I hadn’t yet formed any opinions on Putin’s invasion of Ukraine when I listened to Glenn Greenwald’s take on what’s happening. What I thought before watching his commentary was that it was unfortunate that this was happening: was it really necessary, and was there really nothing we could’ve done to stop it?
Listening to Greenwald, and putting together what I already knew about Ukraine, I could understand his main point: Russia didn’t want a NATO ally on its border any more than we’d want Russian nuclear missiles in Cuba, and Putin had been saying that for years. A NATO Ukraine is an existential fear for many Russians, as our current CIA head stated back in 2008 in a memo to then-Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice:
Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.
The Bidens, incidentally, aren’t without interests in Ukraine. The president’s son, Hunter Biden, was on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma while Joe was VP under Obama, despite that Hunter had zero experience in the energy field. He was of course there— at $50,000/month— so that Burisma could have access to his father, and when an Ukrainian prosecutor started to target Burisma for corrupt practices, Joe had that prosecutor fired. According to Greenwald, the US has been ruling Ukraine more-or-less as a colony.
When East and West Germany were united, Russian was understandably nervous since Germany had invaded Russia twice; to appease Russia, assurances were given that NATO wouldn’t expand beyond East Germany. Despite this, NATO membership has expanded to Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. In recent years whenever the issue of a more-threatening Ukrainian NATO membership came up, the response of the US has been: it’s up the them. Before the recent outbreak our Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, repeated that Ukrainian NATO membership was on the table.
But this is exactly what Russia has repeatedly said for decades: we do not want NATO tanks and troops on our western border and we never wanted NATO expansion beyond Germany.
How could we have prevented war in Ukraine? The solution seems simple: agree that Ukraine won’t become a member of NATO in any near-term scenario. Just say it, for God’s sake, to assure Russia that the west has no intention of threatening Russia and to buy time to work on any long-term negotiations and strategies: it’s called “diplomacy.” The US wouldn’t want Russian tanks in Canada or Mexico; we’d be stupid to suppose that western military on Russia’s border should be a western privilege and that opposition to this is a sign of derangement.