Imagine if Russia and China decided to fund a "Freedom Movement" in Texas.
— Chay Bowes (@BowesChay) January 28, 2024
Then, overturn the democraticly elected Govenor, install a puppet regime,
Then, create a vast army to attack anyone disagreeing or pro US, Ban elections, opposition, dissenting media.
Sound familiar? pic.twitter.com/wmmjKfXv4i
Interesting to see Ted Carpenter's excellent 2022 piece referenced;
Worth remembering, imho…more at the link.Quote:
Vladimir Putin's decision to launch a fullscale invasion of Ukraine is a monstrous act of aggression that has plunged the world into a perilous situation. By any reasonable standard, his move was an overthetop response to any Ukrainian or NATO provocations. However, that conclusion is different from saying that there were no provocations, as far too many policymakers and pundits in the West are doing now.
It has become especially fashionable in such circles to insist that NATO's expansion to Russia's border was in no way responsible for the current Ukraine crisis. Many dismiss all arguments to the contrary as "echoing Putin's talking points," "siding with Putin," or circulating Russian propaganda and "disinformation." Leaving aside the ugly miasma of McCarthyism enveloping such allegations, the underlying argument is factually wrong.
Russian leaders and several Western policy experts were warning more than two decades ago that NATO expansion would turn out badlyending in a new cold war with Russia at best, and a hot one at worst. Obviously, they were not "echoing" Putin or anyone else. George Kennan, the intellectual architect of America's containment policy during the Cold War, perceptively warned in a May 2, 1998 New York Times interview what NATO's move eastward would set in motion. "I think it is the beginning of a new cold war," he stated. "I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake."
U.S. and European officials blew through one red light after another.
Kennan was speaking of the first round of enlargement that brought into the Alliance Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary. Later rounds, which added the Baltic Republics and other East European countries, were considerably more abrasive, and Washington's subsequent attempt to make Ukraine and Georgia members was contemptuous of Russia's core security interests. Moscow's complaints and warnings were becoming increasingly sharp as well.
Yet U.S. and European officials blew through one red light after another. George W. Bush began to treat Georgia and Ukraine as valued U.S. political and military allies, and in 2008, he pressed NATO to admit Ukraine and Georgia as members. French and German wariness delayed that endeavor, but the NATO summit communique affirmed that both countries would eventually achieve that status.
In his 2014 memoir, Duty, Robert M. Gates, who served as secretary of defense in both Bush's administration and Barack Obama's, conceded that "trying to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO was truly overreaching." That initiative, he concluded, was a case of "recklessly ignoring what the Russians considered their own vital national interests."