Close window | View original article
Scragged has previously pointed out that the Obama administration ensured that the North Koreans and the Iranians would never voluntarily give up their desire to possess nuclear weapons regardless of cost or consequence.
To summarize, when the Soviet Union dissolved, America promised the Ukraine that we'd defend them if they gave up their Soviet-era nukes. We also promised Mr. Qaddafi we'd leave him alone if he gave up his nukes, which he did.
Mr. Obama and Hillary let Mr. Putin grab the Crimean peninsula from the Ukraine and killed Mr. Qaddafi. Given these lies by the Obama administration, how could we expect anyone to trust us enough to give up nukes? How else can they defend themselves?
The Saudis and Israelis warned this would happen, but Mr. Obama didn't
listen. Even the New York Times was skeptical of his approach.
We have to go back a bit further to understand how our other foreign policy misadventures fed into Mr. Putin's decision to invade the Ukraine.
NPR hosted a panel discussion which reviewed what the Soviet Union regarded as a promise that NATO would not expand eastward toward the Soviet Union.
Russians say the U.S. and its NATO allies broke a key pledge. They claim the West promised Russia in the 1990s that NATO would move not one inch to the east. Putin recently said, you cheated us shamelessly. The U.S. and NATO say that's nonsense and they've always had an open-door membership policy. ...
The Berlin Wall falls in November 1989 and up comes this question of German reunification. The U.S. thinks that maybe what they could offer the Soviets to get them to allow that is a promise that NATO will not expand eastward. ...
... a book about the negotiations over all this called "Not One Inch." And she [Mary Sarotte, the author] says this not one inch thing comes from this very early conversation in 1990 between then-U.S. Secretary of State James Baker and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Baker floats this idea of letting Germany reunify in exchange for NATO moving not one inch eastward. Gorbachev's like, OK; I'll think about it. ...
Baker goes back to Washington where President George H.W. Bush is like, absolutely not. And so the Americans drop it. It never shows up on the bargaining table.
It's true that "not one inch" was mentioned at a high level,
but that phrase never
appeared in any of the final agreements. Perhaps the Russians
made the egregious mistake of taking American diplomats at their word,
assuming that it didn't need to be written down in black and
white? Of course, our guarantees to Ukraine were written down in black and
white, as were Russia's, though they've turned out to be worth somewhat
less than they seemed.
President Clinton was elected in 1992, just after President Mikhail Gorbachev dissolved the Soviet Union in 1991.
Mr. Clinton started offering NATO membership to the new Eastern
European nations which had
been part of the Russian empire. We
at Scragged regarded this as, while understandable, nevertheless a
provocation which Russia couldn't ignore
forever because
every expansion
put NATO forces that much closer to the Russian heartland. As a
land power which is not defended by any natural boundaries, Russia has
suffered invasion from
the East and from the West for generations; a degree of paranoia and cynical pessimism is
considered to be part of the Russian character.
Politico reported that when Russia invaded the Ukraine, Mr. Clinton was quick to assure everyone that his expanding NATO had nothing to do with the invasion:
Clinton said Putin "made no secret of the fact that he thought the dissolution of the Soviet Union was a great tragedy."
The former president said the U.S. and NATO never meant to threaten Russia and that the nations of Eastern Europe had a right to live in security after decades of being dominated by Russia. ...
During Clinton's presidency, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland joined NATO, followed in 2004 by Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. All of those nations had either been part of the Soviet Union or allies of the Soviet Union.
There's no way that Mr. Putin would have been happy about NATO coming eastward, but he didn't do much other than protest. Mr. Churchill observed that Russia is a mystery wrapped in enigma and shrouded in obscurity. Why didn't he do something about it at the time? Perhaps those countries were small enough not to worry Mr. Putin, perhaps he felt he wasn't through modernizing his military; we simply don't know why he didn't go beyond protest as his understanding of "Not one inch" was consigned to the dustbin of history.
The Ukraine is the second largest of the former Soviet Republics and has a very long border with Russia. NPR credited President George W. Bush with starting the push for the Ukraine to be admitted to NATO. France and Germany pushed back, resulting in an ambiguous situation where NATO was more or less offering the Ukraine membership "in principle" but without setting out a process to actually do it.
As long as the Ukraine government was more or less favorably disposed to Russia, Mr. Putin could tolerate a degree of inconclusive talk about NATO expanding so much closer to him, but we messed that up.
The far-left mouthpiece Truthout tells us
that Assistant Secretary of State
Victoria Nuland was the "mastermind" behind the Feb. 22, 2014 "regime
change" in Ukraine. She worked to overthrow the Ukrainian
government
headed by President Viktor Yanukovych while convincing the
ever-gullible US mainstream media that the coup wasn't really a coup
but a victory for "democracy." We have no insider knowledge as to
opine on how true this may or may not have been, but, there are clearly
grounds for debate on the subject
Yanukovych's government had been pro-Russia enough to rub along
acceptably with Russian President Vladimir Putin in spite of all the
pro-NATO talk, but the new government was much more pro-Western and
less acceptable to Russia. From Mr. Putin's point of view, the US
had
fallen back to an old cold-war tactic - we destabilized a government
which had been allied with him and replaced it with an enemy government
aligned with us. To make matters worse, it seemed that by working
through various businesses, the new government was paying large sums of
money to the son of the Vice President of the United States.
How
would that look to the
Kremlin kleptocrats?
Wasting no time, Mr. Putin annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine in February and March of 2014. As we explained in our article cited above, the Obama administration ignored its obligations to protect the territorial integrity of the Ukraine and Mr. Putin kept Crimea. He didn't go any further during the Trump administration, but once Mr. Biden took over, he saw an opportunity to force the Ukraine back into the Soviet orbit and ordered the invasion.
He grossly overestimated
his military capabilities and his intel team hadn't told him how
fiercely the Ukraine would resist, but that's a problem inherent to any
tyranny. The top three qualities Mr. Putin demands in
subordinates
are loyalty, loyalty, and loyalty followed by slavish devotion.
Skill
and ability aren't important until they suddenly
become very important, but it's usually too late to do anything
about it when a crisis makes the incompetence evident.
As we see it, the US backed Mr. Putin into a corner, led him to believe that NATO was disunited enough that it would be OK to invade, then helped the Ukraine turn the Donbas into a killing ground. This is yet another dent in American credibility.
What's worse, we now have two Eurasian land powers destroying each other. This will make it easier for China under President for Life Xi to take back the parts of Russia which China ceded to the Czars in the Treaty of Aigun of 1858 and the Treaty of Peking of 1860. The Chinese are well aware that the Mongol empire ran from Vladivostok to Vienna and they'd like to get some of that territory back, not to mention reeducating the rebels in Taiwan.
We live in interesting times, and our feckless leaders persist in making things more interesting, day by day.