"Instead we expanded our Warsaw Pact equivalent, NATO, relentlessly....
....All of their sway over Central Europe that they had lost 20 million lives in World War II to gain evaporated as well."
This phrasing implies that the countries that *joined* NATO have no agency whatsoever, in fact they don't have any *right* to agency, because Russia won WW2.
The idea that NATO was a threat to Russia, that a few hundred Canadian or Danish troops in Lithuania were going to roll into a nuclear armed Russia and take Moscow is risible.
NATO has been at war with Russia for over four years. Some suggest as many as half a million Russian soldiers have died. I don't think that's risible. NATO bombed Belgrade in 1999. The threat was always very real. I talk about Eastern European agency in the podcast.
Putin's kleptocracy is not a place you might want to raise a family. The democratization of Eastern Bloc countries is bringing liberal democracy(let's call it 'rule of law' democracy) closer to Moscow, and that's Putin's real fear. NATO (a defensive military alliance) is not and never has been a threat to Russia. Countries like Finland, Sweden, Poland and Estonia have no territorial expansionist dreams. These former non-NATO countries just want to participate in a peaceful economic union, but their security is threatened by the psychopath next door. Sign me up on the 'it's not NATO expansion's fault' side, I'd argue that position all day long. Putin would be far better off if he brought his battered army home and tried to reintegrate Russia(the largest and perhaps the most resource-rich country on the planet) back into the global community. If NATO expansion was Putin's real problem, he's done everything possible to make it worse. The sad thing is that Ukraine has become NATO, and I can't help but admire their tenacity. Trump could have ended the war in a day; all he had to do was arrest Putin the moment he stepped on American soil, and what was left of the kleptocracy would have turned on itself.
"Instead we expanded our Warsaw Pact equivalent, NATO, relentlessly....
....All of their sway over Central Europe that they had lost 20 million lives in World War II to gain evaporated as well."
This phrasing implies that the countries that *joined* NATO have no agency whatsoever, in fact they don't have any *right* to agency, because Russia won WW2.
The idea that NATO was a threat to Russia, that a few hundred Canadian or Danish troops in Lithuania were going to roll into a nuclear armed Russia and take Moscow is risible.
NATO has been at war with Russia for over four years. Some suggest as many as half a million Russian soldiers have died. I don't think that's risible. NATO bombed Belgrade in 1999. The threat was always very real. I talk about Eastern European agency in the podcast.
Putin's kleptocracy is not a place you might want to raise a family. The democratization of Eastern Bloc countries is bringing liberal democracy(let's call it 'rule of law' democracy) closer to Moscow, and that's Putin's real fear. NATO (a defensive military alliance) is not and never has been a threat to Russia. Countries like Finland, Sweden, Poland and Estonia have no territorial expansionist dreams. These former non-NATO countries just want to participate in a peaceful economic union, but their security is threatened by the psychopath next door. Sign me up on the 'it's not NATO expansion's fault' side, I'd argue that position all day long. Putin would be far better off if he brought his battered army home and tried to reintegrate Russia(the largest and perhaps the most resource-rich country on the planet) back into the global community. If NATO expansion was Putin's real problem, he's done everything possible to make it worse. The sad thing is that Ukraine has become NATO, and I can't help but admire their tenacity. Trump could have ended the war in a day; all he had to do was arrest Putin the moment he stepped on American soil, and what was left of the kleptocracy would have turned on itself.