I think as each war turns up, I think the civilianstroke military ratio is getting worse. More and more civilians are getting killed in successive wars and relatively fewer military personnel, particularly as we start going into drone battlefields and all that kind of stuff. The thing I want to talk about in this series is specifically Ukraine, and I feel exactly the same way about Ukraine. I think it's an appalling conflict. Lots of innocent civilian people, kids, women, men, all sorts are dying every day
ROBERT BEST
@ShamanicPoet · 3:32
This expansion would make the founding fathers of this country turn over in their graves. We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way. NATO expansion was simply a light hearted action by a senate that has no real interest in foreign affairs. What bothers me is how superficial and illinformed the whole senate debate was. I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe
ROBERT BEST
@ShamanicPoet · 2:32
As I explained to the SFRC quote the plan to increase the membership of NATO fails to take account of the real international situation following the end of the Cold War and proceeds in accord with a logic that made sense only during the Cold War. The division of Europe ended before there was any thought of taking new members into NATO. No one is threatening to redefine Europe
ROBERT BEST
@ShamanicPoet · 1:06
This is William Perry reflecting on NATO enlargement back in 90 96. I did not believe that the timing was right to push for NATO enlargement. Most important, we need to keep moving forward with Russia. And I fear that NATO enlargement at this time would shove us into reverse. I believe the that a regression here could squander the positive relations we had so painstakingly and patiently developed in the opportunistic post cold war period. It could reverse for an indeterminate period the promising course on which we were finally moving
ROBERT BEST
@ShamanicPoet · 2:20
This one comes from June 9097 and is from Senator Joe Biden. In the strength of my conviction, I considered resigning. But I concluded that my resignation would be misinterpreted as opposition to make NATO membership for Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic membership that I greatly favored, just not right away. In the end, I decided not to resign, hoping that my continued involvement would help to mitigate the growing mistrust. President Clinton had given me just what I had requested an opportunity to state my case
ROBERT BEST
@ShamanicPoet · 0:50
This is Paul Keating speaking. 90 97 the decision to expand NATO by inviting Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to participate and to hold out the prospect to others. In other words, to move Europe's military demarcation point to the very borders of the former soviet union is, I believe, an error which may rank in the end with the strategic miscalculations which prevented germany from taking its foreplay in the international system at the beginning of the 20th century
ROBERT BEST
@ShamanicPoet · 2:27
And if we make good on the commitment of Clinton and Madeleine Albright to bring in the Baltic republics, it is impossible to see how these tiny nations can be defended short of an escalation to a nuclear crisis similar to Cuba
ROBERT BEST
@ShamanicPoet · 1:45
Following a muted first reaction to Ukraine's intent to seek a NATO Membership Action Plan at the Bucharest Summit, foreign Minister Lavrov and other senior officials have reiterated strong opposition, stressing that Russia would view further eastward expansion as a potential military threat NATO enlargement, particularly to Ukraine, remains, quote, an emotional and neuralgic unquote issue for Russia. But strategic policy considerations also underlie strong opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia
ROBERT BEST
@ShamanicPoet · 1:32
The west is leading Ukraine down the Primrose path, and the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked. What we're doing is in fact, encouraging that outcome
ROBERT BEST
@ShamanicPoet · 2:24
But moving so quickly after the collapse of the Soviet Union to incorporate so many of its formerly subjugated states into NATO was a mistake. Including the Baltic states, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary quickly was the right thing to do. But I believe the process should then have slowed US. Agreements with the Romanian and Bulgarian governments. To rotate troops through bases in those countries was a needless provocation, especially since we virtually never deployed the 5000 troops to either country
ROBERT BEST
@ShamanicPoet · 3:53
And all are in military alliance with Russia called the Collective Security Treaty Organization, or CSTO, which suffers from not having a name you can boil down to one word and from being a watered down Warsaw block. Russia. Maintains a military presence in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Armenia. Then there are the prowestern countries formerly in the Warsaw Pact, but now all in NATO and all the EU. Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia, Albania and Romania
ROBERT BEST
@ShamanicPoet · 0:52
Vladimir Posner, who is a famous Russian American journalist, says that NATO expansion in Ukraine is unacceptable to the Russians, that there has to be a compromise where, quote, ukraine guaranteed will not become a member of NATO
ROBERT BEST
@ShamanicPoet · 4:22
And then just mix in a little bit of unbelievable stupidity of using biological weapons to try to kill people in Salisbury to cement the image of the Putin regime as being a rogue state, a pariah state, a state that has zero respect for international law, international treaties and international conventions. And I just don't see that this can change. The interviewer asks, perhaps with joe Biden as US president, we can expect another reset with Russia. Roderick answers the American reset last time was a disaster
ROBERT BEST
@ShamanicPoet · 1:29
This is the last of the quotes, and it comes from Jeffrey Sachs early in 2022. He's a director of the center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, and he writes russia has long feared invasions from the west, whether by Napoleon, Hitler, or latterly, NATO
ROBERT BEST
@ShamanicPoet · 1:28
I think the point of all that is that there are some very experienced, well traveled, well read academics, diplomats, politicians, philosophers, all sorts of people going right back to 1988 that I know of who have been specifically warning that if NATO and the EU moves towards the east and starts to hit up against the borders of Russia, russia are understandably going to get increasingly irritated and feel increasingly threatened to the point where they'll actually do something about it
