- it was a defensive alliance;
- the United States had been involved only one such alliance in the past: the French alliance of 1778, which led to the defeat of the British at Yorktown in 1781;
- the French treaty was permanently severed in 1800 by the Treaty of Mortefontaine;
- for the next 149 years, we did not enter into such a foreign alliance.
NATO was Truman’s umbrella over Western Europe:
- it was part of the Truman Doctrine;
- it was part of his creation of a national security state.
In 1989, James Baker III, who had been Reagan’s Chief of Staff, and who was now Bush’s Secretary of State, sat down with Gorbachev.
On behalf of the USA Baker made a promise to Gorbachev:
- if the USSR took apart the Warsaw Pact,
- NATO would not move one inch closer to the USSR;
- in 1991, the USSR was officially dissolved;
- a new Russian state replaced it — much smaller.
Clinton broke the promise in 1996:
- NATO has moved steadily eastward,
- bringing in mini-states that the U.S. government does not need to defend;
- NATO should have been dissolved no later than 1992.
Now we are trying to bring Ukraine into NATO:
- that has gone too far for Putin,
- as well as the eastern Ukraine;
- each side is rattling sabers, rhetorically speaking;
- in this case, Russia has the larger saber: its geography — next door to Ukraine — and
- its natural gas exports to Western Europe.
But the New World Order crowd refuses to pull back and let good enough alone.
In this interview "The Collapse of the American Imperium", David Stockman goes through some of the potential economic mine fields that the U.S. government is blustering into. They could backfire in the domestic economy.
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http://teapartyeconomist.com/2014/08/05/nato-broken-promise-backfired-ukraine