September
26, 2023
NATO
Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg likely surprised both factions in the
ongoing debate about NATO expansion and its role in triggering the
Russia-Ukraine War. He also undermined (perhaps fatally) the official cover
story about the reasons for the Ukraine war. Since Russia’s February 2022
invasion, Western officials and their allies in the corporate media have
insisted vehemently that the alliance’s addition of Eastern European nations
after the Cold War and giving a pledge to Ukraine that it would become a member
someday had nothing to do with Vladimir Putin’s decision to attack his
neighbor. Indeed, anyone who argued otherwise risked being accused of echoing
Russian propaganda and being “Putin’s puppet.”
Both
the official explanation and the pervasive narrative regarding the war were
unequivocal. Putin was power-hungry and unwilling to tolerate an independent,
pro-Western Ukraine on Russia’s border. Brookings Institution Senior Fellow
Steven Pifer’s interpretation was typical; “For the Kremlin, a democratic,
Western-oriented, economically successful Ukraine poses a nightmare, because
that Ukraine would cause Russians to question why they cannot have the same
political voice and democratic rights that Ukrainians do.” Even when Pifer published
his piece in July 2022, that explanation was extremely weak, given Ukraine’s
own corruption and authoritarianism. Volodymyr Zelensky’s subsequent systematic
assault on civil liberties makes the notion that Putin felt threatened by
Ukraine as an irresistible democratic magnet patently absurd. Ukraine is not a
democratic country by any reasonable definition of the term.
Nevertheless,
other analysts made arguments similar to Pifer’s thesis. That Russian
grievances over NATO helped spark the war “makes no sense,” wrote Rutgers
professor Alexander Motyl. “NATO cannot have been the issue,” historian Timothy
Snyder insists; Putin “simply wants to conquer Ukraine, and a reference to NATO
was one form of rhetorical cover for his colonial venture.” Such comments matched
the official positions that the U.S. and other NATO governments adopted.
Interventionist opponent Caitlin Johnstone was accurate that “arguably the
single most egregious display of war propaganda in the 21st century occurred
last year, when the entire western political/media class began uniformly
bleating the word ‘unprovoked’ in reference to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”
In
a September 6, 2023 speech to the European Union Parliament, Secretary General
Stoltenberg contradicted the entrenched official narrative, most likely
inadvertently. “President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually
sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO
enlargement. That was what he sent us. And was a pre-condition for not invade
(sic) Ukraine. Of course we didn’t sign that.”
Stoltenberg
emphasized, “He wanted us to sign that promise, never to enlarge NATO. He
wanted us to remove our military infrastructure in all Allies that have joined
NATO since 1997, meaning half of NATO, all the Central and Eastern Europe, we
should remove NATO from that part of our Alliance, introducing some kind of B,
or second class membership. We rejected that.” Consequently, “he went to war to
prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.” [Emphasis added]
Several
scholars and former officials had warned for years that NATO’s expansion to
Russia’s border would end badly, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine confirmed
those predictions. George Kennan, the intellectual father of America’s
containment policy during the Cold War, perceptively warned in a May 1998 New
York Times interview about what the Senate’s ratification of NATO’s first round
of expansion would set in motion. “I think it is the beginning of a new cold
war,” Kennan stated. ”I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely
and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake.”
NATO’s
attempt to make Ukraine a full-fledged military asset was especially
provocative. Kremlin leaders regarded Ukraine as not only being in Moscow’s
rightful sphere of influence, but in Russia’s core security zone. Putin made
that point clear on numerous occasions at least as far back as his speech to
the Munich Security Conference in 2007. Instead of taking those warnings
seriously, Western leaders blew through one red light after another. NATO’s
leader, the United States, especially worked to forge ever-closer military ties
with Ukraine. In essence, the Trump and Biden administrations began to treat
Ukraine as a NATO member in all but name.
Extensive
arms shipments to Kiev along with U.S. and NATO joint military exercises
constituted the centerpiece of that policy. But that was not the extent of
Washington’s provocations. Shortly after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, the CIA
initiated secret paramilitary training programs for Ukrainian special
operations personnel in the United States and in Ukraine. Massive arms
shipments to Kiev along with joint U.S. and NATO military exercises with
Ukrainian forces constituted the centerpiece of that policy. Yahoo national
security correspondent Dan Dorfman noted that “U.S. and Ukrainian intelligence
have even participated in joint offensive cyber operations against Russian
government targets, according to former officials.”
Such
actions make a mockery of the argument that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was
unprovoked. That assertion is convenient propaganda, but it was always devoid
of both facts and logic. Stoltenberg’s comments merely confirm what should have
been obvious to both the foreign policy community and the news media from the
beginning.
Ted
Galen Carpenter is a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute and a
senior fellow at the Libertarian Institute.
He also held various senior policy posts during a 37-year career at the
Cato Institute. Dr. Carpenter is the
author of 13 books and more than 1,200 articles on international affairs. His latest book is Unreliable Watchdog: The
News Media and U.S. Foreign Policy (2022).
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