In a recent address to the EU parliament, Jeffrey Sachs detailed a 30-plus-year project of neocons in the U.S. deep state to expand NATO eastward to the border of Russia.
Sachs, an economist, public policy analyst and longtime advisor to governments around the world, described how, across both Republican and Democrat administrations, underlying U.S. policy has been to antagonize and provoke Russia at every opportunity, including helping to overthrow the pro-neutrality former Ukraine president Viktor Yanukovych in 2014.
At the end of the cold war, Russia made a huge concession in agreeing to German reunification. In return, we explicitly promised no eastward expansion of NATO.
Almost immediately, the U.S. and Europe reneged on this promise, and since then, 16 more nations of Europe and the former USSR have joined NATO.
Ukraine’s NATO aspirations were a bridge too far.
In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine.
Was Putin the aggressor?
Of course he was, in exactly the same sense that JFK was the aggressor during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.
How do you think the U.S. would respond today if Russia or China tried to place missile bases near our border with Canada or Mexico? We wouldn’t tolerate it for 30 seconds.
Listen to Jeffrey Sachs, John Mearsheimer and others on this subject.
Read the 1997 open letter to Bill Clinton by 50 foreign policy experts imploring him not to pursue this dangerous expansionist policy.
People completely miss the backstory to the Ukraine-Russia conflict and now badly misframe it.
John Goodrum
Port Angeles