Chomsky didn't say it was written down or announced. But there's no argument here - Baker simply DID say that there would be no eastward movement. It's not even remotely controversial.
Hinting at a moral equivalence -- because let's be honest, that's what's happening here -- between Russian expansion and NATO "expansion" is at the very least intellectually dishonest.
NATO expanding east is a legitimate concern to Russia, and it makes sense they would view it as a longstanding insidious aggression.
NATO is only legitimate danger to the Russia interests in bordering countries like the one they are currently pursuing in the Ukraine, by commiting warcrimes among other things.
It's more complex now, but for awhile they were the two players at the game.
The war in Ukraine is the rebirth of NATO;
- Finland and Sweden on the fast path to joining. - Every member country making good on defense spending and more. - Eastern member countries inviting ever larger standing forces. - Renewed interest in Nuclear deterrents. - Reinforcement of other "NATO like" alliances like AUKUS.
If the true reason for the war was US-NATO provocation, the it was the most successful, long term, multi-administration conspiracy of the century.
Or - the Kremlin could simply be lying and have other ulterior motives for war (territory, hydrocarbons, empire, legacy, etc).
They are either stupid, or liars.
Fyiw - the only real "winners" here seem to be China.
This feels sorta how in the US only congress can declare war, so we don't declare war anymore. These technical distinctions may be compelling to you but they don't put people's legs back on, they don't pull children out of the grave.
Nato countries acting together with the support of other nato countries do invade. Call that what you want I call it nato invading.
Let's keep the same meaning of the word 'invade' when we talk about Russia and NATO.
But two prominent NATO member states, France and Germany, have famously invaded Russia. Another NATO member state, the United States, along with the UK spent the latter half of the 20th century waging a cold war against Russia. I'm a Cold War kid and a U.S. Marine to boot but damn! Russia definitely has legitimate reasons to be concerned with NATO expansion. I know, I know - we believe we're the good guys. The problem is Russia doesn't believe that and they have credible concerns we can't simply hand-wave away. Understanding that is important to making international politics work.
What? When? Should we be holding modern organisations accountable for Napolenic wars? That's absolutely hilarious statement. So when's USA going to take the revenge against the Brits? I'd like to adjust my vacation plans accordingly.
On the other hand ... You being a marine explains a lot. Standards of US military industrial complex to what country has the right to have as legitimate interest and horrifying.
It's not about being good guys or bad guys. It's about not poking your nose in the stuff of people who live outside of your borders without a firm invitation from global community.
A supposed commitment of NATO not to expand eastward wasn't a concern when they were demanding to be immediately admitted without having to meet readiness milestones like other states in Eastern Europe under President (checks) Putin.
It didn't even warrant an invasion of Ukraine. Let alone this. Have you read the news? It's not fake. It's all very real-
Russia denies and deflects in reaction to atrocities...
Town by town, prosecutors build war crimes cases...
Zelensky briefs UN on massacres...
Swastika scratched on corpse... Soldiers cut out tongues...
15-year-old raped with mother...
I am sure people in Iraq (that had nothing to do with 11 of September and had no mass destruction weapons), Libyan negros (that were hunted down and their city razed with NATO air support) and many, many others would agree with me.
It is not even a matter of blaming only USA that drags the rest of NATO with them, Libya for example the country that started the shenanigans was France.
Then there are the aggressive actions of individual NATO members that are ignored by the rest of the alliance, like Turkey bombing Armenians using drones until Russia stepped in.
Those countries are doing it under their own auspices. You seem to be confusing a defensive alliance with a federalized government.
> As someone living in a country that had a democratic leader toppled down by NATO Aircraft carrier threatening to bomb our most populous city at the time... I disagree with you.
You need to be explicit if you want to argue in good faith here.
They absolutely do not. The military aggression of nato countries against weaker ones is well documented. They have killed, organized coups, waged war, and assassinated elected leaders for their own economic and political goals.
If you're going to argue that every single one of these was merely a country that happened to be part of nato, acting independently, then do it. It's not anyone's responsibility to lob you a specific case that you can try to shoot down on its specific details, and refusing to (proactively!?) do so does not indicate a bad faith argument come on.
If I make a promise that I won't punch you and you go punch someone else, that doesn't reflect on my promise not to punch you.
If that aircraft carrier was acting under NATO's auspices it is absolutely relevant to the argument. If it wasn't then it is a strawman and should be called out.
As far as mideast wars in general, most of them, especially from the 60s to 90s, were proxy wars between democratic states and totalitarian regimes. Whether it be Iran or another one. The mideast is a powder keg in general though, I wouldn't use that region's history, or any party's involvement as a guide for much of anything in regards to your views.
It's amazing to see people on both the left and right oppose NATO. 63 Republicans voted against supporting NATO yesterday, which is just astonishing and short-sighted. That is not the GOP that I once supported, they are lost. NATO is what prevented nuclear war for 70 years. Protected Europe so it could thrive into the healthy democratic states they are today. Prevented Soviet tanks from rolling in.
Especially today, when a non-NATO nation is under attack, and would not be, if it were in NATO. The whole Trump and far left anti-NATO viewpoints were absolutely blown out of the water. It's not even a debate anymore. Western expansion was the correct move as the mask is now off of Putin's Russia.
If you hate free and sovereign states, and like dictators building empires and committing genocide to do it- being against NATO is for you. The story today is the Free World consisting of democratic states vs totalitarianism / authoritarianism / dictatorships. That includes Putin's right-wing government, and Xi's left wing Communist government.
> On 5 February 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell appeared before the UN to present evidence that Iraq was hiding unconventional weapons. However, Powell's presentation included information based on the claims of Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, codenamed "Curveball", an Iraqi emigrant living in Germany who later admitted that his claims had been false. Powell also presented evidence alleging Iraq had ties to al-Qaeda. As a follow-up to Powell's presentation, the United States, the United Kingdom, Poland, Italy, Australia, Denmark, Japan, and Spain proposed a resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq, but NATO members like Canada, France, and Germany, together with Russia, strongly urged continued diplomacy. Facing a losing vote as well as a likely veto from France and Russia, the US, the UK, Poland, Spain, Denmark, Italy, Japan, and Australia eventually withdrew their resolution.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War
> It's not anyone's responsibility to lob you a specific case that you can try to shoot down on its specific details, and refusing to (proactively!?) do so does not indicate a bad faith argument come on.
I think that depends on why you show up in forums. If your goal is to learn and grow by sharing experiences backed by data then I think it's important to be specific. If you just show up to "make your voice heard" or make grifting comments, then yeah it doesn't matter that much.
There is no such thing as a "NATO Aircraft carrier". NATO is an alliance. NATO does not declare war as a block. Iraq was not a NATO operation. Libya was not a NATO operation.
The only time NATO has intervened outside of self defense as per Article V of the Charter was Yugoslavia (and with good fucking reason).
I just interpret that as "aircraft carrier belonging to a NATO member state".
>>>Iraq was not a NATO operation.
And yet there is very significant overlap of Multi-National Forces- Iraq countries with NATO member states: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-National_Force_%E2%80%93...
>>>Libya was not a NATO operation.
Have you taken a look at the Wiki article on that conflict? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_military_intervention_in_...
A couple of choice quotes: On 19 March 2011, a multi-state NATO-led coalition began a military intervention in Libya
24 March 2011: In telephone negotiations, French foreign minister Alain Juppé agreed to let NATO take over all military operations on 29 March at the latest
I'm always amazed at the number of emphatically stated positions regarding recent geopolitics/warfare/etc. that are so easily challenged with a 30-second internet search.
US != NATO
> very significant overlap
ah yes the overlap
> On 19 March 2011, a multi-state NATO-led coalition began a military intervention in Libya
You must have forgotten to paste the text after the comma, let us retry together:
On 19 March 2011, a multi-state NATO-led coalition began a military intervention in Libya, to implement United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973, in response to events during the First Libyan Civil War. With ten votes in favour and five abstentions, the UN Security Council's intent was to have "an immediate ceasefire in Libya, including an end to the current attacks against civilians, which it said might constitute “crimes against humanity” ... [imposing] a ban on all flights in the country's airspace — a no-fly zone — and tightened sanctions on the [Muammar] Qadhafi regime and its supporters.
I'm always amazed at the number of snarky know-it-all positions regarding recent geopolitics/warfare/etc. that are based on conveniently projecting away inconvenient pieces of information.
This is so much the case that until the invasion of Ukraine, France and other NATO members states were saying that Article 5 was effectively unenforceable for any member state save the U.S!
They also have more of a population base than any other member state (4x Germany, 4.8x UK, 5x France...)
If NATO only needs whatever vote it deems necessary to attack a completely uninvolved country because of a completely internal conflict, you realize that literally proves that it is not the type of neighbor you want to have?
What a completely self defeating argument lol. And that's ignoring the totally defensive strikes against serbia. Which for the record I personally think were justified, but supporting an intervention does not mean the intervention suddenly becomes defensive.
Could France just deploy it's army in the Ukraine and push out Russian occupiers saying "don't worry we are not NATO, we are here privately" and Russia would have to accept that and hold no additional grudge against NATO, knowing that if it retaliates it will trigger article 5?
I don't in any way condone what Russia is doing and I wish that invasion on Ukraine will safely end with NATO having a parade on Red Square and demilitarization of Russia.
I'm just arguing that you can't pretend that labels and formalities is all than counts when things start happening.
I condemn the vast majority of the US foreign policy of the last 50+ years, I'm just pointing out that conflating US/NATO is a convenient parlor trick and irrelevant whataboutism.
> Could France
This scenario wouldn't trigger Article 5.
Really? Does it have to be unprovoked attack? And what exactly means unprovoked? Does having a peace mission in some neighbouring country and defending yourself there counts as provocation? Who decides that? And do you think that the definition that would be most geopolitically convenient at that moment wouldn't be chosen?
Oh absolutely it would.
The Charter is just a lot of verbiage around two promises: NATO members will defend each other, and NATO won't wage aggressive war.
If you are so inclined you can also doubt Article 5 itself: are we really going to unleash the apocalypse over Latvia? Wouldn't we be tempted to bend the rules in that case as well?
The point is whether you believe those promises to be credible. IMHO history implies they largely are, but that's something reasonable people can disagree on.
Article 4 is also important, and more actual NATO interventions have been triggered by Article 4 consultations than Article 5 direct mutual defense.
NATO is a regional security organization with a mutual defense commitment, not a pure defensive alliance.
That... depends on the precise geographic location of any retaliation. The participation of a NATO state in a collective self-defense action with a non-NATO state under UN Charter Article 51 rights, outside of NATO operations, does not itself limit the applicability of Article 5.
And even if it didn't trigger Article 5, well, most NATO actions have been initiated as a result of Article 4 process, not Article 5 commitments. And an attack on a member’s forces in the Euro-Atlantic region but outside of the precise area covered by Article 5 commitments would arguably be a more serious Article 4 issue than the ones that have resulted in NATO interventions.
Russia can hold all the grudges it likes, with or without any kind of justification.
Not that it matters to the international legitimacy of France (or even NATO, without Article 5 being triggered) directly militarily supporting Ukraine’s self-defense against Russian aggression, see UN Charter, Article 51.
USA, UK, Australia, Poland, Netherlands, Italy and Spain (and Turkey threatened to invade in 2007 too), the fact they are all members of NATO is just coincidence, it is not NATO piling up on a single country.
Or Afghanistan:
US, UK, Canada, Germany, Australia, Italy, New Zealand
or Libya, france gave them weapons first, and invited the rest of NATO, that responded:
Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Denmark, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Romania, Spain, Turkey, USA, UK.
NATO can claim to be defensive and only about article 5, but the fact remains NATO will happily use their forces offensively and working in a cohesive group. You can't just say it isn't NATO because NATO is supposed to be defensive.
NATO kept us out of nuclear war for 70 years. It kept Soviet tanks from overrunning western Europe. It enabled stable democracies to gain a foothold safely in western Europe.
NATO is literally the only thing that stands between democratic states, which are the minority in the world (the North Atlantic region + some small states in Asia) and totalitarian regimes.
Mysteriously, a non-NATO nation is currently having a genocidal war waged on them. While NATO nations are free and safe. NATO is keeping the Free World safe.
If you hate freedom and representative government, if you find debates "too messy" and like easy-answer dictatorships, you should be anti-NATO.
Australia isn't a member of NATO (neither is New Zealand, which you claim at another point), and there were NATO members opposed to the invasion; NATO works by consensus, but isn't a supergovernment that dictates the outside-of-NATO foreign policy of its members.
> NATO can claim to be defensive and only about article 5
It could, but it actually doesn't.
It claims to be a regional security organization, and Article 4 is just as important as Article 5.
(I could tangent into Russia...)
Are you sure?
It was Azerbaijan using drones procured from Turkey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Nagorno-Karabakh_war
Anyway NATO is not a single state. NATO members can make independent decisions other NATO members would disapprove.
The problem here is that both sides are in the wrong, but for different reasons. NATO expanding eastwards is scary and destabilizing to everyone in the world. Putin, meanwhile, is behaving like an utter savage, and is also scary and destabilizing, to both his immediate neighbours, and also to everyone in the world. Ukraine got burnt, badly from both directions - one pushed it under the bus, the other is in the middle of invading it.
Are these the same level of wrongs? No. Does one excuse the other? Also no. Would I prefer everyone involved to have stopped escalating this, starting two decades ago? Yes. Did poor judgement in the past severely constrict our ability to reach better outcomes in the present? Also yes.
Remember 9/11, and how poor ME policy lead to it? Remember what was in the short term, a reasonable response, in the long run resulted in self-inflicted damage that was orders of magnitude worse?
NATO moving east may well be that short term win. We will see whether the long-term losers will be limited to former Soviet republics.
I can't imagine how scary it would be for Polish people right now if we weren't in NATO, because Russians practiaclly mention us along with Ukraine on a single breath.
It was called a Warsaw pact. Warsaw is Polish capital.
We can't know, it's alt-history speculative wankery. But what we can know is that the latter left the former with very few options.
You have very interesting priors, I must say.
Yes. Reestablising soviet empire was Putins life long project from the moment he gained significant power. Vibes of it are easy enough to notice in his speeches predating '08
Those are not words of a man in fear. Those are the words of a man with a dream.
NATO went east in 1999, which was before Putin. '08 was when the war in Georgia took place.
You might want to look up who Russia’s head of government (not chief of state) was in 1999.
Though, on the other hand, the process of NATO expansion into the former Iron Curtain (beyond German unification) actually started in 1991, almost immediately after the fall of the USSR, with requests from a number of ex-Warsaw Pact, including ex-Soviet, republics for an onramp to NATO (including, it might be noted, the Russian Federation, which was also one of the initial members, in 1994, of the NATO-onramp Partnership for Peace program. Which is among the very many reasons that the recent debate about a supposed 1989 commitment to not expand NATO into former Warsaw Pact territory is nonsense: even if such an informal non-treaty assurance was binding, and inherited from the USSR by Russia, Russia’s subsequent active and formal participation in the NATO expansion process would have repudiated it, in any case.)
I call BS on that one. Just for an extreme example, take Uruguay. How is NATO expansion eastward scary or destabilizing for them?
Or take Estonia. Is NATO expansion destabilizing for them? Or is it stabilizing? I claim it is the latter; it keeps Russia from coming back.
Was it destabilizing for Ukraine? Insufficient data. If NATO had never gone past united Germany, would Russia have invaded Ukraine? Maybe. Would it have been this bloody? Maybe not. It might have been like the Russian interventions is Belarus and Kazakhstan. Is it better, or worse to be under their heel for the next N decades, but initially have fewer dead bodies?
It's scary and destabilizing in the sense that Uruguay doesn't really give a rat's ass about where the borders between east and west are drawn in Europe, but would really, really, really prefer that NATO and Russia don't get into a shooting war.
Same thing with threats to the MAD balance of power, like anti-missile defenses. Anyone standing on the sidelines doesn't really care about where the borders are, they just don't want one side to scare the other to the point of nuclear war.
1 in direct mutual self-defense, actually.
> but a number of offensive ones
NATO has conducted, I believe, two operations that were neither mutual self-defense under Article 5 nor at the invitation of the government in whose territory they were conducted nor under a direct call for military forces by the UN Security Council under its notionally-compulsory authority regarding matters of international peace and security, the operation in Libya (which was to enforce Security Council resolutions, but not itself in response for a call by the Council for armed force) and that in response to the Kosovo situation.
EDIT: I do agree that Mearsheimer is another good person to learn from, but I don't know of an article or video from him that takes a holistic view at things
Like bombing Libya?
(there is more about Russia vis-a-vis Libya but no need for me to Tangent into that)
That's true if your word means nothing and you have no honor. NATO is in control of their expansion, yes, the members join voluntarily but the existing members have to approve the new membership. NATO can't claim it has no control of its expansion.
Now does any of this mean that Putin is justified in committing war crimes? No, of course not. But it is relevant that the West can't be trusted to keep their word. That makes negotiating a peaceful resolution to this conflict more difficult. It also provides our detractors plenty with which to create a credible alternate telling of the facts.
https://web.archive.org/web/20010915014621/http://www.zmag.o...
This is hard to read knowing what actually happened.
He focuses on USA to the point of being boring now.
At this point nobody outside US believes any justifications to US foreign wars. If there was any willingness to believe any of that George W Bush pretty much trew in on a pile and set it on fire while doing stupid face.
Everybody knows USA just goes around the world and starts wars with whatever local evil they can safely engage (from geopolitical standpoint) to further their economical interests, both global and domestic.
It's not that the rest of the world is doing nothing because they believe any word USA puts out. It's because they can do nothing against current military and market hegemon.
Other countries will even happily pretend they believe US propaganda so they can calm their populace and keep themself safe from the next round of "democracy spreading" that comes out of US.
The US did indeed arm the "Khmer Rouge", whatever that is, after its era in power.
We know the Carter administration contemplated arming the Khmer Rouge and we know they hated the idea.
There is no evidence that they actually ever gave military aid.
No, but the US should have carefully measured (and probably rejected) any interest from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Georgia, and Ukraine. Accession into NATO requires unanimous endorsement from all extant members. The most powerful member of the alliance saying "No" sends an even stronger signal.
And then we should have offered military training, maybe even subsidized armament sales (aka "foreign aid") to encourage a strong self-defense capability....but NO formalized or even informal assurances of mutual defense, and no US assets based in their borders. I think that would have been a smart compromise: help these countries make themselves too costly to invade, without making Russia more paranoid and without growing our "surface area" of treaty risks.
Why?
Should we also have rejected the interest of the Russian Federation expressed first in a letter from their President to NATO in 1991, formalized when they joined the Partnership for Peace in 1994, and at the time the first three on your list were admitted still being actively worked toward by both the Russian and NATO sides?
So that we could focus 100% of our attention on stuffing the CCP Dragon back in a box before it's too late.
>>>Should we also have rejected the interest of the Russian Federation
Compare the strategic utility of Russia in our alliance (#2 nuclear power in the world, extremely large military, shares a border with China) with the strategic utility of the Baltic states. I'd rather have NATO-member Russian tank divisions positioned to attack China's naked rear, backed by Russian ICBMs, helping us. I would argue the US hasn't fought an industrial power out of its weight class.....ever. When we eventually fight the CCP, we're going against a nation that is embarrassing us with its shipbuilding capacity, has 4x the manpower to draw on, and will be operating with shorter logistical lines. We need Russia, India, South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Philippines...all of them to help. We need the Russians to do this again: ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Manchuria ), while the US Pacific Fleet and JMSDF sink the PLAN, with India/Vietnam/Korea providing basing for the US Air Force.
How does Estonia help us topple the only other Great Power on the planet? The only other serious challenger to US hegemony?
But in all seriousness, if it were to come to a US-CCP war, everyone would equivalently loose no matter what.
Russia attacking its neighbors goes back centuries. And for that matter, so does western Europe and the US. If there's no formal alliance, then the western powers would be a threat too.
Look, if Mexico tomorrow invaded Honduras because some diplomatic approach by the UK to Honduras (following similar ones to other Central American states) violated some commitment, not ever incorporated into any treaty, that a British official had made to Spain while the Viceroyalty of New Spain was still a thing, no one, anywhere, would take that as a serious excuse, no matter how much evidence there was that the official had, in fact, made the representation.
This is pretty much exactly the same thing; whether the discussion occurred is irrelevant; there is no scenario where it even slightly mitigates the enormity of, much less justifies, the Russian invasion of Ukraine or the war crimes committed during that invasion.
The next President has his own ideals, and the next, and the next.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chom...
Now, imageine you are one of ex-Warsaw Pact countries. You know very well NATO is the only thing that can stop Russia from changing their mind and taking over your country. What will your government do? They will do everything to join NATO. And this is exactly what happened.
Putin's propaganda is that NATO is a threat to Russia. Yet, NATO has never attacked Russia. NATO is, however, a threat to Russia's imperialism. After Ukraine they can turn to Kazakhstan and a few other countries that are not NATO members. He can't just invade the Baltics just as he invaded Ukraine - just because of that single reason. No wonder Putin is having a fir over it again and again.
If the Chinese government struck a deal with Mexico (or Canada) to put military units, bases, people, surveillance etc. in those countries, would the US just say "meh, that's their sovereign right"?
We need to be realistic about this, not idealistic.
Incidentally, if someone’s breaking agreements, it’s Russia. They wrote down an actual promise to not invade Ukraine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum_on_Securit...
"We thought the US Secretary of State could make a verbal binding agreement on behalf of all of NATO" is simply absurd. Treaties exist for a reason; hell, a verbal contract isn't legally valid in the US for a $1,000 purchase, let alone to commit 30 countries' foreign policy.