{"id":196625,"date":"2008-04-07T23:13:00","date_gmt":"2008-04-08T04:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/04\/07\/a-good-commentary-on-russia\/"},"modified":"2008-04-07T23:13:00","modified_gmt":"2008-04-08T04:13:00","slug":"a-good-commentary-on-russia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/04\/07\/a-good-commentary-on-russia\/","title":{"rendered":"A Good Commentary on Russia"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Boston Globe columnist James Carroll looks at what <a href=\"http:\/\/www.boston.com\/bostonglobe\/editorial_opinion\/oped\/articles\/2008\/04\/07\/paranoia_backed_by_just_cause\/\">might be driving Russia&#8217;s hostility to recent NATO actions<\/a>, and comes to the conlusion that it&#8217;s completely justified:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The dissolution of the Warsaw Pact was accompanied by a buildup of NATO.<\/li>\n<li>Mikhail Gorbachev was assured that if the USSR accepted the reunified Germany&#8217;s presence in NATO, there would be no further eastern expansion of the alliance.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Carroll quotes George Kennan describing NATO expansion as, &#8220;the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The list of countries that have invaded Russia in the past few hundred years includes, &#8220;Poland, the Ottoman Empire, Sweden, Austria, France, Great Britain, and Germany&#8221;, though he leaves off the US&#8217;s direct military participation in White Russian revolts of the 1920s.<\/p>\n<p>I would argue that Carroll does not go far enough. <\/p>\n<p>If one looks at the Hart-Rudman Commission of the late 1990s looking at coming threats to America, and the behavior of Lynne Cheney, who <a href=\"http:\/\/jamesfallows.theatlantic.com\/archives\/2007\/07\/gary_hart_lynne_cheney_and_war.php\">continuously called for an immediate military strike on China<\/a>, and resigned when she was created like a crazy aunt by everyone else, <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">inclucing<\/span> other Republicans, and juxtaposes it with the report that Francis Fukuyama said that &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com\/2006\/04\/23\/the_search_for_an_enemy\/\">There was actually a deliberate search for an enemy because they felt that the Republican Party didn&#8217;t do as well<\/a>&#8220;, I think that this is actually a deliberate strategy.<\/p>\n<p>The Republican party needs an external enemy to succeed, and that this actions taken recently, particularly the missile shield, are part of a deliberate attempt to recreate the Cold War for partisan political gain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Boston Globe columnist James Carroll looks at what might be driving Russia&#8217;s hostility to recent NATO actions, and comes to the conlusion that it&#8217;s completely justified: The dissolution of the Warsaw Pact was accompanied by a buildup of NATO. Mikhail Gorbachev was assured that if the USSR accepted the reunified Germany&#8217;s presence in NATO, there &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[984,964,1096,1043,978],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-196625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-foreign-relations","category-missile-defense","category-nato","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196625"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196625"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196625\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}