Vladimir Putin is not the Neville Chamberlain the US / NATO is looking for
“It simply came to our notice then in recent history, “the U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said on January 7, referring to the arrival of Russian troops in Kazakhstan to save the country’s allied regime from the rebellion of disgruntled land slaves, “is that when the Russians are at home, it is sometimes very difficult to get them out.”
It is the boiler that calls the boiler black. More than 30 years after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, 77 years after the end of World War II, the United States still holds 40,000 troops in Germany.
For 45 years, it was justified to defend Germany from the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. As Germany progressed towards reunification, the U.S. Secretary of State James Baker assured the Prime Minister of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization would not expand as much as “a cent east” to the former Soviet sphere of influence it was created to include.
That insurance, codified in several negotiations and subsequently deleted classified documents, was far from “unofficial” in favor of expanding NATO pretense. It may well have prevented Eastern Europe from moving towards independence from the Third General European War during the century.
But NATO broke its word. In 1999, the Alliance began a march eastward to Russia’s still considerable sphere of influence and toward its borders – the exact outcome that Gorbachev feared and promised will not materialize. Since 1999, NATO has almost doubled the number of its members, instead of disintegrating as it should have.
Suppose the Warsaw Pact adopted Nicaragua in the 1980s and then began adding more states in Central America, culminating in a Mexican coup (as the U.S. sponsored Ukraine in 2014) to replace pro-US rule with pro-Russian rule. administration, followed by Mexico’s entertaining membership in the treaty and the fencing of the “gathering of U.S. troops near the Mexican border.”
I suspect that the response from the US and NATO would seem more like a Russian reaction to the current absurdity of the US and NATO in Eastern Europe and Ukraine: a stern warning to retreat or suffer serious consequences.
The United States and NATO could have seized the opportunity for long-term peace and increased overall prosperity. Instead, they decided to play the role of an eternally injured painful winner.
Some U.S. hawks compare the situation to Munich in 1938, and they’re not wrong – but they’ve changed roles. It is NATO that has devoured Czechoslovakia after Czechoslovakia, and Vladimir Putin which they are trying to present Neville Chamberlain. He seems reluctant to accept the role.
We may now be closer to a large-scale war between the “great powers” than ever before in 1945, this time with nuclear weapons ready. Expecting Putin to save the U.S. and NATO by knocking them out of a bad situation caused by themselves is not a peace strategy, it is a recipe for disaster.
Factor: Thomas L. Knapp
(Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is a director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in northern Central Florida.
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