSmith1984: "I am not defending him or his actions I am just saying that on the national stage he should have seen strength in the west and not subversion.
He is reacting to a combination of weakness in the west and subversion within his sphere of influence."
And still more babbling, irrelevant nonsense.
Boris Yeltsin left Putin with the path to follow -- NATO membership -- and Putin rejected that, chose his own anti-NATO path and now you want us to sympathize with the natural consequences?
I don't think so.
WinstonSmith1984: "What I see going on is that we are literally laundering money back into our political system through Ukraine which brunted the red wave and the cry of the American people to stop the insane policies which are literally killing us domestically and have us on the edge of Armageddon. "
So far as I can tell, those are nothing but words, often repeated like propaganda -- as if, the more often you say it, the better chance it has to magically become true.
But I've seen not one shred of evidence to support such wild claims.
WinstonSmith1984: "And add this to your thought bubble... President Z has outlawed political opposition and has taken over dictatorial powers internally.
(Oligharchs in Ukraine are mysteriously dying as well from time to time now)
Z is not a good guy he is a corrupt thug just like President P."
Again, wild claims without evidence cannot magically become true just because you repeat them endlessly.
I've seen no evidence -- zero, nada, zilch evidence -- suggesting Zelenskyy is more corrupt than Putin, or Ukraine generally more than Russia overall.
As for alleged money laundering, nothing generally known supports such claims.
And why? Why do you keep lying about Zelenskyy outlawing political opposition? There are many political parties in Ukraine.
Only treasonous parties are banned, just as they would be in any country in the world.
What do you think you're talking about?
During the Second World War, our President Franklin Roosevelt took on near dictatorial powers and crushed all opposition he thought could subvert our war effort.
But FDR did not outlaw the Republican party any more than Zelenskyy has outlawed his loyal opposition.
WinstonSmith1984: "Put me in the camp with John Mearsheimer, we led the Ukrainian people down the primrose path and they are being slaughtered because of it."
Rubbish! We didn't "lead" Ukrainians anywhere. They wanted independence from Russia and we did not prevent them.
Now they are willing to fight for their country and we're trying to help them.
My concern is: are we helping enough for Ukraine to win or just to delay defeat?
WinstonSmith1984: "BroJoeK it is not secretly controlled by Democrats, it is controlled by the uniparty and the cartels. What is happening in AZ..."
Sure, I can see your claims, but I've seen no real evidence to support any of it.
WinstonSmith1984: "Again, I appreciate your analysis but your arguments seem to be more focused on the flees on the elephant than the elephant in the room."
In the meantime, you not only ignore the real elephant, you ignore the room itself, which is Vlad the Invader invaded Ukraine!
That is utterly evil, unjustifiable and must be defeated, we have no choice.
If Putin succeeds in Ukraine, then there will be many more invasions like it and the world will revert to the empires of January 1914.
Today's 195 independent countries will be consumed in a handful of new empires and we will not like that world.
It will not be friendly to us.
WinstonSmith1984: "No one believes Joe Biden received more legitimate votes than any other President in history.
Why do they believe that... because they all saw real time voter fraud happen and it was in their face and Joe Biden told us he assembled the most diverse voter fraud organization in history."
Obviously, the devil is in the details of that word "legitimate".
Nobody really knew which votes were legit and which were not, if any.
And still, here we are today, over two years later and nobody knows any more than we did in December, 2020.
Many have researched and written books on it -- Fox's Molly Hemmingway is one -- all have said that Covid caused laws to be changed, perhaps improperly, to allow counting votes which would not be acceptable in other elections.
And yet, nobody has managed to overturn a single election as a consequence, to my knowledge.
What did happen is: for 2022, some election laws were changed and Republicans, here & there, have figured out how to beat the Dems at their own shenanigans.
And that might be the best we can hope for, for now.
And that just barely gets us to the next big issue -- uncounted millions of illegal immigrant Democrat voters.
WinstonSmith1984: "We need Russia as a balance against China and we have driven two powers together that can actually take down the west..."
B.R.I.C is more than two powers, it's four, and that's not even counting Little Kim and the Mula Mullahs.
Brazil, Russia, India, China have 40% of the world's population and produce about 25% of the world's GDP, with China alone accounting for around 70% of that.
They would certainly make a formidable force, though just their GDP and population numbers cannot make them unbeatable.
A united West, including the western Pacific, is still more than a match.
WinstonSmith1984: "What to do? "
I think I agree with all of that except Ukraine.
Ukrainians deserve all the support we can give them until they themselves decide it's time for a negotiated settlement.
My guess is the eventual pattern is the one we can still see today in Korea, 70+ years after the armistice.
And that could easily be long after the current generation of leadership in both countries has passed away.
I should mention something else -- as amazing as our Founding Fathers were, they did not, they could not, win the Revolutionary War all by themselves.
They had help, lots and lots of help, mainly from France but other countries too, including Spain and Holland, plus army officers & soldiers from Germany and Poland, and others too.
Our combined forces were too much for the Brits, powerful as they were, they couldn't defeat us plus much of Europe too.
And the lack of substantial foreign support is what doomed the Confederacy in the 1860s.
That's why we are today, as nearly always, what President Kennedy quoted in Ottawa in 1961:
