Comment by brabel
3 days ago
They agreed that war was a thing of the past, but still continued to push for NATO to allow new members anyway, ironically causing Russia (and China and everyone who is NOT in NATO) to suspect that war was NOT a thing of the past and therefore never quite abandoning their military completely. Unpopular opinion: the West should either NEVER have abandoned its military production (so as to maintain NATO actual preparedness for war, given that's the only reason for its existence) OR it should just have dismantled NATO and announced to the world that it strongly believes war is a thing of the past, and that other countries are advised to follow suit. But we actually chose the easy, halfway path: keep NATO, keep our militaries "looking strong" (which gives the signal our rivals should also do the same, obviously), but not actually be ready for any sort of major war and as the article points out, even lose actual capacity to become ready for war within any realistic timeframe. The worst possible outcome :(.
After the USSR fell, they left behind many countries abused by Russia that didn't believe it would leave them alone. Those countries wanted defense guarantees in case of future Russian aggression.
NATO wanted to be deliberate and slow about admitting any new members, but countries that wanted to join felt that anyone who didn't join might get attacked or face hybrid measures from Russia to prevent them from joining next. So they grouped up and 7 countries joined NATO simultaneously. NATO was never begging them to join, they wanted to join NATO.
People push this vision of NATO being some hungry bastard that can't get enough, but it's largely outside pressures pushing countries to want to join it.
Sure enough they were right. Russia invaded both Georgia and Ukraine, which wanted to join already because Russia kept interfering in their societies.
USA had no part in that push?
NATO expansion was pretty controversial in the US
https://time.com/archive/6731121/how-clinton-decided-on-nato...
Clinton was the president of the USA, I think you're proving I was correct. I never stated each and every USA citizen was pushing for it.
Perhaps but the US was pushing NATO to invest more in war for years suggesting they didn't believe war was in the past
Correction: The US was pushing NATO to invest more in US gear.
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That's because they have more to gain from that.
It could be matching theory for outcome though. The unpopular opinion may still be wrong too. Russia was quite different in 1999, or better in 1992, to the point of joining NATO, and China was nowhere the threat of today, and it could be different reasons- not keeping NATO - which caused today's standup. So, basically, the situation seem to be more complex.