I watched all 8 minutes of your link and my responses are:
- This is exactly how the US loses wars -- most notably Vietnam, it was the same old cr*p: somebody dug out old documents to "prove" that we shouldn't be there in the first place and we're wrong, they're right and so we have to give it all up, turn the South over to North Vietnam and walk away from the resulting bloodbath.
So your video is the argument for defeat, which invites the questions: is defeat what you want, and if so, why do you think defeat is better than victory?
- Your video focuses on the Bucharest Summit in 2008, where Pres. Bush Jr. recommended NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine, but it strips away all of the context, context, context leading up to the Summit and replaces actual historical events with ludicrous Russian propaganda.
- Here is some of that context, context, beginning with very friendly relations between Russia, the US and NATO:
Timeline of NATO-Russia friendly relations:
- June 1990 -- The Message from Turnberry, often described as "the first step in the evolution of [modern] NATO-Russia relations", laid the foundation for future peace and cooperation.[12]
- November 1990 – Soviet Union and the western countries signed in 1990 the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe.
- ***See below for "What Gorbachev was promised in 1990"
- *****See below for "What Yeltsin heard in 1993"
- June 1994 -- Formal contacts and cooperation between newly-founded Russian Federation and NATO began following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, within the framework of the North Atlantic Cooperation Council (later renamed Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council), and were further deepened as Russia joined NATO’s Partnership for Peace program on 22 June 1994.
"In 1992, Russia and the former USSR countries were offered the opportunity to join NATO's ‘Partnership for Peace’ (PFP), and they all joined, including Russia.
We hoped it would be an entry point into NATO and several PFP members joined.
Russia even sent a brigade to serve under NATO in Bosnia in 1995. Things looked good in those days," Erickson tells TRT World.
- Decemberr 1994 -- In the same year, the Budapest Memorandum was signed where Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States made security assurances to Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine, in return for handing over by these three countries of their post-Soviet nuclear arsenal.
- May 1997 -- at the NATO Summit in Paris, France, NATO and Russia signed the Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security, a road map for would-be NATO-Russia cooperation.[18][19][20] The act had 5 main sections, outlining the principles of the relationship, the range of issues NATO and Russia would discuss, the military dimensions of the relationship, and the mechanisms to foster greater military-military cooperation.
- March 1999 – Chechia, Hungary and Poland admitted to NATO.
- Early 2000s – "What Putin Wanted":
Ex-Nato head says Putin wanted to join alliance early on in his rule
Vladimir Putin wanted Russia to join Nato but did not want his country to have to go through the usual application process and stand in line “with a lot of countries that don’t matter”, according to a former secretary general of the transatlantic alliance.George Robertson, a former Labour defense secretary who led Nato between 1999 and 2003, said Putin made it clear at their first meeting that he wanted Russia to be part of western Europe.
“They wanted to be part of that secure, stable prosperous west that Russia was out of at the time,” Robertson said.
The Labour peer recalled an early meeting with Putin, who became Russian president in 2000.
“Putin said: ‘When are you going to invite us to join Nato?’
And [Robertson] said: ‘Well, we don’t invite people to join Nato, they apply to join Nato.’
And Putin said: ‘Well, we’re not standing in line with a lot of countries that don’t matter.’ ” - May 2002 -- The NATO-Russia Council (NRC) was created on 28 May 2002 during the 2002 NATO Summit in Rome.
The NRC was designed to replace the PJC as the official diplomatic tool for handling security issues and joint projects between NATO and Russia.[32]
The structure of the NRC provided that the individual member states and Russia were each equal partners and would meet in areas of common interest, instead of the bilateral format (NATO + 1) established under the PJC.[33] - March 2004 – Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia admitted to NATO.
- Russia-NATO relations grew hostile over repeated threats by Russia against its neighbors,
Russian threats to neighbors since 1991:
- Azerbaijan (1990–1994);[1][2]
- Moldova (1992–present);
- Georgia (2004–present);
- Lithuania (2006);
- Estonia (2006–2007);
- Poland (2006–present);
- Belarus (2007);
- Ukraine (2014–present);
- Syria (2015–present);
- Turkey (2015–2016);
- Kazakhstan (2021–2022) ;[3] and
- Armenia (2022) [4] amongst others.[5]
***"What Gorbachev was promised in 1990"
James A. Baker III’s Words on NATO Loom in Ukraine Standoff - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
New York Times article describing US Secretary of State James Baker’s alleged promise to Michael Gorbachev about not expanding NATO into eastern Europe.
There was talk but no formal promise, as acknowledged by Gorbachev himself.
Rather, what Baker wanted was for Russia itself to join NATO, then problem solved.German troops assigned to NATO could be deployed there once Soviet forces withdrew by the end of 1994.
Nothing in the treaty addressed NATO expansion beyond that.“Now remember, it’s not clear the Soviet Union is going to collapse at this point,” Dr. Rice recalled.
“It’s not even clear that the Warsaw Pact is going to collapse.
This is about the unification of Germany.”
She added, “The expansion of NATO was just not on the table as an issue in ’90-’91.”No less a witness agreed than Mr. Gorbachev.
“The topic of ‘NATO expansion’ was not discussed at all, and it wasn’t brought up in those years,” he told an interviewer after Russia’s intervention in Ukraine seven years ago.
The issue was foreign troops in eastern Germany.
“Baker’s statement” about not one inch “was made in that context,” Mr. Gorbachev said.
“Everything that could have been and needed to be done to solidify that political obligation was done. And fulfilled.”Having said that, Mr. Gorbachev agreed that NATO expansion was unnecessarily provocative.
“It was definitely a violation of the spirit of the statements and assurances made to us in 1990,” he said.*****"What Yeltsin Heard in 1993"
*****NATO Expansion: What Yeltsin Heard | National Security Archive (gwu.edu)
Russian president led to believe Partnership for Peace was alternative to expanded NATO :
Washington, D.C., March 16, 2018 – Declassified documents from U.S. and Russian archives show that U.S. officials led Russian President Boris Yeltsin to believe in 1993 that the Partnership for Peace was the alternative to NATO expansion, rather than a precursor to it, while simultaneously planning for expansion after Yeltsin’s re-election bid in 1996 and telling the Russians repeatedly that the future European security system would include, not exclude, Russia. The declassified U.S. account of one key conversation on October 22, 1993, (Document 8) shows Secretary of State Warren Christopher assuring Yeltsin in Moscow that the Partnership for Peace was about including Russia together with all European countries, not creating a new membership list of just some European countries for NATO; and Yeltsin responding, “this is genius!”
