Some recent items related to U.S. foreign policy matters.
Robert Wright Nonzero Newsletter
Wait, let me get this straight. So the leaders of the big NATO countries didn't especially want Ukraine to join NATO? And agreeing to not let Ukraine join NATO-agreeing to not do what they didn't want to do anyway-might have kept Russia from invading Ukraine? But they didn't do that? And doing that wasn't even seriously discussed? Like, virtually no influential American commentators argued that doing this would make sense? How could that be?
Good question! Regular readers of this newsletter may expect me to answer it by launching immediately into an indictment of "the Blob" (the foreign policy establishment) and lamenting the Blob's lack of "cognitive empathy" (understanding how your adversary, or anyone else, views the world).
Thomas L. Friedman
In my view, there are two huge logs fueling this fire. The first log was the ill-considered decision by the U.S. in the 1990s to expand NATO after - indeed, despite - the collapse of the Soviet Union.
And the second and far bigger log is how Mr. Putin cynically
exploited NATO's expansion closer to Russia's borders to
rally Russians to his side to cover for his huge failure of
leadership. Mr. Putin has utterly failed to build Russia into
an economic model that would actually attract its neighbors, not
repel them, and inspire its most talented people to want to stay,
not get in line for visas to the West.
...
The mystery was why the U.S. - which throughout the Cold War dreamed
that Russia might one day have a democratic revolution and a leader who,
however haltingly, would try to make Russia into a democracy and join
the West - would choose to quickly push NATO into Russia's face
when it was weak.
Scott Horton and Bill Kristol Debate
3,000 people were killed on September 11th, 2001. As Paul Wolfowitz admitted, the main reason Osama bin Laden cited for attacking America was the U.S. military bases left in Saudi Arabia for the so-called "dual containment" policy against Iraq and Iran in the 1990s after Iraq War I, the Persian Gulf War.
Bin Laden's plan was to provoke the United States into invading Afghanistan so he could replicate the mujahideen's earlier success against the USSR, with U.S. support, in the 1980s, this time against us; to bog us down, bleed us to bankruptcy and to create a "choking life" for the American people under the tyranny of our security state.