During his recent campaign for president, Donald Trump repeatedly stated that he had a secret plan for settling the war in Ukraine. He suggested that he would be able to resolve the conflict within a day of so of taking office. That obviously was political hyperbole because the war is still going on. Trump and people in his administration are now talking to Russian president Vladimir Putin and Russian officials in an effort to find a way to end the war and possibly even normalize relations between the United States and Russia.
There is one great big obstacle, however, to bringing an end to the Ukraine-Russia conflict. That obstacle is NATO, the old Cold War dinosaur that should have gone out of existence with the end of the Cold War, just like the Warsaw Pact did.
Instead, NATO not only remained in existence, it also ultimately became the root cause of the war between Ukraine and Russia.
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It’s that critically important point that is lost on the U.S. mainstream media. For them, the war began at the moment that Russia invaded Ukraine. Nothing that preceded that invasion matters to the mainstream media. What came before the invasion is simply considered irrelevant.
But it’s not irrelevant, especially because it might well prove to be an insurmountable obstacle to a lasting peace between Ukraine and Russia.
With the surprise end of the Cold War, the U.S. national-security establishment — i.e., the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA — lost its big official enemy — Russia (or, to be more exact, the Soviet Union), which meant the end of the big Cold War racket that had kept the national-security branch in high cotton in terms of power and taxpayer-funded largess.
The Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA were panicky. At first, they announced that they were willing to participate in the “war on drugs.” They then converted their old partner and ally Saddam Hussein into an official enemy, who they used to scare the American people for some 11 years. Then, their interventionist and deadly foreign policy in the Middle East brought about the 9/11 retaliatory strikes and they were off to the races again, with the “war on terrorism” replacing the Cold War’s “war on communism.”
But they never lost sight of the possibility of reconverting Russia into a renewed official enemy, as part of a new Cold War, especially given that the anti-Russia Cold War sentiment was so deeply embedded within the American people. That’s when they began using NATO to expand eastward toward Russia’s border by absorbing former members of the Warsaw Pact.
An important thing to note about this was that U.S. officials had promised Russia that NATO would not expand. It would stay, they repeatedly stated, right where it was.
It was a lie. Instead, NATO was used to expand eastward, which enabled NATO’s missiles, tanks, weapons, troops, and planes to get ever closer to Russia’s border. It’s worth mentioning that NATO includes Germany, the nation that wreaked untold death and destruction on Russia in the two world wars.
Why would U.S. officials do that? To get their official enemy — and big cash cow — back. They were not ready to let go of Russia as America’s official enemy. And they knew — as an absolute certainty — what Russia’s reaction would be to having U.S. and German missiles, forces, tanks, planes, and armaments getting ever closer to Russia’s borders. They knew that Russia would react negatively — very negatively. And the reason they knew that was because they knew that that is precisely how they would react if Russia began doing the same thing in Cuba.
Moreover, Russia repeatedly told them what would happen if they threatened to absorb Ukraine into NATO. Russia would invade to prevent that from happening. Thus, not surprisingly, NATO threatened to absorb Ukraine, knowing full-well that that would provoke Russia into invading.
Thus, when Russia did invade, U.S. and European officials and the U.S. mainstream press cried, “Aggression! Aggression!” And they were right from a legal standpoint. Russia had no legal right to invade Ukraine, and Ukraine had the legal right to join NATO. But what U.S. officials, European officials, and the U.S. mainstream press steadfastly avoided confronting — and still avoid confronting — is that, as a practical matter, U.S. officials had broken their promise to Russia not to expand NATO eastward and that, as a practical matter, that was the reason for the Ukraine-Russia war.
Why is all that pre-invasion history important insofar as a peace treaty is concerned? Because if one takes the official U.S.-European narrative seriously — that Russia invaded Ukraine because it is an aggressor nation that is hell-bent on conquering the world — then how do they arrive at a satisfactory resolution of the war, given that the real reason that Russia invaded Ukraine was to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO?
Thus, how does Trump guarantee Russia that Ukraine won’t ever join NATO? Sure, he can give his word. He can even put it into writing. But everyone knows that the U.S. government does not keep its word, and everyone knows that the U.S. government lies. Indeed, everyone knows that the U.S. promised Russia that NATO would not move eastward, and it did anyway.
Moreover, even if Russia believes Trump and takes him at his word, Trump could die from a heart attack tomorrow. Moreover, four years from now, America will presumably have a new president. What then? What assurance does Russia have that a new president won’t suddenly announce that NATO is absorbing Ukraine.
Therefore, the best assurance that Russia could be given would be the total dismantling of NATO. With no NATO, there is no threat of NATO’s suddenly absorbing Ukraine. Moreover, no more NATO means no more former Warsaw Pact members as members of NATO. But what are the chances that Trump will bring an end to this Cold War dinosaur? Very slim, unfortunately, which will make it very difficult to arrive at a lasting peace in Ukraine.
