Experts Warned For Years That NATO Expansion Would Lead To This by Ms Caitlin Johnstone!
(2022-02-26 at 00:34:27 )

Experts Warned For Years That NATO Expansion Would Lead To This by Ms Caitlin Johnstone!

Chris Hedges introduces his latest article for Scheer Post, titled "Chronicle of a War Foretold", with the following:

"After the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a near universal understanding among political leaders that NATO expansion would be a foolish provocation against Russia. How naive we were to think the military-industrial complex would allow such sanity to prevail."

Imperial narrative managers have been falling all over themselves working to dismiss and discredit the abundantly evidenced idea that Russias invasion of Ukraine was due largely to Moscows fear of NATO expansion and the refusal of Washington,D.C. and Kyiv to solidify a policy that Ukraine would not be added to the alliance.

Take Michael McFaul, the mass medias go-to pundit on all things Russia:

-Putins horrific invasion of Ukraine has NOTHING to do with NATO expansion! Stop please.

-Or read the details:-Michael McFaul (McFaul) February 24, 2022

-Or New Jersey Congressman Tom Malinowski:

-Rep. Malinowski: "The mask is totally off of Putin. In case anyone had any doubts, this is nothing to do with NATO expansion. It has everything to do with his belief that Ukraine has no right to exist. The very existence of Ukraine is offensive to him."-The Hill (thehill) February 23, 2022

-Or Just Security editor Ryan Goodman:

-If you think the #RussiaInvasion has much to do with NATO enlargement, this analysis provides many fact-based reasons to think again.

-Thanks to great experts on the topic:-Ryan Goodman (rgoodlaw) February 24, 2022

It makes sense that they would have to do this. After all, if westerners were to get it into their heads that this whole terrible war could have been avoided by simply solidifying a policy of neutrality for Ukraine and issuing a guarantee that it would never be added to NATO, they would begin asking why this did not happen.

NATO powers had no interest in adding Ukraine to the alliance anyway, so it does not really make sense to refuse to make such low-cost concessions if the only alternative is mass military slaughter. I mean, unless your goal was to provoke mass military slaughter to advance your own geostrategic objectives.

So they work hard to present the narrative that the invasion has nothing to do with NATO at all, and occurred solely because President Putin is an evil madman who hates freedom and wants to destroy democracy. Most western analysis goes no deeper than this:

Why would President Putin want to invade Ukraine? Because he wants democracy to fail, and not just in Ukraine.-Anne Applebaum (anneapplebaum) February 11, 2022

But these herculean propaganda efforts have one pretty significant plot hole: if the attack on Ukraine has nothing to do with NATO expansion, then how come so many western experts have spent years warning that NATO expansion will lead to an attack on Ukraine?

Check out this 2015 video clip by John Mearsheimer, for example:

-Best advice to solve the Russia-Ukraine Conflict was given by John J. Mearsheimer in 2015 which nobody listened.

-"The West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path and the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked."-Buddhi (buddhimedia) February 24, 2022

Or this one by the late great Stephen F Cohen back in 2010:

-The late historian Stephen Cohen in 2010: "There has been a tremendous expansion of Americas sphere of influence since the mid-1990s..with all the while, every American administration saying to Russia.."You cannot have a sphere of influence because that is the old thinking."-Human Rights Watch Watcher (queeralamode) February 22, 2022

Or this excerpt from a summary by The Nation of points made by Cohen in a 2017 dialogue with John Batchelor titled "Have 20 Years of NATO Expansion Made Anyone Safer?":

-NATO promises that Georgia might one day become a member state was an underlying cause of the Georgian-Russian war of 2008, in effect a United States-Russian proxy war. The result was the near ruination of Georgia. NATO remains active in Georgia today.

-Similar NATO overtures to Ukraine also underlay the crisis in that country in 2014, which resulted in Russias annexation of Crimea, the still ongoing Ukrainian civil war in Donbass, and in effect another United States-Russian proxy war. Meanwhile, United States-backed Kiev remains in profound economic and political crisis, and Ukraine fraught with the possibility of a direct American-Russian military conflict.

Or this from Stephen M Walt in 2015:

-Today, those who want to arm Ukraine are demanding that Russia cease all of its activities in Ukraine, withdraw from Crimea, and let Ukraine join the EU and-or NATO if it wants and if it meets the membership requirements.

In other words, they expect Moscow to abandon its own interests in Ukraine, full stop. It would be wonderful if Western diplomacy could pull off this miracle, but how likely is it???

Given Russias history, its proximity to Ukraine, and its long-term security concerns, it is hard to imagine President Putin capitulating to our demands without a long and costly struggle that will do enormous additional damage to Ukraine.

-The solution to this crisis is for the United States and its allies to abandon the dangerous and unnecessary goal of endless NATO expansion and do whatever it takes to convince Russia that we want Ukraine to be a neutral buffer state in perpetuity. We should then work with Russia, the EU, and the IMF to develop an economic program that puts that unfortunate country back on its feet.

Or this from George Kennan right after the United States Senate approved NATO expansion all the way back in 1998:

-"I think it is the beginning of a new cold war. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. 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.. Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are - but this is just wrong."

Or how about now-CIA Director William Burnss 2008 memo to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice:

"Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putins sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests."

Or what the last United States ambassador to the USSR Jack Matlock recently wrote about the Ukraine conflict, calling it "an avoidable crisis that was predictable, actually predicted, willfully precipitated, but easily resolved by the application of common sense":

In 1997, when the question of adding more members to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), I was asked to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In my introductory remarks, I made the following statement: "I consider the Administrations recommendation to take new members into NATO at this time misguided. If it should be approved by the United States Senate, it may well go down in history as the most profound strategic blunder made since the end of the Cold War. Far from improving the security of the United States, its Allies, and the nations that wish to enter the Alliance, it could well encourage a chain of events that could produce the most serious security threat to this nation since the Soviet Union collapsed."

So many people who have worked hard to gain an understanding of the Russian government have been warning for years that NATO expansionism would lead to a disastrous conflict, strongly emphasising Ukraine as a powderkeg where that conflict could ignite.

Yet we are being asked to believe that what we are seeing in Ukraine has nothing whatsoever to do with NATO expansion and is due rather to Vladimir Putin simply being evil and wanting to ruin everything.

The aforementioned Michael McFaul even goes so far as to pretend this thing we were warned about for decades was never anything anyone ever mentioned until the end of last year:

Why were not thinking-debating-writing-tweeting about NATO expansion in 2009? 2010? 2011? 2012? 2013? 2014? 2015? 2016? 2017? 2018? 2019? 2020? Why are you now? Something change in Brussels? No. President Putin massed his army on Ukraines border and invented this "NATO expansion" crisis.-Michael McFaul (McFaul) February 9, 2022

Imperial spinmeisters have even gone so far as to deceitfully claim President Putin makes no mention of NATO in a speech about intervening in Ukraine and citing that as evidence that he is just a land-grabbing Hitler-like monster, hoping no one would fact check them:

And after everything, this Putin speech has nothing to do with NATO and everything to do with challenging Ukraines legitimacy as a state.-Isabelle Khurshudyan (ikhurshudyan) February 21, 2022

When he most certainly did:

-I have seen numerous pundit-hawks point to President Putins speech today as the definitive evidence that all of this is about imperial ambitions and has nothing to do with NATO…even though Putin again specifically mentions NATO expansion in the speech. Dishonesty or laziness???-Branko Marcetic (BMarchetich) February 22, 2022

So I dunno, if experts have been warning for many years that NATO expansion would provoke an attack, and the guy launching the attack is explicitly citing NATO expansion as a driving motive for his actions, it seems like maybe it has sorta kinda got something to do with NATO expansion.

Which would be great news, because it would mean that the United States and its allies actually have a lot more power to end this war than they have been letting on, and no good reason not to do so immediately.

"This Ms Caitlin Johnstone article, its pictures, and its links are here:"

Thanks for reading!!

Everyone has my unconditional permission to republish or use any part of this work (or anything else I have written) in any way they like free of charge.

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my "sweet merchandise", buying my new book "Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone", or my previous book "Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers". The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for "my website", which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I am trying to do with this platform, "click here".