by
Phillip Todd
- "War [with the U.S.] is inevitable.” - Margarita Simonyan, editor in chief of the state-funded Russian media outlets RT and Sputnik.
To understand why war is coming you must understand the Russians. They lost an enormous amount of citizens fighting the NAZIs alone for most of the war. A whole generation of males were lost to Hitler. They hate and fear Nazis to this day. Their country was invaded multiple times in the twentieth century including by America. Is it any wonder paranoia is in their psyche? Then there are the lies from the west.
Mikhail Gorbachev, at the end of the Cold War, reportedly told U.S. Secretary of State James Baker that Russia would agree to unification of East and West Germany if the U.S. would guarantee that NATO would not be moved further east. Baker is said to have told Gorbachev, "Not one inch." Since then fourteen nations have been admitted to NATO, and thus received U.S. war guarantees, after 1991, to defend them against…..Russia. The NATO line has been moved right to their borders and the west has installed weaponry aimed at…..Russia. That makes 29 nations, stretching far into Eastern Europe and represents an expansion of U.S. war commitments riskier in ways than the original creation of NATO, when we were obligated to defend 10 nations of Western Europe. Still, further NATO expansion may be in the cards. Georgia and Ukraine are looking to join NATO and have the U.S. thereby obligated to fight Russia in their defense. Two other nations, Sweden and Finland, are talking of abandoning their traditional neutrality for NATO membership and U.S. war guarantees.
Presidents Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan did agree on this: U.S.-NATO war guarantees stopped at the Elbe. Beyond the river in Germany, we battled the USSR with weapons of diplomacy, politics and economics, not weapons of war. But that hasn’t happened.
- "Now they’re saying that they will have Ukraine as well. This means they will deploy their weapons there, even if it's not officially part of NATO,” he went on. According to the Russian leader, it is now up to the US-led bloc to come up with guarantees “immediately,” instead of continuously talking about it “for decades.” - V. Putin
At a meeting with high-ranking military officers, Putin
warned that stationing rockets in Ukraine would allow NATO to reduce
“their
flight time to Moscow to seven-to-ten minutes, and if hypersonic
weapons are deployed, to just five.”
Russia has warned it will take steps to defend its territory from the
perceived threat.
- "What would Americans do if we went to Canada and Mexico and deployed missiles there?" V. Putin
How would we have reacted if, after losing the Cold War, we were treated to Russian warships on Lake Ontario and Moscow giving Canada war guarantees? Can we not understand why a Russian nationalist like Vladimir Putin would feel his country was being corralled and imperiled, if a NATO alliance created to contain Russia had lately added 14 members, most of which were former allies or republics of the USSR? As the New York Times editorialized:"Mr. Putin's concerns cannot be entirely dismissed. Were Ukraine to join NATO, the alliance would then have a 1,200-mile land border with Russia, a situation no major power would abide, no matter how loudly the Atlantic alliance claims to be purely defensive."
Do we believe Putin will indefinitely accept the encirclement and containment of his country by nations united in an alliance created to keep Russia surrounded? With NATO's continuous post-Cold War expansion into Central and Eastern Europe, America has to ask: If the risk of war with Russia grows with each new member on its borders admitted to NATO, why are we doing this? Is there no red line of Putin's Russia we will not cross? When this war begins, the fault will lie with the West.
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