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February 1, 2023

I am responding to “Ukraine and the Unlearned Lesson of History,” by Jacob Fraden. published in AT 1/31/23.

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I’ll start with the author’s contention that Russia’s war against Napoleonic France was one of its wars “of aggression.”  On June 24, 1812, Napoleon invaded Russia with an army of 650,000, approximately the 12th European county to receive the French tyrant’s military attention. Who was the aggressor here?  Tsar Alexander I was a hero at the Congress of Vienna, for crushing that invasion and breaking the French chronic aggressor’s back once and for all.

And most of Christian Europe had the sense to be grateful to Russia for driving the hated Turkish muslim conqueror and oppressor out of the Balkans and other parts of Europe. As to Russia’s wars with the Swedes, Lithuanians, Poles and Germans (13th through early 17th centuries), for much of that time those four, not Russia, were the aggressors. In fact, the Poles and Lithuanians burned Moscow in the early 17th century. And yes, in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries Russia expanded eastward through Siberia and Asia, absorbing territory thinly populated by backward peoples. Who, of all people, are we Americans to fault Russia for THAT? Go to the blackboard, and write MANIFEST DESTINY 100 times.

It’s not merely this writer’s logic about the present that’s flawed – he’s terminally confused about the past.

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More pertinently to the ongoing tragedy in Ukraine, after the Soviet collapse in 1991, Russia wanted peaceful integration into the European economic, political and security system. No knowledgeable person at the time doubted the sincerity of this wish; and no one in the 1990’s saw prostrate Russia as a threat to anyone. It was we, rather, the US military industrial complex (“MIC”) and neocon hegemonists, who rejected this desire, fervently and repeatedly expressed by both Gorbachev and Yeltsin.

The promises of no eastward expansion of NATO by Secretary of State James Baker (and no doubt other Western leaders) were promptly ignored by Clinton and his gang. NATO expanded successively in two major tranches -1999 and 2004 – and thereafter the well of the West’s relations with Russia was poisoned. But that poisoning, no doubt, was the neocon object of the NATO expansions.

The eastward expansion of NATO was condemned at the time of its first occurrence by no less an authority, and American patriot, than George Kennan, former ambassador to Russia and arguably the author of America’s Cold War policy of containing Soviet expansion.

In the 90’s Russia could do nothing about this massive breach of faith by the West. But object it did, and repeatedly. By Vladimir Putin’s assumption of power in 2000, no significant Russian leader could have been found who saw the West’s expansion of NATO as anything but threatening, or Gorbachev’s failure to prevent that expansion by formal treaty as anything but naive and incompetent.

Without firing a shot, in the period 1989-1991 the Soviet Union gave up an empire, more accurately, a cordon sanitaire, in Eastern Europe; and by 1994 it had withdrawn all of its troops from the region. At the same time, believing the West’s assurances that there would be no NATO eastward expansion and that Russia would be economically and politically integrated into Europe, Russia disbanded the Warsaw pact.

For all of these historically unique concessions Russia got no thanks, no integration into Europe, and successive gratuitous and – from its standpoint, threatening – eastward expansions of NATO.