I dunno, man. Why did these countries feel like they needed the strength of NATO? Because of a possible aggressor to the east? Whether your country is in NATO or not, that fact remains the same: there is a possible aggressor to the east.
So I see it as:
You are allied with a bloc who will counter attack if you are attacked, keeping the likelihood of attack much lower
or
You are not allied with a bloc, and could be completely on your own if attacked.
Great. Just… great…
Now that song is gonna be stuck in my head all day.
Thanks a lot.
Looks like an opinion from a libertarian think tank.
You may as well not post it if you’re not going to defend anything written by the Cato Institute, whose president is also chairman at the Ayn Rand Institute. A right-wing for-hire think tank financed by the Koch Brothers.
The “NATO expansion” theory has been debunked largely up in the thread, and identified as one of the many russian disinformation actions.
sigh. Would have been a great time to have an extra 70 Mig-29’s…
Bitter pill after bitter pill, this conflict.
Ted Galen Carpenter is senior fellow for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. Carpenter served as Cato’s director of foreign policy studies from 1986 to 1995 and as vice-president for defense and foreign policy studies from 1995 to 2011
Useful Idiot, Libertarian “America First” Isolationist variety. I’m not sure why the Guardian is publishing pro-fascist propaganda, even as an opinion piece.
Also, someone from the Cato Institute has a lot of nerve complaining about America’s treatment of Russia in the 1990s when so many of its fellows and alumni were complicit in wrecking the country’s economy at the time.
And maybe more importantly the very large number of people from those border countries and former Soviet areas who are straight up insulted by it just being called “NATO Expansion”. I caught the former Finnish PM on tv the other day, he had a pretty salty take on “Finlandization” as any kind of deliberate or viable policy.
I keep see-sawing back and forth on that one. It’s a roundabout way of saying I don’t know.
Why not, they seem fond of defending terfs…
They point out that they have disbanded the Warsaw Pact, their military alliance, and ask why the west should not do the same.
The obvious answer would have been to invite Russia to join NATO / merge NATO and Warsaw Pact. (Not sure whether that would have been /s or good lateral thinking.)
Yeah can’t the whole discussion get magicked into a new thread?
Very much a “See what you made me do!” “We need to be nicer to the bloodthirsty despot! If we made him tea, I am sure he would be much nicer” kind of post. WTF are they thinking?
