Quit repeating this crap. There was no agreement for NATO to not expand eastward and even Gorbachev stated there was no such agreement. You are just repeating the bullshit spread by Pozner and Mearsheimer. It is still bullshit propaganda no matter how many people repeat it.

I fell for it too, at the start of the war, and then I tried to combat it each time I came across it.

Mearsheimer is way more of an authority on the subject than you are, so if you're going to dismiss his claim as bullshit while claiming you're trying to combat the claim you could at least provide a link. Also even if Mearsheimer is wrong in that claim it doesn't make it propaganda.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2014/11/06/did-nato-...

>the former Soviet president criticized NATO enlargement and called it a violation of the spirit of the assurances given Moscow in 1990, but he made clear there was no promise regarding broader enlargement.

More regarding Mearsheimer in case anyone is interested.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Mearsheimer

https://political-science.uchicago.edu/directory/john-mearsh...

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/why-john-mearsheimer-...

There is a distinction between an explanation and a justification. There are many ways to explain why some thing happened or might happen. They can not be used to justify said action. I believe Mearsheimer and Pozner, for reasons, confound one for the other. Saying that Russia could not help not to attack, that it is the rational choice for Russia, is like saying that advertisers can not help themselves tracking users, it is the rational choice to track users. Again, explanation is not justification. Explanations are not excuses. That is why I call it bullshit propaganda: He is justifying the war. War is not just. War is never just. War is death and tragedy, even if you can write entire books explaining how it happened and why every party had legitimate interest.

RealPolitik, the realist school of thought, evolutionary psychology, etc. only ever provide explanations. And often they may be good explanations. They are useful when trying to understand events or people or groups of people and when trying to predict behavior or create models.

But to derive justification from those explanations means that you ascribe to the belief that determinism (lack of free will) absolves you of responsibility. It does not. Whether you have free will or not you still have to make choices and still bear the responsibility of those choices. If you believe you have free will you are directly responsible and must assume responsibility for any consequence coming your way. If you believe you do not have free will, than any consequence is simply the system correcting itself. There is no escape from making choices.

But what do I known? So since you are claiming he has more authority I will counter with someone of equal or greater authority, Alexander Stubb, past Prime Minister, Minister Of Finance and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Finland and Director and Professor of the School of Transnational Governance at the European University Institute:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlB-pRqdyBg

Declassified documents show security assurances against NATO expansion to Soviet leaders from Baker, Bush, Genscher, Kohl, Gates, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Hurd, Major, and Woerner [0]

[0] https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017...

Oh sure, I wonder why Eastern Europe wants to join NATO. Hmmm, I wonder why countries who were on the fence about joining NATO have suddenly fast tracked applications in 2022?

You are justifying an action by the reaction to it.

It's like saying that Russia's invasion of Ukraine is justified by the Ukrainian drones and rockets attacking Russian cities [0] and villages near Ukrainian border.

[0] https://t.me/zhest_belgorod/16230

Russia has been invading it's neighbors for centuries. Eastern Europeans do remember that.

Joining NATO is not only about the conflict today, it's due to pretty much all generations in the area suffering due to their aggressive neighbor further to the east.

Nearly every country in Europe has been invading its neighbors for centuries, that’s what normal looks like in Europe. In fact some countries liked invasions so much, that they invaded countries all over the world.

Joining NATO is not at all only up to the countries which apply. The US is more or less the game maker, with big countries like Germany, France, the UK etc. also having an important voice.

It’s not unexpected that the former Warsaw Pact countries would want to join. It is surprising to see the US being so short-sighted to allow these expansions considering that several of its own diplomats and foreign policy experts were warning against it.

> Nearly every country in Europe has been invading its neighbors for centuries,

Which was horrendously destructive, and the two World Wars fought using more modern weaponry were particularly awful. In fact, avoiding similar wars in Europe was part of the original justification for creating the EU, Europe has benefited tremenously from the almost a century of near-peace it's experienced, and this makes Russia's recent actions basically an existential threat to the rest of Europe.

If the goal was to avoid war in Europe, then keeping a buffer of neutral countries between Russia and the EU/NATO would have been the logical course of action, when failing to integrate Russia in the European family.

It seems to me that the EU and US didn’t know when to stop and only looked at the potential economical and respectively geopolitical gains, while not giving enough weight to the risk of conflict when it was known what Russia’s red lines were.

This was a policy blunder. Looking at it from a moral or international law perspective is a dead end when the primary driver of the chain of events leading to today was geopolitics.

You are ignoring the will of the people in a buffer state. In the EU they see prospering liberal democracies and on the other side it's permanent authoritarian kleptocracy, which by the way still sees them as part of a lost empire. Of course they are going to want a path to the EU.

You seem to be assuming that countries may decide on their own freely who they associate with. This is the case in international law, but not in reality, as can be seen in many examples concerning Russia or the US or China.

Realpolitik vs ideal-oriented policy. It wasn’t the buffer states driving the decision, it was the US and NATO. They had to choose between buffer states and expanding NATO. The developments in Ukraine were predictable and likely avoidable had they chosen differently - see the fate of Belarus or Georgia or Ukraine before 2004 and before 2014.

And that's why countries have to consider all of their neighbors when deciding on their foreign policy. There was a lot of bad blood for example against Germany, but since we have a very good economic partnership with them, there is no reason for being overly prepared for war with them. They haven't done anything to consider them hostile.

Russia has consistently been a bad neighbor that keeps on threatening or playing weird tricks against other countries. They have invaded multiple neighbors in the last 100 years, where the rest of Europe has become more peaceful.

There is a clear danger to peace in Europe, and that's why countries want to join NATO.

Why do you think that letting Eastern European countries join NATO is misguided? So far, it has been the number one reason that Russia hasn't invaded any other countries in the region.

Now you’ve scaled back from hundreds of years to a just as arbitrary 100 years.

I assume you’ve led with Germany to address the very obvious WW2, when Germany turned the entire continent into a bloodbath. Ok, let’s skip that one :-)

There were the Cod Wars, which were mostly boat ramming affairs, if it weren’t for the fact that Iceland threatened to leave NATO, expel US forces and broke diplomatic relations with the UK at some point.

There was the Turkish Cypriot conflict, which continues to smolder until the present day.

Quite a few civil wars and uprisings.

Then the big Yugoslav war, where a defensive alliance oddly decided to go on the offensive.

The next big war was the current one in Ukraine.

Rather quiet given Europe’s bloody past. But if we look outside Europe, we see that the warfare just moved to other places. Falklands, Iraq twice, Syria, Libya. Not to mention the French and British colonial empires.

Core NATO are no slouches at invading and making war. So what’s the point in trying to make Russia seem irredeemable? We measure with very different standards what we do vs. what they do. Makes it easier to justify militarization, spending enormous amounts on weapons, reducing civil liberties, etc if you have an evil enemy.

Edit: forgot to answer your question about expansion. Because the likely outcome of not expanding would have been Belarus, Georgia or Ukraine in the 00’s, not invasions and war. This is not some far-fetched theory, Russian and ex-USSR leaders were repeatedly advocating for it and US and German/French politicians were obviously aware of it and in agreement. Post Bush the 1st the US changed its policy and went on a NATO expansion quest.

> Nearly every country in Europe has been invading its neighbors for centuries

We don't need to go into that long history. Most of these CEE countries have been invaded by Russia in the last 100 years.

> It’s not unexpected that the former Warsaw Pact countries would want to join. It is surprising to see the US being so short-sighted to allow these expansions considering that several of its own diplomats and foreign policy experts were warning against it.

It actually worked out well. Not letting e.g. Baltics into NATO/EU would almost certainly mean they have been already absorbed back into Russia. The rest of CEE would be vassalized.

"Not letting e.g. Baltics into NATO/EU would almost certainly mean they have been already absorbed back into Russia. The rest of CEE would be vassalized."

Why?

Because Russia has a recent and current track record of behaving this way.

You too are trying to justify NATO expansion by Russian reaction to it.

Not necessarily. Most of the new members have been invaded by Russia in the past 100 years.

And Russia has been invaded by most of the European countries in the same time period. Starting from the Intervention and Poland's invasion to the invasion by Germany and its allies.

I’m puzzled by this statement. Russia has been invaded by Germany several times. Has it been invaded by France, Spain, Poland, Denmark, The Netherlands, Belgium, the Czech Republic, or The UK in the past 100 years? As a parochial American, what have I missed?

Poland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish%E2%80%93Soviet_War

Czechoslovaks, United Kingdom, France, Greece, Estonia, Serbia, Italy, Romania: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_intervention_in_the_Rus...

Germany, Romania, Hungary, Italy, Slovakia, Croatia, Finland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Front_(World_War_II)

The intervention was a messy affair, but can hardly be called an invasion. Czechoslovak legion got to Russia to fight on its side and when Bolsheviks took over, mostly just tried to return home. The goals of other countries interventions in this chaos were diverse, but again, mostly not directed against Russia, some e.g. tried to prevent Germany from taking more Russian territory.

"but can hardly be called an invasion"

It was an invasion in support of one of the sides in Russian civil war. Russia made peace with Germany 1917 [0], the intervention started in 1918.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armistice_between_Russia_and_t...

You're deflecting. The point is that CEE countries had a valid reason to fear Russian imperialism and acted accordingly.

You're deflecting.

I remind you that I asked 'Why?' in response to your bold statement "Not letting e.g. Baltics into NATO/EU would almost certainly mean they have been already absorbed back into Russia. The rest of CEE would be vassalized."

And I responded to you that Russia has both long and recent history of imperialism in this region.

Just like almost anyone else which makes it a deflection and not an answer.

No, the countries in question have been recently threatened only by Russia.

The only other recent aggressor was by that point completely pacified Germany.

Again, you are justifying an action by the reaction to it.

No, these aggressions happened in the recent history (< 100 years) before NATO accessions. Once in NATO, these countries were off limits (= main lure of the membership).

You are going in circles: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32829679

You're going in circles. We're not discussing why Russia started CSTO, but why CEE nations felt the need to enter NATO. The fact that Russia was also invaded in its history bears no relevancy in this matter.

And here we go again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32835337

And which neighbor hasn't invaded Russia? Russia remembers that too. In the 1990s there was a perfect chance to turn the page, but it was squandered by the West.

I agree, Russia should form or join an already existing defensive alliance to protect itself against what it considers to be aggressive neighbors.

That sounds reasonable to me, just like the neighboring countries doing likewise - joining a pact to defend against Russia.

This exists, its called the Организация Договора о коллективной безопасности or Collective Security Treaty Organization. Its member states include Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan. It used to include Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Uzbekistan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_Security_Treaty_Org...

That organization is functionally defunct

Russia has been a prison of people’s for some time. I’m all for countries like Finland wanting to be neutral but Russia’s actions and out right threats of war really force their hands.

There’s a reason Belarus is the only real ally in the region.

Is Spain the prison of Catalonians?

Russia used to be more on the fence about NATO too when it acted defensively - before Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.

The war crimes committed during the NATO Libyan intervention - with a deliberate emphasis on regime change and creating a failed state - sparked the same fear in Russia that the Ukraine invasion sparked in Finland.

Russia already went through a period of internal collapse and being ruled by an American puppet, too, so the feeling that "they could make it happen again" is pretty visceral.

Afaik the NATO mission in Yugoslavia and Libya were the two big ones. Both misused NATO and were not defensive in nature.

And none of them were targeted against Russia.

For the obvious reason that NATO countries are largely rich, peaceful, and doing pretty ok and are not gonna waste their time and energy attacking a nation with f'ing nuclear weapons.

Oh it was. If you thought it was coincidence that they were both Russian allies you'd be utterly wrong.

You're right that NATO definitely isnt interested in committing to a full scale ground invasion of Russia.

Similarly the British were never interested in committing to a full scale invasion of India. Therefore they were... never a threat?

There was a real hope Russia would join NATO at one point. That it has devolved back into the primary threat was never a foregone or even straightforward conclusion.

It's very unclear if Russia being in NATO would change anything in its imperialistic tendencies. Wouldn't it be, after all, the best chance to destroy NATO from within?

Russia has no say over Eastern Europ and ex-USSR countries. If they want to join NATO, there is nothing Russia can do. Justifying a war based on this is just very wrong.

I remember when I learned about the Cuban missile crisis as a kid (in America) my initial thought was to ask what moral right the US had in nearly starting a war in order to stop the Soviets from moving their missiles to Cuba when both the USSR and Cuba wanted that.

Thankfully for the world saner minds prevailed and a settlement was reached. The soviets turned their ships around and the US removed their missiles from Turkey.

Such a settlement unfortunately is no longer possible with the current situation.

And yet, the USA did not invade Cuba or press a regime change after the CMC. There was a negotiated settlement where the USA withdrew their missiles from Turkey, left Castro alone and that settled the issue.

NATO never deployed nukes in any of the ex-USSR countries, did not build extensive permanent bases, signed the Russia/NATO founding act and in general tried to accommodate Moscow.

There's a world of difference between deploying offensive nukes in a neighboring country and allowing countries to join a defensive alliance. That's not to say I am a huge fan of US politics of the 1960's, but the comparison is simply lopsided.

>And yet, the USA did not invade Cuba or press a regime change after the CMC. There was a negotiated settlement where the USA withdrew their missiles from Turkey, left Castro alone and that settled the issue.

No, but they were willing to go to war to prevent the missiles from getting there. Waiting until after would have been too late.

>NATO never deployed nukes in any of the ex-USSR countries, did not build extensive permanent bases, signed the Russia/NATO founding act and in general tried to accommodate Moscow.

There are NATO missile bases in ex-Warsaw Pact countries though (Poland and Romania). Yes they are ostensibly to defend against an Iranian missile attack but the US has a poor record for honesty in its international dealings so I can understand that a potential missile base in Ukraine would cross a lot of red lines for the Russians.

>There's a world of difference between deploying offensive nukes in a neighboring country and allowing countries to join a defensive alliance. That's not to say I am a huge fan of US politics of the 1960's, but the comparison is simply lopsided.

It's easy to argue that the potential nukes in Cuba were defensive to deter any further US invasion attempts. At any rate balance of power I think is a better lens through which to examine these things rather than the ethics of offence and defense because that's actually what drives the decision making.

Likewise calling NATO a defensive alliance is a bit tenuous I think (at least from the American perspective). NATO is controlled by the US and the US is quite aggressive about pursuing its perceived interests.

Over the last 20 years there has been lots of chatter regarding US long term ambitions towards Russia and those ambitions are now being discussed more openly even in mainstream press. For example this article is from yesterday.

https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/world/nato-versus-russia-in-u...

>A much more truly ambitious apparent long-term US ambition seems to have been to instigate the breakup of Russia into smaller manageable countries, paralleling the emergence of nations in eastern Europe after 1989. It could then deal with a reconstructed historical Russia of smaller emerging statelets run by competitive elites at odds with each other. These new polities, anxious for revenues, will then, presumably, be eager to sign lucrative commercial deals with US corporations since the entire region is extraordinarily wealthy in raw material resources.

So while I agree that Russia has acted in a paranoid manner vis-à-vis Ukraine/NATO I also think that the paranoia is understandable. Russia has after all been invaded by Western European countries three times in the previous 180 years (I'm not suggesting a military invasion of Russia is on the cards but certainly an economic and cultural one).

From an American perspective I think the US has played their hand very well. By manufacturing this conflict they created a situation where Russia had to choose between allowing further NATO expansion or starting a war which 30 years ago would have been considered a civil war. This results in all sorts of benefits for the US.

- Potential collapse of the Russian Federation and the economic benefits this would bring (for the West)

- Solidifying EU support of NATO

- Increased energy sales to Europe at higher prices

- Increased military sales to NATO countries due to new threat

- Increased budget for "the military industrial complex"

- Further the long term goal of preventing a peer competitor from appearing by both weakening Russia and making the EU more dependant on the US both economically and militarily.

- Mutually beneficial German/Russian cooperation is pretty much dead now so no threat of such an alliance appearing in the future.

Russia it seems only had two bad choices to pick from strategically speaking; a "Kobayashi Maru". We'll never know what would have happened if they had made a different choice but its fascinating to watch all this play out. History is happening in real time!

edit: I'm not the one downvoting you.

Yeah, but the Americans pinky swore that they wouldn't expand NATO in the early 90s in an early negotiating round.

That's how negotiations work. Everything the west proposes at any point of negotiations must be honored irrespective of whether it was actually an agreed upon outcome of that negotiation or not. And if Russia blatantly breaks the agreed upon, written, formally accepted points of the negotiation that doesn't count.

edit: Oh, I think I may have misread what you wrote. You were being sarcastic and saying that the US proposed not to expand early on but no agreement was reached, and Russia is trying to hold NATO to that anyway. Sorry!

Could you provide any proof of this? I don't see any evidence of this, are you referring to a verbal agreement?

https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_111767.htm#c203

Claim: NATO promised Russia it would not expand after the Cold War

Fact: Such an agreement was never made. NATO’s door has been open to new members since it was founded in 1949 – and that has never changed. This “Open Door Policy” is enshrined in Article 10 of NATO’s founding treaty, which says “any other European State in a position to further the principles of this Treaty and to contribute to the security of the North Atlantic” can apply for membership. Decisions on membership are taken by consensus among all Allies. No treaty signed by the United States, Europe and Russia included provisions on NATO membership.

The idea of NATO expansion beyond a united Germany was not on the agenda in 1989, particularly as the Warsaw Pact still existed. This was confirmed by Mikhail Gorbachev in an interview in 2014: "The topic of 'NATO expansion' was not discussed at all, and it wasn't brought up in those years. I say this with full responsibility. Not a single Eastern European country raised the issue, not even after the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist in 1991. Western leaders didn't bring it up, either."

Declassified White House transcripts also reveal that, in 1997, Bill Clinton consistently refused Boris Yeltsin's offer of a 'gentlemen's agreement' that no former Soviet Republics would enter NATO: "I can't make commitments on behalf of NATO, and I'm not going to be in the position myself of vetoing NATO expansion with respect to any country, much less letting you or anyone else do so…NATO operates by consensus."

Just like Cuba wanted to host Soviet missiles in 1962.

Oddly, the US didn't think 'there is nothing we can do' and was about to start WW3 over it.

That's obviously where Russia went wrong. The US made stupid mistakes when it comes to Cuba, but with the Soviet missiles they made it stick.

In contrast, Russia thought that could take over a country while Europe and the US would sit still. Then when that didn't happen, Russia didn't figure out that something was going wrong. So they got a complete economic boycott and they are letting Ukraine destroy most of the Russian army.

Soon Russia will be a country with no economy to speak of and no army.

So, uhm, which country in central/eastern Europe hosts NATO nuclear missiles again?

That's just whataboutism.

And Russia isn't about to sink American ships. Yet.

Here is NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg talking about moving American nukes to Eastern Europe. [0]

"The alternative to NATO nuclear sharing is different kinds of bilateral arrangements and also the risk of having, you know, nuclear weapons also . . . so, of course, Germany can, of course, decide whether there will be nuclear weapons in your country, but the alternative is that we easily end up with nuclear weapons in other countries in Europe, also to the east of Germany."

And please don't use the word 'whataboutism' unless you want to say "I have double standards."

[0] https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/opinions_188772.htm

According to https://icanw.org, Germany and Turkey currently host U.S. nuclear weapons.

Verbal face to face agreements that go against the explicit wish of the countries involved which you give no agency? Should a finger be pointed at the agreement regarding Ukraine giving up the USSR nukes?

Such agreements are based on trust and if that’s gone both parties stand to lose a lot. The kind of global challenges we will meet can only be tackled by having the US, Russia, China, India, the EU work together.

Pointing out that it was a verbal agreement is correct, but is missing the bigger point. This is not just a technical gotcha, the future of humanity is at stake.

Those countries which wanted to join have agency, but they don’t decide if they are accepted or not. The US does, with a few other big players. The rest rubber stamp what was decided by the big boys.

Finally, both the US and Russia had an interest in those nukes not staying in Ukraine. In fact the Ukrainians changed their mind at the last moment, but they were more or less forced/bribed to take the agreement.

Turkey apparently didn't get this rubber-stamping message, and used their vote for own gains. To me this still looks pretty much like a state deciding for themselves.

Turkey are an important member of NATO and they know it. They’re also hosting US nuclear missiles.

"which you give no agency"

It takes two to tango. Those countries didn't promise anything to Russia, but the West did.

"Should a finger be pointed"

Yes, please. But be sure to read the memorandum to the end, where you will find the Annex describing West's and Russia's commitment to the common inclusive security system for all Europe. The NATO expansion that followed is nothing like that.