FLASHBACK: Experts Warned for Decades That NATO’s Expansion Would Provoke Russia, Globalists Did Not Listen
Shane Trejo
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Often lost in the haze of war is truth, but the truth regarding the Ukraine/Russia conflict is explicit, and many experts from varying ideological backgrounds have warned that NATO expansion would provoke hostilities for decades.
Nevertheless, the globalists have proceeded anyway and ignored the sage advice of these individuals, and now here we are, perhaps on the precipice of World War 3 as a result of their folly.
Renegade left-wing journalist Glenn Greenwald amplified a Twitter thread posted by observer Arnaud Bertrand of MeAndQi.com showing how the globalists ignored many warnings that pushing Ukraine toward NATO would lead to war.
“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,” said George F. Kennan, a legendary State Department bureaucrat who was the primary architect of the U.S. containment strategy in the 1940s that would go on to eventually defeat Sovietism, during a 1998 interview with New York Times columnist Tom Friedman before his death.
“Our differences in the Cold War were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime. And Russia’s democracy is as far advanced, if not farther, as any of these countries we’ve just signed up to defend from Russia. 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,” he added.
Former United States Secretary of State and Realpolitik advocate Henry Kissinger is also adamantly against the expansion of NATO into Ukraine.
“The West must understand that, to Russia, Ukraine can never be just a foreign country. Russian history began in what was called Kievan-Rus. The Russian religion spread from there. Ukraine has been part of Russia for centuries,” Kissinger wrote in a 2014 op/ed for the Washington Post.
“A wise U.S. policy toward Ukraine would seek a way for the two parts of the country to cooperate with each other. We should seek reconciliation, not the domination of a faction,” he added.
Political science professor John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago foretold the outcome of NATO expansion during a 2015 address.
“What’s going on here is that the West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path. And the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked. And I believe that the policy that I’m advocating, which is neutralizing Ukraine, and then building it up economically, and getting it out of the competition between Russia on one side, NATO on the other side is the best thing that could happen to the Ukrainians,” Mearsheimer said.
“What we’re doing is encouraging the Ukrainians to play tough with the Russians. We’re encouraging, the Ukrainians to think that they will ultimately become part of the West, because we will ultimately defeat Putin, and we will ultimately get our way, time is on our side. And of course, the Ukrainians are playing along with this,” he continued.
“And Ukrainians are almost completely unwilling to compromise with the Russians and instead want to pursue a hardline policy. Well, as I said to you before, if they do that, the end result is that their country is going to be wrecked. And what we’re doing is in effect, encouraging that outcome. I think it would make much more sense for us to neutral to, to work to create a neutral Ukraine, it would be in our interest to bury this crisis as quickly as possible. It certainly would be in Russia’s interest to do so. And most importantly, it would be in Ukraine’s interest to put an end to the crisis,” Mearsheimer added.
Others, such as Jack F. Matlock Jr., who served as US Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987-1991, warned about the predictable consequences of NATO expansion back in 1997 before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when it was being pushed by the Clinton administration.
“I consider the administration’s 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,” Matlock said.
Dissident far-left anarchist Noam Chomsky also noted that Ukraine entering NATO would initiate major conflict with Russia. He said that NATO has been disingenuous about their intentions to the Russians since the collapse of the Soviet empire.
“The idea that Ukraine might join a Western military alliance would be quite unacceptable to any Russian leader. This goes back to 1990 when the Soviet Union collapsed. There was a question about what would happen with NATO. Now Gorbachov agreed to allow Germany to be unified and to join NATO. It was a pretty remarkable concession with a quid pro quo: that NATO would not expand one inch to the east. That was the phrase that was used,” Chomsky said.
“Well, what happened? NATO instantly moved into East Germany and then Clinton came along and expanded NATO right to the borders of Russia. Now, the new Ukrainian government, the government established after the overthrow of the preceding one, now the parliament voted 300 to 8 or something like that, to move to join NATO,” he continued, adding that the push to get Ukraine into NATO “is not protecting Ukraine, it is threatening Ukraine with major war.”
Stephen Cohen, a New York University professor who served as a scholar of Russian studies, warned in 2014 that Russia was not going to take a NATO expansion lying down.
“If we move the forces, NATO forces, including American troops, to [or] toward Russia’s borders, where will we be in? I mean, obviously it is going to militarize the situation and therefore raise the danger of war, and I think it’s important to emphasize, though I regret saying this, Russia will not back off. This is existential. Too much has happened,” Cohen said during an appearance on Democracy Now.
“Putin, and it’s not just Putin, we seem to think that Putin runs the whole of the universe. He has a political class, that political class has opinions, public support is running overwhelmingly in favor of Russian policy. Putin will compromise at these negotiations, but he will not back off if confronted militarily,” he added.
This conflict is not the arbitrary invasion of Ukraine by a hostile and insane ‘Hitler of the Moment’ dictator, rather, it has been a great many years in the making. It is no wonder why the likes of George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and every ‘America Last’ neoconservative in the GOP are fully united in this conflict behind the corrupt Ukrainian puppet government that was installed via color revolution coup in 2014.
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