XPost: talk.politics.guns, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, sac.politics   
   XPost: alt.politics.republicans   
   From: drooler@gmail.com   
      
   nderstandably enough, commentaries on the crisis between Russia and the   
   West tend to dwell on Ukraine. After all, more than 100,000 Russian   
   soldiers and a fearsome array of weaponry have now been emplaced around   
   the Ukrainian border. Still, such a narrow perspective deflects attention   
   from an American strategic blunder that dates to the 1990s and is still   
   reverberating.   
      
   During that decade, Russia was on its knees. Its economy had shrunk by   
   nearly 40 percent, while unemployment was surging and inflation   
   skyrocketing. (It reached a monumental 86 percent in 1999.) The Russian   
   military was a mess. Instead of seizing the opportunity to create a new   
   European order that included Russia, President Bill Clinton and his   
   foreign-policy team squandered it by deciding to expand NATO threateningly   
   toward that country’s borders. Such a misbegotten policy guaranteed that   
   Europe would once again be divided, even as Washington created a new order   
   that excluded and progressively alienated post-Soviet Russia.   
      
   The Russians were perplexed—as well they should have been.   
      
   At the time, Clinton and company were hailing Russian President Boris   
   Yeltsin as a democrat. (Never mind that he had lobbed tank shells at his   
   own recalcitrant parliament in 1993 and, in 1996, prevailed in a crooked   
   election, abetted weirdly enough by Washington.) They praised him for   
   launching a “transition” to a market economy, which, as Nobel Laureate   
   Svetlana Alexievich so poignantly laid out in her book Second Hand Time,   
   would plunge millions of Russians into penury by “decontrolling” prices   
   and slashing state-provided social services.   
      
   Why, Russians wondered, would Washington obsessively push a Cold War NATO   
   alliance ever closer to their borders, knowing that a reeling Russia was   
   in no position to endanger any European country?   
      
   AN ALLIANCE SAVED FROM OBLIVION   
   Unfortunately, those who ran or influenced American foreign policy found   
   no time to ponder such an obvious question. After all, there was a world   
   out there for the planet’s sole superpower to lead and, if the United   
   States wasted time on introspection, “the jungle,” as the influential   
   neoconservative thinker Robert Kagan put it, would grow back and the world   
   would be “imperiled.” So, the Clintonites and their successors in the   
   White House found new causes to promote using American power, a fixation   
   that would lead to serial campaigns of intervention and social   
   engineering.   
      
   The expansion of NATO was an early manifestation of this millenarian   
   mindset, something theologian Reinhold Niebuhr had warned about in his   
   classic book, The Irony of American History. But who in Washington was   
   paying attention, when the world’s fate and the future were being designed   
   by us, and only us, in what Washington Post neoconservative columnist   
   Charles Krauthammer celebrated in 1990 as the ultimate “unipolar   
   moment”—one in which, for the first time ever, the United States would   
   possess peerless power?   
      
   Still, why use that opportunity to expand NATO, which had been created in   
   1949 to deter the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact from rolling into Western Europe,   
   given that both the Soviet Union and its alliance were now gone? Wasn’t it   
   akin to breathing life into a mummy?   
      
   To that question, the architects of NATO expansion had stock answers,   
   which their latter-day disciples still recite. The newly born post-Soviet   
   democracies of Eastern and Central Europe, as well as other parts of the   
   continent, could be “consolidated” by the stability that only NATO would   
   provide once it inducted them into its ranks. Precisely how a military   
   alliance was supposed to promote democracy was, of course, never   
   explained, especially given a record of American global alliances that had   
   included the likes of Philippine strongman Ferdinand Marcos, Greece under   
   the colonels, and military-ruled Turkey.   
      
   And, of course, if the denizens of the former Soviet Union now wanted to   
   join the club, how could they rightly be denied? It hardly mattered that   
   Clinton and his foreign policy team hadn’t devised the idea in response to   
   a raging demand for it in that part of the world. Quite the opposite,   
   consider it the strategic analog to Say’s Law in economics: They designed   
   a product and the demand followed.   
      
   Domestic politics also influenced the decision to push NATO eastward.   
   President Clinton had a chip on his shoulder about his lack of combat   
   credentials. Like many American presidents (31, to be precise), he hadn’t   
   served in the military, while his opponent in the 1996 elections, Senator   
   Bob Dole, had been badly injured fighting in World War II. Worse yet, his   
   evasion of the Vietnam-era draft had been seized upon by his critics, so   
   he felt compelled to show Washington’s power brokers that he had the   
   stomach and temperament to safeguard American global leadership and   
   military preponderance.   
      
   In reality, because most voters weren’t interested in foreign policy,   
   neither was Clinton, and that actually gave an edge to those in his   
   administration deeply committed to NATO expansion. From 1993, when   
   discussions about it began in earnest, there was no one of significance to   
   oppose them. Worse yet, the president, a savvy politician, sensed that the   
   project might even help him attract voters in the 1996 presidential   
   election, especially in the Midwest, home to millions of Americans with   
   eastern and central European roots.   
      
   Furthermore, given the support NATO had acquired over the course of a   
   generation in Washington’s national security and defense industry   
   ecosystem, the idea of mothballing it was unthinkable, since it was seen   
   as essential for continued American global leadership. Serving as a   
   protector par excellence provided the United States with enormous   
   influence in the world’s premier centers of economic power of that moment.   
   And officials, think-tankers, academics, and journalists—all of whom   
   exercised far more influence over foreign policy and cared much more about   
   it than the rest of the population—found it flattering to be received in   
   such places as a representative of the world’s leading power.   
      
   Under the circumstances, Yeltsin’s objections to NATO pushing east   
   (despite verbal promises made to the last head of the Soviet Union,   
   Mikhail Gorbachev, not to do so) could easily be ignored. After all,   
   Russia was too weak to matter. And in those final Cold War moments, no one   
   even imagined such NATO expansion. So, betrayal? Perish the thought! No   
   matter that Gorbachev steadfastly denounced such moves and did so again   
   this past December.   
      
   YOU REAP WHAT YOU SOW   
   Russian President Vladimir Putin is now pushing back, hard. Having   
   transformed the Russian army into a formidable force, he has the muscle   
   Yeltsin lacked. But the consensus inside the Washington Beltway remains   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)