I agree with Richard Pipes

Submitted by Andrew Baldwin (Canada), Jul 5, 2022 at 22:21

I can't read Richard Pipes' views as it is behind a Wall Street Journal paywall, but I agree with his take on NATO. It was in April 2008 that NATO just grandly declared that Georgia and Ukraine would one day be part of NATO, without offering either of them a Membership Action Plan. In 2011, One could already see the tragic consequences of this misguided policy for the Georgians. It led the unstable Georgian President to launch an aggression against the breakaway province of South Ossetia, in defiance of OSCE guidelines. This led to the Russo-Georgian War, the official recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent countries by the Russian Federation and an ethnic cleansing of ethnic Georgians from Abkhazia. None of this had to happen, or likely would have happened if it weren't for dysfunctional American foreign policy (we know who calls the shots in NATO). Rather than being chastened by the abject failure of its expansion policy in Georgia, America doubled down in Ukraine, with the same tragic results on a much greater scale. The urge to expand NATO ever eastward led to Ukraine losing Crimea and Sevastopol in 2014, and now it looks like it may suffer much more serious territorial losses now. Whatever happens, its economy has been devastated, and millions of its people have left as refugees. It is likely a lot of them will never come back. NATO, since at least 1999, has been a force for bad in the world, not a force for good. If it hadn't been for NATO's war of aggression against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, it is possible no-one would ever have heard of Vladimir Putin. He rose rapidly to the Russian Presidency from obscurity in the wake of the NATO ethnic cleansing of Kosovo of its Serb population. Russians saw this as an operation that NATO (and more particularly America) would like to duplicate in the Russian Caucasus, targeting Russians rather than Serbs. Anyway, all is not lost. If Donetsk and Luhansk and possibly Kherson must be recognized as independent republics by Ukraine in a peace agreement, there should be at least the hope of a reunion with Ukraine at some time in the future, when things have changed, and there is no longer a NATO alliance devoted to creating enmity among the East Slavic peoples.

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