In others words they avoided it being written down like the germans avoided calling the Two plus Four agreement a peace treaty. Political trickery.

That may have worked for the germans to prevent paying reparations to greece, but the NATO trick lead to the problems we now have with russia.

Remember how the US reacted to some missiles in Cuba?

problem with russia is not nato but putin's head. if you had listen to his speech yesterday, nato is just a pretext because people need enemy to unite against. in reality he wants ussr back (he was complaining yesterday that republics were allowed to leave ussr to easily and ukraine is not a real country but something made up by lenin and stalin). he wants back the glory of soviet empire.

Things don't happen in a vacuum.

Putin is a result of what happened under Yeltsin, where some people got very rich and the rest had to suffer.