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Progress? Let's see. We've gone from unending wars in distant lands against enemies capable of little more than wielding firearms and roadside bombs and those conflicts were disasters to the possibility of a war in the European heartland between nuclear-armed foes. I mean, honestly, what could possibly go wrong?
And it was all fated to happen in Europe because of that anti-democratic nightmare of an autocrat Vladimir Putin. Pay no attention to the much-beloved (by Fox News) autocrat of NATO member and "democratic" Hungary, Viktor Orba'n, or Donald Trump's attempts to create his own version of an autocracy here. (Had that all-American Putin lover been a little sharper, he might have succeeded and, of course, he or a next-generation Trumpster might still do so.) In today's Washington, it's clear: we're still the defenders of democracy, pure and simple, and Ukraine is just another case of the same.
As TomDispatch regular Rajan Menon points out today, we're acting as if the Ukraine situation came out of nowhere thanks to the Vlad, when it's actually a post-Cold War train wreck long in the making. To grasp that, however, you need a little historical perspective on American policy after the Soviet Union collapsed, that now-classic moment when our leaders became convinced that the world was simply ours forever and a day. So, step into Menon's time machine and head back to those years to get a better sense of where we truly are today. Tom
How Did We Get Here?
The Strategic Blunder of the 1990s That Set the Stage for Today's Ukrainian Crisis
By Rajan Menon
Understandably enough, commentaries on the crisis between Russia and the West tend to dwell on Ukraine. After all, more than 100,000 Russian soldiers and a fearsome array of weaponry have now been emplaced around the Ukrainian border. Still, such a narrow perspective deflects attention from an American strategic blunder that dates to the 1990s and is still reverberating.
During that decade, Russia was on its knees. Its economy had shrunk by nearly 40%, while unemployment was surging and inflation skyrocketing. (It reached a monumental 86% in 1999.) The Russian military was a mess. Instead of seizing the opportunity to create a new European order that included Russia, President Bill Clinton and his foreign-policy team squandered it by deciding to expand NATO threateningly toward that country's borders. Such a misbegotten policy guaranteed that Europe would once again be divided, even as Washington created a new order that excluded and progressively alienated post-Soviet Russia.
The Russians were perplexed as well they should have been.
At the time, Clinton and company were hailing Russian President Boris Yeltsin as a democrat. (Never mind that he had lobbed tank shells at his own recalcitrant parliament in 1993 and, in 1996, prevailed in a crooked election, abetted weirdly enough by Washington.) They praised him for launching a "transition" to a market economy, which, as Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich so poignantly laid out in her book Second Hand Time, would plunge millions of Russians into penury by "decontrolling" prices and slashing state-provided social services.
Why, Russians wondered, would Washington obsessively push a Cold War NATO alliance ever closer to their borders, knowing that a reeling Russia was in no position to endanger any European country?
An Alliance Saved from Oblivion
Unfortunately, those who ran or influenced American foreign policy found no time to ponder such an obvious question. After all, there was a world out there for the planet's sole superpower to lead and, if the U.S. wasted time on introspection, "the jungle," as the influential neoconservative thinker Robert Kagan put it, would grow back and the world would be "imperiled." So, the Clintonites and their successors in the White House found new causes to promote using American power, a fixation that would lead to serial campaigns of intervention and social engineering.
The expansion of NATO was an early manifestation of this millenarian mindset, something theologian Reinhold Niebuhr had warned about in his classic book, The Irony of American History. But who in Washington was paying attention, when the world's fate and the future were being designed by us, and only us, in what Washington Post neoconservative columnist Charles Krauthammer celebrated in 1990 as the ultimate "unipolar moment" one in which, for the first time ever, the United States would possess peerless power?
Still, why use that opportunity to expand NATO, which had been created in 1949 to deter the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact from rolling into Western Europe, given that both the Soviet Union and its alliance were now gone? Wasn't it akin to breathing life into a mummy?
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