Words from 24 years ago are looking incredibly prophetic. From David Stockman at antiwar.com:
We are now deep into the weeds with respect to Ukraine. So deep, in fact, that the underlying architecture of the situation doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in the hot place of getting even a fleeting mention in the 24/7 war news cycle.
So let’s call a spade a spade. The current fraught situation has nothing at all to do with the rule of international law or the sovereignty of national borders or the spread of democracy; and certainly not even remotely with any kind of threat to the safety and security of the American homeland posed by Russia.
To the contrary, it all goes back to the fall of 1991 when the old Soviet Union slithered off the pages of history, but the Washington-based military industrial complex refused to go quietly into the good night. Instead, it busied itself with policing the far-flung precincts of the planet as if the Cold War had not even ended, and extending Washington’s hegemony to any and every vacuum left behind by the vanished Soviet Union and its former satellites, allies and vassals.
Foremost among these misbegotten projects was the perpetuation of NATO and its subsequent extension to most of the former Warsaw Pact nations. At the time the senate approved the treaty admitting the first three new members – Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic – in 1998, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman had the good sense to track down the single wisest voice in America about the matter.
