Bill Clinton’s Epic Double-Cross: How “Not An Inch” Brought NATO To Russia’s Border, by David Stockman

From David Stockman, at davidstockmanscontracorner.com:

American foreign policy is mindlessly driven by the machinery of our Warfare State—a vast accretion of economic, diplomatic, spying and military capabilities which are ceaselessly in search of missions and justifications for their colossal call on the nation’s resources. If you don’t believe that just read Ray McGovern’s succinct summary below of the US’s epic double-cross of Russia on NATO.

It began as a pledge by the first Bush Administration to Gorbachev that in return for German unification and liberation of the “captive nations” there would be “not an inch” of NATO expansion. It ended up its opposite, and for no plausible reason of American security whatsoever. In fact, NATO went on to draft nearly the entire former “Warsaw Pact”, expanding its membership by 12 nations. So doing, it encroached thousands of kilometers from its old Cold War boundaries to the very doorstep of Russia.

So what was the grand logic by which the safety and security of the good folks living in Bangor ME, Lincoln NE and Spokane WA would be enhanced by the addition of Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Latvia, Slovakia and Slovenia, among others, to our military shield against, well, no identifiable industrial state enemy? In Dustin Hoffman’s epigrammatic style, it was fear of one word: Wimp!

That’s right. Bill Clinton came to Washington fresh from wandering the Ozarks for 20 years after his stint as a Rhodes Scholar—and with no clue about the post-cold war world which had suddenly emerged after the fall of the Berlin wall. Accordingly, he was a sitting duck for catcalls from neocon Republicans and spurious platitudes from the national security bureaucracy about “nation-building” and America’s post-war role as the “indispensable” keeper of the peace.

So as McGovern explains, Clinton just unilaterally cast aside the solemn pledges to freeze NATO at its existing borders that had been made by President Bush and Secretary Baker. In making these pledges the latter represented a world-wise generation that had experienced the long, costly, perilous cold war twilight and had recognized the profound opportunity for a fresh start that had fallen upon the world when the Soviet Union disintegrated.

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To continue reading: Bill Clinton’s Epic Double-Cross