(Bill Clinton)I Tried to Put Russia on Another Path

[AZProgressive]

When I first became president, I said that I would support Russian President Boris Yeltsin in his efforts to build a good economy and a functioning democracy after the dissolution of the Soviet Union—but I would also support an expansion of NATO to include former Warsaw Pact members and post-Soviet states. My policy was to work for the best while preparing for the worst. I was worried not about a Russian return to communism, but about a return to ultranationalism, replacing democracy and cooperation with aspirations to empire, like Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. I didn’t believe Yeltsin would do that, but who knew what would come after him?

If Russia stayed on a path toward democracy and cooperation, we would all be together in meeting the security challenges of our time: terrorism; ethnic, religious, and other tribal conflicts; and the proliferation of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. If Russia chose to revert to ultranationalist imperialism, an enlarged NATO and a growing European Union would bolster the continent’s security. Near the end of my second term, in 1999, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic joined NATO despite Russian opposition. The alliance gained 11 more members under subsequent administrations, again over Russian objections.

Lately, NATO expansion has been criticized in some quarters for provoking Russia and even laying the groundwork for Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The expansion certainly was a consequential decision, one that I continue to believe was correct.

As United Nations ambassador and later secretary of state, my friend Madeleine Albright, who recently passed away, was an outspoken supporter of NATO expansion. So were Secretary of State Warren Christopher; National Security Adviser Tony Lake; his successor, Sandy Berger; and two others with firsthand experience in the area: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff John Shalikashvili, who was born in Poland to Georgian parents and came to the U.S. as a teenager, and Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, who translated and edited Nikita Khrushchev’s memoirs while we were housemates at Oxford in 1969 and 1970.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/bill-clinton-nato-expansion-ukraine/629499/

[ymetca]

1. Yep

and it still amazes me that so many of our fellow citizens appear to have forgotten, or have no idea, what it would be like to live in the type of society they are imagining. "Make America Great Again", they say. But for whom? You? I doubt it.

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out...

[Hekate]

2. The Clintons are both such bright people...