Howdy all!
You might have heard that Vladimir Putin of Russia went all crazy and invaded the
Ukraine.
Putin is definitely crazy pants but he kind of has a point.
NATO, a military organization of the United States and its vassals
is at least equally to blame on this issue. In order to tell this story
it's necessary to go back to the end of the Cold War. Here
in 1989, we have the blue countries that belong to NATO and the United States.
Germany was divided in to Western and Eastern
halves. East Germany was part of the pink here. The pink countries were all
basically Russian colonies
and members what was called the Warsaw Pact. The red bit
is the USSR itself. In the nineteen eighties Russia figured out something the
rest of Europe had figured out about thirty years earlier...
Being an empire, it sucks. -So Russia was willing to pull back.
But it really didn't like the idea of Germany getting back together
for some pretty obvious reasons.
Ein Platz Ein Der Sohn! -Lebensraum
The US stepped up and made a simple promise:
That nato's boundaries would not move beyond what was then east germany.
US Secretary of State James Baker assured the russians that NATO would not "move
one
inch to the east". This promise was important.
Russia believed it. They allowed Germany to reunify.
They allowed the Warsaw Pact to disintegrate.
Then in 1991, in an incredible step
they let the old Russian Empire, known then as the USSR, fall apart.
This included territories like Crimea in the Ukraine
that had been Russian for hundreds of years. Thanks in part to NATO's promise
Europe's horrific twentieth century ordeal was finally
over. Unfortunately, the promise that the United States made barely held for a
decade.
The nineties were pretty bad for Russia. Despite the fact that the Cold War was
already over
the Clinton administration couldn't resist continuing to fight it.
Heh, Heh, Suck it Boris!
In 1999 we took advantage Russia's weakness
and added much of the old Warsaw Pact to NATO.
In 2004, noted foreign policy genius George Bush went even further,
adding the rest of the Warsaw Pact and countries that had once been part
the USSR. In 2008
elements within NATO made it clear that they intended to ask
Georgia and Ukraine to join. This was too much for Russia.
in 2008, with some help from the Georgian President,
Putin engineered an invasion of Georgia. This seemed to calm NATO down a bit.
It reminded us that we were a military organization
and maybe we should be a little more careful about what we were committing to.
Despite this clear warning the Obama administration continued NATO's expansion.
Adding Croatia and Albania had no purpose other than cementing the
pointless idea
that closer links to NATO and the European Union where an
automatic thing. In early 2014
when the United States hoped to overthrow the shitty but
democratically elected president of Ukraine in the name of a treaty with
the EU
an outsized reaction from Russia was the easiest thing to predict in the
world.
To review this is where the border of the anti Russia
military alliance was in 1990 when the US promised it wouldn't expand
another inch.
Here is where it stands today. Putin is certainly a bad actor.
He is using Western aggression to cover for the fact that he's turning Russia
into the Nigeria
of Europe. But why the hell did we give him the excuse?
You can see our other Ukraine video for one reason why.
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