And Joe Biden is an honest politician. From Ted Galen Carpenter at fff.org:
Western leaders have long fostered the self-serving myth that NATO is an organization solely for the mutual defense of its members. The corollary is that other nations therefore have no legitimate reason to fear the most powerful military alliance in history. After all, it is an association of peace-loving democracies.
The operational expression of the myth is most evident regarding relations with Russia. According to the dominant narrative (that a sycophantic news media obediently circulate) is that NATO’s addition of new members in Eastern Europe during the post-Cold War era posed no threat to Russia’s security. Even the extensive efforts to turn Ukraine into an alliance military asset supposedly did not constitute dangerous provocations. Those actions included multiple weapons sales to Kyiv, the training of Ukrainian military forces, joint NATO-Ukraine war games, and apparently joint cyberwarfare operations against Russian targets.
All of these moves occurred against the background of Washington’s withdrawal from both the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty and the Open Skies Agreement, even though the preservation of both measures was a high priority for the Kremlin. Despite that long pattern of belligerent behavior, Western officials continued to insist not only that Ukraine has every right under international law to join NATO, but that Moscow would have no reason to consider such a move a menace to Russia’s security.
