Where was Germany when "US President Bill Clinton called for former Warsaw Pact countries and post-Soviet republics to join NATO, and made NATO enlargement a crucial part of his foreign-policy," and when, beginning in 1999 and always despite the vehement but ignored objections of Russia, 14 more countries (in addition to reunified Germany) joined NATO, including five directly on Russia's borders (Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Norway)?
Germany should have been the first country to object to this expansion and violation of the spirit, if not the letter, of the agreement that made it possible for it to exist as a whole country again, and even join NATO in a military alliance against the very country, Russia, that had sacrificed so much (27 million lives!) in order to defeat it in its former incarnation as the "Third Reich," the worst scourge that has been visited upon humanity in modern history.
But no, we do not see Germany objecting to NATO expansion. On April 1, 2022, the Wall Street Journal reported that
Mr. Scholz made one last push for a settlement between Moscow and Kyiv. He told Mr. Zelensky in Munich on Feb. 19 that Ukraine should renounce its NATO aspirations and declare neutrality as part of a wider European security deal between the West and Russia. The pact would be signed by Mr. Putin and Mr. Biden, who would jointly guarantee Ukraine's security.
Mr. Zelensky said Mr. Putin couldn't be trusted to uphold such an agreement and that most Ukrainians wanted to join NATO. His answer left German officials worried that the chances of peace were fading.
This is remarkable for three reasons, all of which are obvious and important but none of which, as far as I know, have been pointed out in either the German or the American press. First, it shows Scholz knew exactly what was needed to prevent the war. If the same proposal had been made to Zelensky by Joe Biden, it would not have been rejected. Ukraine would not have been able to fight the Russians effectively, and would not have wanted to, without American support.
Secondly, it shows that Olaf Scholz did not have the backbone to allow the news of his rejected proposal to be reported by the German press. Germans did not hear about it until 40 days later, after it appeared in the WSJ. It is highly unlikely that the WSJ reporters had access to information about the German chancellor that German reporters did not, which means Scholz's office must have put pressure on the German and perhaps also the foreign press not to report it. When it was finally reported in the WSJ, it appeared at the end of a long (6,500-word) "backstory" article that describes the history of the conflict as "Putin's 20-year march to war" and the "roots of the war" as lying not in Russia's legitimate security concerns but "in Russia's deep ambivalence about its place in the world after the end of the Soviet Union." The article is full of distortions that I will not try to correct here, but the intended take-away is clearly that the valiant efforts of the West over two decades "managed neither to deter Mr. Putin from invading Ukraine nor reassure him that Ukraine's increasing westward orientation didn't threaten the Kremlin" while Putin "resorted to increasingly aggressive steps to reassert Moscow's dominion over Ukraine and other former Soviet republics."
In this context, Scholz's "one last push" is quite falsely depicted as if it was only one of many sincere efforts by the West to recognize Russia's legitimate security concerns and do the right thing. The fact is, however, that this proposal had never been made, either to Zelensky or to Russians, and if it had been - by the US - there would have been no invasion and no war, and everyone would have been happy except the fools and warmongers in Washington who think the war will weaken Russia and bring about regime-change in Moscow - as well as fill the coffers of the arms industry.
Thirdly, Scholz's "last push" offer and the effort to keep it from being publicized shows how pitifully weak and spineless is the strongest "ally" of the US in NATO. If Scholz had had the guts to announce to the world that he had made this offer to Zelensky instead of keeping it secret, Zelensky would not have been able to reject it out of hand and the US would have been forced to choose between supporting its NATO ally or supporting Zelensky. It would be very interesting to know if Scholz discussed his proposal with the Americans before making it to Zelensky, and what the American response was.
Without knowing this, I won't speculate, but it is fair and necessary to consider what could have happened if Olaf Scholz had made his proposal known, in which case, like e.e. cummings, I could "sing of Olaf, glad and big," instead of having to criticize him as just another spineless US vassal.
If Scholz had accompanied his proposal by declaring formally that Germany, for one, would never allow Ukraine into NATO, that in itself might well have been enough for Russia to call off the invasion. It would have raised the ire of the US, of course, but they would not have been able to override Germany's veto since the NATO charter clearly requires any decision on enlargement to be unanimous. Even if a German pledge to keep Ukraine out of NATO had not dissuaded Russia from invading, Germany could and should have continued to refuse to contribute anything but humanitarian aid to Ukraine. It could and should have also refused to participate in sanctions against Russia, and refused to scuttle its multi-billion-euro Nordstream 2 deal with Russia.
All of this could have been justified by the special position that Germany has vis-a-vis not only the US but also, and especially, Russia after WW2. It was, after all, primarily the Russians who freed the Germans from the Nazis, at the cost of 27 million lives. And it is right to be grateful for the Marshall Plan, but how far should this gratitude extend? Does it require that Germans sacrifice their current economy because of sanctions and a US proxy war that could have been easily avoided and could even now be immediately ended instead of being stoked ever more dangerously to the brink of nuclear war?
All it would have taken, and all it would take now, is a simple No. No to Ukraine ever joining NATO, no to nuclear weapons in Ukraine, and no to Ukraine's refusal to implement the Minsk 2 agreement, and as Scholz quite reasonably proposed, a declaration of neutrality "as part of a wider European security deal between the West and Russia." I fail to see how any rational person can fail to see the common sense and utter simplicity of this, as an alternative to war.
My father, a West Pointer and veteran of two wars, once told me that "everybody feels guilty when there is a war." He was capable of such flashes of brilliance, which seemed to emerge from him despite himself. It was his response to my confession, many decades after the fact, that I sometimes felt guilty about not "serving" in Vietnam. That too, despite myself, since I would not have admitted it in a rational state of mind.
What we are seeing now in Ukraine is insanity. No one is going to accept any guilt. That may come later, if there is a later. The Vietnam war dragged on for years solely on the grounds of "saving face," which had in fact become a major factor even before the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, as shown in a conversation between President Johnson and Senator Richard Russell on May 27, 1964. Applying this to President Trump's policies in 2017 re North Korea and Afghanistan, Jeff Greenfield wisely wrote:
Are we doomed to follow a path with North Korea [read "Ukraine"] where the only apparent options are nuclear war or some sort of diplomatic or geopolitical defeat? If the reasonably foreseeable outcome of a policy is disaster, then pursuing that policy because no one can conceive of an alternative is something close to madness.
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