When No One Has Clean Hands or How to Reap the Whirlwind

 

It's one of those complex issues.  Russia makes an apparent land grab in two separatist enclaves in Ukraine. Boil off all the inconvenient complexity and that's what you've got.

What is playing out today is something rooted in the Berlin Wall and the reunification of East and West Germany back in the days of Mikhail Gorbachev and George H.W. Bush.  

The fall of East Germany (and other states of the Warsaw Pact) threatened chaos that could destabilize the superpower detente. Something had to be done. There had to be some quid pro quo. The two leaders came up with a compromise. East and West Germany would reunite. The Soviets would withdraw. East Germany would be allowed to become part of NATO.  Just one more thing. NATO would go no further east than the border of the new/old Germany. The other eastern European nations would be buffer states. They could join the EU but not NATO.

Along came another Bush this time with Dick Cheney at his side. It was as though there was no deal. NATO would march east right to Russia's borders.

Tom Friedman elaborates on how America wrecked the deal.

Most Americans paid scant attention to the expansion of NATO in the late 1990s and early 2000s to countries in Eastern and Central Europe like Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, all of which had been part of the former Soviet Union or its sphere of influence. It was no mystery why these nations would want to be part of an alliance that obligated the U.S. to come to their defense in the event of an attack by Russia, the rump successor to the Soviet Union.

The mystery was why the U.S. — which throughout the Cold War dreamed that Russia might one day have a democratic revolution and a leader who, however haltingly, would try to make Russia into a democracy and join the West — would choose to quickly push NATO into Russia’s face when it was weak.

In 2016, Bill Clinton's defense secretary, Bill Perry, discussed the Bush/Cheney chicanery.

“In the last few years, most of the blame can be pointed at the actions that Putin has taken. But in the early years I have to say that the United States deserves much of the blame. Our first action that really set us off in a bad direction was when NATO started to expand, bringing in Eastern European nations, some of them bordering Russia."

George Kennan, the architect of America’s successful containment of the Soviet Union was aghast. Having joined the State Department in 1926 and served as U.S. ambassador to Moscow in 1952, Kennan was arguably America’s greatest expert on Russia.

"I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the founding fathers of this country turn over in their graves.

“We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way. [NATO expansion] was simply a lighthearted action by a Senate that has no real interest in foreign affairs. What bothers me is how superficial and ill informed the whole Senate debate was. I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe."

Canada, of course, was America's lap dog just as we are today.