![]() ![]() Moscow immediately responded by seizing and annexing Crimea, and a new cold war was underway with a vengeance. The Obama administration’s shockingly arrogant meddling in Ukraine’s internal political affairs in 20 to help demonstrators overthrow Ukraine’s elected, pro‐Russia president was the single most brazen provocation, and it caused tensions to spike. Western (especially US) leaders continued to blow through red warning light after a red warning light, however. Thereafter, Russia permanently detached two secessionist‐minded Georgian regions and put them under effective Russian control. ![]() Moscow exploited a foolish provocation by Georgia’s pro‐western government to launch a military offensive that brought Russian troops to the outskirts of the capital. ![]() The following year, the Kremlin demonstrated that its discontent with Nato’s continuing incursions into Russia’s security zone had moved beyond verbal objections. That move, he contended, was a case of “recklessly ignoring what the Russians considered their own vital national interests”. Among other missteps, “US agreements with the Romanian and Bulgarian governments to rotate troops through bases in those countries was a needless provocation.” In an implicit rebuke to the younger Bush, Gates asserted that “trying to bring Georgia and Ukraine into Nato was truly overreaching”. In his memoir, Duty, Robert M Gates, who served as secretary of defense in the administrations of both George W Bush and Barack Obama, stated his belief that “the relationship with Russia had been badly mismanaged after Bush left office in 1993”. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact?” Nato expansion “represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. “Nato has put its frontline forces on our borders,” Putin complained. The last reasonably friendly warning from Russia that the alliance needed to back off came in March 2007, when Putin addressed the annual Munich security conference. Moscow’s patience with Nato’s ever more intrusive behavior was wearing thin. That wave of expansion now had Nato perched on the border of the Russian Federation. Those countries not only had been part of the Soviet Union, but they had also been part of Russia’s empire during the Czarist era. He was right, but US and Nato leaders proceeded with new rounds of expansion, including the provocative step of adding the three Baltic republics. ”I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. “I think it is the beginning of a new cold war,” Kennan stated. George Kennan, the intellectual father of America’s containment policy during the cold war, perceptively warned in a May 1998 New York Times interview about what the Senate’s ratification of Nato’s first round of expansion would set in motion. They point out that they have disbanded the Warsaw Pact, their military alliance, and ask why the west should not do the same.” It was an excellent question, and neither the Clinton administration nor its successors provided even a remotely convincing answer. “Many Russians see Nato as a vestige of the cold war, inherently directed against their country. ![]() Strobe Talbott, deputy secretary of state, similarly described the Russian attitude. In her memoir, Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s secretary of state, concedes that “ Yeltsin and his countrymen were strongly opposed to enlargement, seeing it as a strategy for exploiting their vulnerability and moving Europe’s dividing line to the east, leaving them isolated.” It would be the first of several waves of membership expansion.Įven that first stage provoked Russian opposition and anger. The administration would soon propose inviting Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary to become members, and the US Senate approved adding those countries to the North Atlantic Treaty in 1998. What was not publicly known at the time was that Bill Clinton’s administration had already made the fateful decision the previous year to push for including some former Warsaw Pact countries in Nato. ![]()
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