How did the Smartest People in the World see Eastern Europe during Clinton's Vacation from History?

The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley

O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us!

A lot of plans were made by the government of the USSR during the time that it existed. Some of them probably seemed well-laid. Others, not so much. The dissolution of this empire was a remarkable thing to watch.

But it also strikes me as remarkable that the West seemed to have been taken by surprise that the end came as fast as it did. Where was all of that fancy intelligence? East Germany and the USSR were apparently surprised, too.

So, how did the West handle this crisis/opportunity? I remember a lot of anxiety about how the former satellite countries of the USSR would sort themselves out, as well as anxieties about left-over nuclear weapons in some of those countries. I remember some conflicts. I don't remember being real confident about the situation over there. One of the West's responses was to expand NATO. This probably made some people feel better. Was it a best-laid scheme?

Not long ago, I ran across a piece in the Powerline picks by Michael Mandelbaum entitled Anatomy of a Blunder.

It's premise is:

NATO expansion redivided Europe, isolated Ukraine, and enabled Vladimir Putin.

It was published in American Purpose, which features work by Francis Fukuyama, the End of History guy. I had never heard of it before.

Anyway, a lot of what Mandelbaum wrote seems to make sense:

In the first month of 2022, Russia, under the leadership of Vladimir Putin, presents a grave threat to European security and American international interests. It has a hundred thousand troops on or near its border with Ukraine and has threatened a full-scale invasion unless the Atlantic Alliance, NATO, accepts a series of demands that the Alliance has rightly rejected. . .

Moreover, Russia is ever more closely aligned with China . . .

And Russia's influence extends further now, even though it was crippled at the end of the Cold War.

Imagine, however, a different global political configuration, with Russia aligned with rather than opposed to the United States. . .

The United States expanded NATO against the deeply felt and strongly stated objections of a Russia just emerging from the seven-decades-long nightmare of Communist rule and struggling to install a democratic political system. Washington pressed ahead with expansion despite a number of assurances by Western leaders that this would not take place. It pushed the Alliance all the way to the borders of post-communist Russia while making it clear from the start that NATO was prepared to receive any country in Europe into its ranks except Russia. America expanded NATO because Russia was--temporarily, as should have been obvious--too weak to prevent it. From expansion the Russians drew some lessons that it was not remotely in the American interest for them to learn: namely, that it was vital to build up their military power, and that trust in and cooperation with the United States are foolish, if not dangerous.

One of the public rationales that the Clinton administration presented for expansion added insult to injury for the Russians. Administration officials asserted that NATO membership was needed to guarantee democratic government in the formerly communist world, despite the lack of evidence that belonging to a military organization assures democracy; during the Cold War, in fact, NATO had several undemocratic countries in its ranks. Moreover, if joining the Alliance could actually consolidate democracy, the country where membership was most important for Europe, the United States, and the world was unquestionably the one country denied it from the outset--Russia itself.

So, why was this up to the Clinton Administration, rather than Europeans, anyway?

Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of the Post-Cold War Stalemate (2021) by M.E. Sarotte, the Kravis Distinguished Professor of Historical Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, recounts the sequence of decisions, especially within the American government, that produced NATO expansion. . .

NATO expansion had legitimate purposes. . .

As is clear from Not One Inch, however, the United States could have achieved these goals without paying the high price that NATO expansion exacted, by persisting with an organization that America created at the beginning of 1994 called the Partnership for Peace (PfP). That organization was open to all countries in Europe, and many participated. It involved military cooperation of various kinds. Participation did not preclude NATO membership, but neither did PfP establish a fixed timetable for formally expanding the Alliance or exclude eventual Russian membership. It thus provided time to judge the political trajectory of the new Russia before taking steps that were bound to worsen relations with Moscow. The Department of Defense welcomed PfP. Russia's democratically-inclined President Boris Yeltsin, already worried about NATO expansion, called it "brilliant" and "a great idea." The Partnership for Peace, that is, provided the best of both worlds, preventing a security vacuum in Europe without excluding or alienating Russia. Yet the Clinton administration threw it away in favor of formal, anti-Russian expansion.

You might want to read Anatomy of a Blunder. What do you think?

The Guardian puts the start of the ratchet toward opening NATO during the term of Bush I, based on statements in 2007 by Putin about the West breaking promises to Russia. Bush II also pushed for Ukraine to join NATO. Some countries in Europe were not too happy about this.

Then came the Russian incursion into Ukraine.

Since then, the stance of the West toward Ukraine seems to be unstable, particularly when Biden speaks in public. The President of Ukraine would like to know where he stands. Do we have any plans for Eastern Europe beyond the midterm elections?

Watching the Olympics this weekend?

WATCH: Dutch Reporter Dragged Away By Chinese Agents During Live Olympics Broadcast

Music

Some people may be feeling like this would be a good time to bug out of old Hong Kong.

Hong Kong Blues

Hope you have something nice planned for the weekend.

Something fun(ny):

This is the Thread before the Gardening Thread.

posted by K.T. at 11:13 AM

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