WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS, #62, February 23, 2022
Soviet
Phobia/Russo Phobia: In the 1990s US decided to expand NATO
threateningly eastward and to exclude Russia. (Dick)
Rajan Menon, War with Russia?
February 8, 2022.
Progress? Let's see. We've gone from unending wars in distant
lands against enemies capable of little more than wielding firearms and
roadside bombs -- and those conflicts were disasters -- to the possibility
of a war in the European heartland between nuclear-armed foes. I mean,
honestly, what could possibly go wrong?
And it was all fated to happen in Europe because of that
anti-democratic nightmare of an autocrat Vladimir Putin. Pay no attention
to the much-beloved (by Fox News) autocrat of NATO member and
"democratic" Hungary, Viktor Orbán, or Donald Trump's attempts to create his own version of an
autocracy here. (Had that all-American Putin lover been a little sharper, he might have succeeded and, of course, he or a next-generation Trumpster might still do so.) In today's
Washington, it's clear: we're still the defenders of democracy, pure and
simple, and Ukraine is just another case of the same.
As TomDispatch regular Rajan Menon points out today, we're
acting as if the Ukraine situation came out of nowhere thanks to the Vlad,
when it's actually a post-Cold War train wreck long in the making. To grasp
that, however, you need a little historical perspective on American policy
after the Soviet Union collapsed, that now-classic moment when our leaders
became convinced that the world was simply ours forever and a day. So, step
into Menon's time machine and head back to those years to get a better
sense of where we truly are today. Tom
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How Did We Get Here?
The Strategic Blunder of the 1990s That Set the Stage for
Today's Ukrainian Crisis By Rajan Menon.
https://tomdispatch.com/how-did-we-get-here/?utm_source=TomDispatch&utm_campaign=818cd5b209-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2021_07_13_02_04_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1e41682ade-818cd5b209-308836209
Understandably enough, commentaries on the crisis between
Russia and the West tend to dwell on Ukraine. After all, more than 100,000
Russian soldiers and a fearsome array of weaponry have now been emplaced
around the Ukrainian border. Still, such a narrow perspective deflects
attention from an American strategic
blunder that dates to the 1990s and is still reverberating.
During that decade, Russia was on its knees. Its economy had
shrunk by nearly 40%, while unemployment was surging and
inflation skyrocketing. (It reached a monumental 86% in 1999.) The Russian military
was a mess. Instead of seizing the opportunity to
create a new European order that included Russia, President Bill Clinton and his foreign-policy team squandered
it by deciding to expand NATO
threateningly toward that country's borders. Such a misbegotten policy
guaranteed that Europe would once again be divided, even as Washington
created a new order that excluded and progressively alienated post-Soviet
Russia.
Click here to read more of this
dispatch.
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