What stoltenburg doesn't mention is that back in the last couple of years of the Clinton Presidency when everyone pretended to be getting along famously President Putin asked Clinton if the Russian Federation could join Nato too, by that time nato had approached a number of former Warsaw pact countries asking them to join nato.
What stoltenburg doesn't mention is that back in the last couple of years of the Clinton Presidency when everyone pretended to be getting along famously President Putin asked Clinton if the Russian Federation could join Nato too, by that time nato had approached a number of former Warsaw pact countries asking them to join nato.
Clinton told President Putin that this sounded like a great idea but he would have to "run it past his people".
When he came back a couple of hours later Clinton told him that was absolutely out of the question, meaning that back then long before Russia had done anything to upset 'the west' amerikan security advisors had already planned on attacking Russia to Balkanise it and steal the resources. It also should have alerted Russia to two other facts that i) nato was no defensive alliance. ii) it was actually an extension of amerikan unipolar foreign policy when one looked past all the amerikan schtick about ensuring europe didn't engage in any more stupid intra-euro conflicts, especially after the nato efforts to break up the former Yugoslavia and isolate Serbia, a major Russian ally.
Even so the Russians bent over backwards to assist amerika in the second Iraq war such as supplying Iraqi airforce friend/foe codes used on their fighters. Still amerika desperate for a major power it could deem an adversary to justify military spending continued to beat up the Russian Federation as being an adversary.
There's war-mongering and then there is amerikan war-mongering, the first is bad enough but the second is egregious killing for the sake of stock prices, something which the world had never previously witnessed and which should be in an entirely new category called 'pre-war crimes'.
In NATO's own documents starting back in 1998-99 you can see that Russia was simply on a shelf waiting to be brought out and inflated as necessary to provide whatever threat NATO needed for its nefarious ends. It was precisely at that time that, having gone to Davos with my husband, I asked DefMin Rivkind of the UK precisely the question of whether there was any plan to invite Russia into NATO, given that none of those chosen could claim to be in any way more modern or democratic than Russia. Rivkind was livid, he ranted and raved as if I'd thrown piss in his face. The British moderator asked him to actually answer the question, and Rivkind's reply was, "I HAVE answered the question!" followed by a bit more ranting. It was so clear to me that NATO had kept Russia as "the enemy," and even at its weakest, Russia was referred to in NATO documents as a "potential enemy." By the way, the Russian rep on the dais sat silent throughout Rivkind's insults to Russia. I felt sad for him, that a foreigner had to stand up for his country. Now NATO is in deep trouble, the doll is alive and very big and after incredible abuse from the EU/NATO/US, Russia truly detests all NATOlandia. And if I were Finland, from which I believe drones are launched at St. Petersburg (oh, the Swedes want that city back!), I'd be very careful because Russia won't hesitate to send a drone or two back to your own cities.
Interesting stuff Ms Brown, the thing which I just don't get about Finland is that after the old Soviet Union let them off the hook so lightly for being the northern bulwark for the nazi blockade of the siege of Leningrad/St Petersburg, they have gone back to the same stuff once more. Surely they must realise once the Russian Federation gathers sufficient evidence of Finnish involvement in attacks on Russia, nato will just let them hang. No one from the more rational nato states wants to be responsible for beginning ww3.
The Russian government knows that as much as they still have the same attitude to Finland as the USSR had, that it is simply not worth the hassle, Russia cannot let them off this time.
The people of St Petersburg would go absolutely ape if Russian leadership did that. Most people have relatives who were among the more than 1 million citizens who starved in the nazi siege. When ww2 ended people were so relieved and more concerned with reconstruction but they certainly aren't going to be as forgiving this time around.
yes, I also had a dear Russian friend who was sent to the east with her mother when the war began. Her father stayed behind and defended Leningrad for the entirety of the siege. I cannot imagine the suffering and today the US has enabled all Russia's old enemies. I think they will fail, all of them, and in their failure bring down their self-serving systems and institutions.
I have a dear Russian friend whose mother was born in the seige and stayed. She moved to US to get away in the 90s and the rest of her siblings left for other countries. Parents still there, including the mother born in Leningrad. The transition to democratic capitalism just went poorly and they have never, ever been liberal.
sure, the system collapsed as is the western system today. and it was extraordinarily painful and the USG and its stinking allies in Europe moved in to create the oligarchs who served our purposes, and when Putin threw the bums and the west out where they belong, to their own territory, then the fury grew against Russia. The history stands. You won't change it with your alternative history.
It did collapse. Aside from the gulags under Stalin, it wasn't a terrible place to live and I don't completely understand why it broke down but it clearly was. I think the West is doing o.k. US positively well but we've got advantages Western Europe doesn't have.
Norma, you may have interpreted Malcolm Rifkind's tone of voice as ranting and raving; as an Anglo-Scot, I can assure you that that was his ordinary Scottish-accented voice.
You may also be interested to know that his family hails from Lithuania. You wouldn't have been hard-pressed to find a Lithuanian who would have contradicted your impression of NATO's stance toward the then-young Russia.
But the reason I'm here, Norma, is because "back in 1998-99 ... precisely at that time" Rifkind was not Secretary of State for Defence. He wasn't even a Conservative Member of Parliament, because by that time, Her Majesty had asked Tony Blair and his Labour Party to form the Government, and Rifkind had lost his seat!
Britain and the rest of NATO radically reduced defence spending after the dissolution of the USSR. From spending 4.1% of GDP on defence, under Rifkind (1990-5) it went down to 2.5%, and that 2.5% was loaded with costs which had not been included in accounting previously.
But the context of this comment is made under a Mearsheimer post, whose Offensive Realism argues that states cannot be sure of intentions, as they can change in a flash anyway, so you have to look at capabilities, and Russia's were of being able to destroy the world many times over with its nuclear weapons, all of which which were pointed "precisely at that time" at us!
You may have meant the Jan-Feb 1997 Davos WEF meeting when Rifkind was Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs in Her Majesty's Government. Not a single former Warsaw Pact country was in NATO at the time.
The world was reeling from the First Chechen War, and before that the use of military force to resolve the conflict between Yeltsin and the Supreme Soviet, and before that, the Transnistria crisis (which Putin could use to expand the current war).
You kind of did throw piss in his face. No serious person would argue Russian institutions/beliefs have changed as they did in Eastern Europe although many countries such as Poland and many others wanted them but USSR wouldn't allow it. He should have laughed in your face unless you are important in which case, yes, I can understand his anger. You put him in a position where he had to criticize Russia when there was still hope for change.
and how do you define "serious person"? Is it somebody who agrees with you, while those who present a different view than that of the One Narrative -- that Russia was always evil just waiting to happen and had no sellouts who put the CIA straight in the drunk Yeltsin's office -- are insulting and deserve to be hissed and silenced? Some democracy, friend. Some example for the world. Just like our domestic justice system that serves one party.
Your question was larded with statements of opinion presented as facts. I disagree with your opinions and believe I am more informed as was Rivkind (whoever he is) who obviously did not think it a question. It depends on the situation, some places it is called for but you were not in one of those.
You were basically the equivalent of Alex Stein in this video:
sorry, Jeff, no. He was angry by being forced to admit Russia was NEVER being offered entry. You think what you think, I know what I saw. To argue Poland was more democratic than Russia -- totally absurd, and the same goes for its economy. Please, don't rewrite history. I was there when it happened.
There is no comparison; yes Poland is more democratic and has much better institutions than Russia. My opinion is that Russia suffered from some combination of resource curse that is common and bad traditions. The resource curse is something that never gets talked about but I believe it gets short shrift.
goody. keep "your views" and ignore facts. it doesn't work but it feels good. Ukraine is losing. It will lose. And NATO threw itself down the drain after Ukraine by working it up from "not our war" to "our existential war forever!" in leaps of weeks. I will not mourn the demise of NATO, the greatest threat to world security today.
There are lots of people who agree with you. Definite minority in US but it used to be fairly common in Europe. Fall of communism kind of took the wind out of their sails but not you apparently. Lots of people in US don't care and want to be isolationist again; maybe they are right; we'll be fine in US but I would still hate to see it happen.
I didn't call anyone names. There were lots of people in Western Europe who voted Communist; it just never happened in US. I never talked to anyone in that camp so I have little knowledge of the reasoning. Never forgot the poster, "You can't hug your children with nuclear arms." I tend to think they were idealists but I don't honestly know.
@debsisdead, I'm interested in your source for "nato had approached a number of former Warsaw pact countries asking them to join nato", specifically that nato had made the approach ...
Manipulation with a mixture of bribery, blackmail & bullying - pick the option which best suits the circumstance. If you screw up - pick another option. This works sufficiently often enough to generate the result required. There's no magic to it, just a requirement for the false belief in your right to rule.
It is sick and the people in the rest of the world know it and have taken that from their careerist politicians and their instigators too long. The jig is up no matter what simplistic rationalizations their lickspittles offer.
What stoltenburg doesn't mention is that back in the last couple of years of the Clinton Presidency when everyone pretended to be getting along famously President Putin asked Clinton if the Russian Federation could join Nato too, by that time nato had approached a number of former Warsaw pact countries asking them to join nato.
Clinton told President Putin that this sounded like a great idea but he would have to "run it past his people".
When he came back a couple of hours later Clinton told him that was absolutely out of the question, meaning that back then long before Russia had done anything to upset 'the west' amerikan security advisors had already planned on attacking Russia to Balkanise it and steal the resources. It also should have alerted Russia to two other facts that i) nato was no defensive alliance. ii) it was actually an extension of amerikan unipolar foreign policy when one looked past all the amerikan schtick about ensuring europe didn't engage in any more stupid intra-euro conflicts, especially after the nato efforts to break up the former Yugoslavia and isolate Serbia, a major Russian ally.
Even so the Russians bent over backwards to assist amerika in the second Iraq war such as supplying Iraqi airforce friend/foe codes used on their fighters. Still amerika desperate for a major power it could deem an adversary to justify military spending continued to beat up the Russian Federation as being an adversary.
There's war-mongering and then there is amerikan war-mongering, the first is bad enough but the second is egregious killing for the sake of stock prices, something which the world had never previously witnessed and which should be in an entirely new category called 'pre-war crimes'.
In NATO's own documents starting back in 1998-99 you can see that Russia was simply on a shelf waiting to be brought out and inflated as necessary to provide whatever threat NATO needed for its nefarious ends. It was precisely at that time that, having gone to Davos with my husband, I asked DefMin Rivkind of the UK precisely the question of whether there was any plan to invite Russia into NATO, given that none of those chosen could claim to be in any way more modern or democratic than Russia. Rivkind was livid, he ranted and raved as if I'd thrown piss in his face. The British moderator asked him to actually answer the question, and Rivkind's reply was, "I HAVE answered the question!" followed by a bit more ranting. It was so clear to me that NATO had kept Russia as "the enemy," and even at its weakest, Russia was referred to in NATO documents as a "potential enemy." By the way, the Russian rep on the dais sat silent throughout Rivkind's insults to Russia. I felt sad for him, that a foreigner had to stand up for his country. Now NATO is in deep trouble, the doll is alive and very big and after incredible abuse from the EU/NATO/US, Russia truly detests all NATOlandia. And if I were Finland, from which I believe drones are launched at St. Petersburg (oh, the Swedes want that city back!), I'd be very careful because Russia won't hesitate to send a drone or two back to your own cities.
Interesting stuff Ms Brown, the thing which I just don't get about Finland is that after the old Soviet Union let them off the hook so lightly for being the northern bulwark for the nazi blockade of the siege of Leningrad/St Petersburg, they have gone back to the same stuff once more. Surely they must realise once the Russian Federation gathers sufficient evidence of Finnish involvement in attacks on Russia, nato will just let them hang. No one from the more rational nato states wants to be responsible for beginning ww3.
The Russian government knows that as much as they still have the same attitude to Finland as the USSR had, that it is simply not worth the hassle, Russia cannot let them off this time.
The people of St Petersburg would go absolutely ape if Russian leadership did that. Most people have relatives who were among the more than 1 million citizens who starved in the nazi siege. When ww2 ended people were so relieved and more concerned with reconstruction but they certainly aren't going to be as forgiving this time around.
yes, I also had a dear Russian friend who was sent to the east with her mother when the war began. Her father stayed behind and defended Leningrad for the entirety of the siege. I cannot imagine the suffering and today the US has enabled all Russia's old enemies. I think they will fail, all of them, and in their failure bring down their self-serving systems and institutions.
I have a dear Russian friend whose mother was born in the seige and stayed. She moved to US to get away in the 90s and the rest of her siblings left for other countries. Parents still there, including the mother born in Leningrad. The transition to democratic capitalism just went poorly and they have never, ever been liberal.
sure, the system collapsed as is the western system today. and it was extraordinarily painful and the USG and its stinking allies in Europe moved in to create the oligarchs who served our purposes, and when Putin threw the bums and the west out where they belong, to their own territory, then the fury grew against Russia. The history stands. You won't change it with your alternative history.
It did collapse. Aside from the gulags under Stalin, it wasn't a terrible place to live and I don't completely understand why it broke down but it clearly was. I think the West is doing o.k. US positively well but we've got advantages Western Europe doesn't have.
Norma, you may have interpreted Malcolm Rifkind's tone of voice as ranting and raving; as an Anglo-Scot, I can assure you that that was his ordinary Scottish-accented voice.
You may also be interested to know that his family hails from Lithuania. You wouldn't have been hard-pressed to find a Lithuanian who would have contradicted your impression of NATO's stance toward the then-young Russia.
But the reason I'm here, Norma, is because "back in 1998-99 ... precisely at that time" Rifkind was not Secretary of State for Defence. He wasn't even a Conservative Member of Parliament, because by that time, Her Majesty had asked Tony Blair and his Labour Party to form the Government, and Rifkind had lost his seat!
Britain and the rest of NATO radically reduced defence spending after the dissolution of the USSR. From spending 4.1% of GDP on defence, under Rifkind (1990-5) it went down to 2.5%, and that 2.5% was loaded with costs which had not been included in accounting previously.
But the context of this comment is made under a Mearsheimer post, whose Offensive Realism argues that states cannot be sure of intentions, as they can change in a flash anyway, so you have to look at capabilities, and Russia's were of being able to destroy the world many times over with its nuclear weapons, all of which which were pointed "precisely at that time" at us!
You may have meant the Jan-Feb 1997 Davos WEF meeting when Rifkind was Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs in Her Majesty's Government. Not a single former Warsaw Pact country was in NATO at the time.
The world was reeling from the First Chechen War, and before that the use of military force to resolve the conflict between Yeltsin and the Supreme Soviet, and before that, the Transnistria crisis (which Putin could use to expand the current war).
You kind of did throw piss in his face. No serious person would argue Russian institutions/beliefs have changed as they did in Eastern Europe although many countries such as Poland and many others wanted them but USSR wouldn't allow it. He should have laughed in your face unless you are important in which case, yes, I can understand his anger. You put him in a position where he had to criticize Russia when there was still hope for change.
and how do you define "serious person"? Is it somebody who agrees with you, while those who present a different view than that of the One Narrative -- that Russia was always evil just waiting to happen and had no sellouts who put the CIA straight in the drunk Yeltsin's office -- are insulting and deserve to be hissed and silenced? Some democracy, friend. Some example for the world. Just like our domestic justice system that serves one party.
Your question was larded with statements of opinion presented as facts. I disagree with your opinions and believe I am more informed as was Rivkind (whoever he is) who obviously did not think it a question. It depends on the situation, some places it is called for but you were not in one of those.
You were basically the equivalent of Alex Stein in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_R67tpqSjeE
sorry, Jeff, no. He was angry by being forced to admit Russia was NEVER being offered entry. You think what you think, I know what I saw. To argue Poland was more democratic than Russia -- totally absurd, and the same goes for its economy. Please, don't rewrite history. I was there when it happened.
There is no comparison; yes Poland is more democratic and has much better institutions than Russia. My opinion is that Russia suffered from some combination of resource curse that is common and bad traditions. The resource curse is something that never gets talked about but I believe it gets short shrift.
goody. keep "your views" and ignore facts. it doesn't work but it feels good. Ukraine is losing. It will lose. And NATO threw itself down the drain after Ukraine by working it up from "not our war" to "our existential war forever!" in leaps of weeks. I will not mourn the demise of NATO, the greatest threat to world security today.
There are lots of people who agree with you. Definite minority in US but it used to be fairly common in Europe. Fall of communism kind of took the wind out of their sails but not you apparently. Lots of people in US don't care and want to be isolationist again; maybe they are right; we'll be fine in US but I would still hate to see it happen.
I see we descend to name-calling, the really last refuge of the false patriots.
I didn't call anyone names. There were lots of people in Western Europe who voted Communist; it just never happened in US. I never talked to anyone in that camp so I have little knowledge of the reasoning. Never forgot the poster, "You can't hug your children with nuclear arms." I tend to think they were idealists but I don't honestly know.
@debsisdead, I'm interested in your source for "nato had approached a number of former Warsaw pact countries asking them to join nato", specifically that nato had made the approach ...
US plans to invade Russia to get its resources? That's quite the leap there. Illustrates the fact that many have lost touch with reality.
Hmmm. Is the US really that good at manipulating opinions of European leaders?
Manipulation with a mixture of bribery, blackmail & bullying - pick the option which best suits the circumstance. If you screw up - pick another option. This works sufficiently often enough to generate the result required. There's no magic to it, just a requirement for the false belief in your right to rule.
It is sick and the people in the rest of the world know it and have taken that from their careerist politicians and their instigators too long. The jig is up no matter what simplistic rationalizations their lickspittles offer.