Pat Buchanan – The Unz Review Feb 25, 2022
When Russia’s Vladimir Putin demanded that the U.S. rule out Ukraine as a future member of the NATO alliance, the U.S. archly replied: NATO has an open-door policy. Any nation, including Ukraine, may apply for membership and be admitted. We’re not changing that.
In the Bucharest declaration of 2008, NATO had put Ukraine and Georgia, ever farther east in the Caucasus, on a path to membership in NATO and coverage under Article 5 of the treaty, which declares that an attack on any one member is an attack on all.
Unable to get a satisfactory answer to his demand, Putin invaded and settled the issue. Neither Ukraine nor Georgia will become members of NATO. To prevent that, Russia will go to war, as Russia did last night.
Putin did exactly what he had warned us he would do.
Whatever the character of the Russian president, now being hotly debated here in the USA, he has established his credibility.
When Putin warns that he will do something, he does it.
Thirty-six hours into this Russia-Ukraine war, potentially the worst in Europe since 1945, two questions need to be answered:
How did we get here? And where do we go from here?
How did we get to where Russia — believing its back is against a wall and the United States, by moving NATO ever closer, put it there — reached a point where it chose war with Ukraine rather than accepting the fate and future it believes the West has in store for Mother Russia?
Consider. Between 1989 and 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev let the Berlin Wall be pulled down, Germany be reunited and all the “captive nations” of Eastern Europe go free.
Having collapsed the Soviet empire, Gorbachev allowed the Soviet Union to dissolve itself into 15 independent nations. Communism was allowed to expire as the ruling ideology of Russia, the land where Leninism and Bolshevism first took root in 1917.
Gorbachev called off the Cold War in Europe by removing all of the causes on Moscow’s side of the historic divide.
Putin, a former KGB colonel, came to power in 1999 after the disastrous decadelong rule of Boris Yeltsin, who ran Russia into the ground.
In that year, 1999, Putin watched as America conducted a 78-day bombing campaign on Serbia, the Balkan nation that had historically been a protectorate of Mother Russia.
That year, also, three former Warsaw Pact nations, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, were brought into NATO.
Against whom were these countries to be protected by U.S. arms and the NATO alliance, the question was fairly asked.
The question seemed to be answered fully in 2004, when Slovenia, Slovakia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Romania and Bulgaria were admitted into NATO, a grouping that included three former republics of the USSR itself, as well as three more former Warsaw Pact nations.
Then, in 2008, came the Bucharest declaration that put Georgia and Ukraine, both bordering on Russia, on a path to NATO membership.
Georgia, the same year, attacked its seceded province of South Ossetia, where Russian troops were acting as peacekeepers, killing some.
This triggered a Putin counterattack through the Roki Tunnel in North Ossetia that liberated South Ossetia and moved into Georgia all the way to Gori, the birthplace of Stalin. George W. Bush, who had pledged “to end tyranny in our world,” did nothing. After briefly occupying part of Georgia, the Russians departed but stayed as protectors of the South Ossetians.
The U.S. establishment has declared this to have been a Russian war of aggression, but an EU investigation blamed Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili for starting the war.
In 2014, a democratically elected pro-Russian president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, was overthrown in Kyiv and replaced by a pro-Western regime. Rather than lose Sevastopol, Russia’s historic naval base in Crimea, Putin seized the peninsula and declared it Russian territory.
Teddy Roosevelt stole Panama with similar remorse.
Which brings us to today.
Whatever we may think of Putin, he is no Stalin. He has not murdered millions or created a gulag archipelago.
Nor is he “irrational,” as some pundits rail. He does not want a war with us, which would be worse than ruinous to us both.
Putin is a Russian nationalist, patriot, traditionalist and a cold and ruthless realist looking out to preserve Russia as the great and respected power it once was and he believes it can be again.
But it cannot be that if NATO expansion does not stop or if its sister state of Ukraine becomes part of a military alliance whose proudest boast is that it won the Cold War against the nation Putin has served all his life.
President Joe Biden almost hourly promises, “We are not going to war in Ukraine.” Why would he then not readily rule out NATO membership for Ukraine, which would require us to do something Biden himself says we Americans, for our own survival, should never do: go to war with Russia?
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever.”
Any patriot in the US or uk is on Putin’s side.
The isle of wight cult appears to be against putin and pro nato — more evidence of being controlled opposition?
All present and correct, although, I would add that Putin has given many talks on geopolitics and the need for a multi-polar world. The Chinese and Indian regimes agree with Putin, but West ignores the potential debate and the fake news won’t even touch it.
Now this change is coming about by force. Biden says any country can join NATO. Biden is an idiot, and so are his advisors.
Yesterday, Putin told the world, that if Finland or Sweden try to join NATO, they will face military action. So if this were to happen in the depths of Winter, this would be missile and airstrikes. Most of the Finnish population live in and around Helsinki, that’s very ugly. No country is going to join NATO that has a border with Russia. NATO is finished. If Russia invaded the Baltic states, would Amerika launch its nukes? Doubtful.
I can tell you now, even if I don’t know this for a fact. Leaders and other powerful sheeple all around the world are smirking at the West for their utter stupidity. Bankrupts do stupid things.
Even dumb Biden knows that the U.S. cannot win a war with Russia. Russia’s modern weapons will wipe out America in a single day. First, of course, Russia will have to shut down America’s nuclear weapons which it could do in the dark of night.
No-one is listening when Americans pretend to care about Ukrainians, some White People, when they obviously hate all the Whites of America and let them be over-run and defamed AS WHITES every day. Keep your hook-nosed face out of Europe, Uncle Sambo.
Satanic Jews, mostly from the US Dept of State and the US CIA, caused the war in Ukraine. If you do not know the names of Blinken, Nuland, and Pyatt, you are probably so dumb as to have taken the Jew death jab. The Satanic Jews hate Russia and Christians. These Satanists wanted to plant a threat under Russia’s “soft underbelly” of Ukraine. All deaths and injuries and all destruction in the war now ongoing in Ukraine are directly because of Jews. If you are an American and do not recognize this fact, you are not an American patriot at all. Jews rule America. Remember the USS Liberty! Oh, almost forgot……the Satanic Ashkenazi Khazars come from the lands between the Black and Caspian Seas. This is why they wanted to regain their natural homelands, knowing that the Jews of Israel would need a place to live after they are run off the Palestinian lands. And, of course, the “Russian” revolution of 1917 was not Russian at all. It was a revolt by JEWS, many from NYC, like Trotsky.
WESTERN PROVOCATION
AGAINST RUSSIAN HEMISPHER !
The only thing that will result from this is more white gentiles killed. As I wrote before, many weeks ago:
If the Zionist-Communist Cryptocrats start a new war, via their various yarmulke wearing Chabad Lubavitch agents (Zelensky, Putin, Biden, Johnson etc) the white gentiles will idiotically further decimate their own race, while millions of Afro-Asian apes & mongrel migrants continue pouring into the West to ‘replace’ them, all according to plan..Like Covid, this has all been planned out years ahead by the Jewish Overlords…
Nice to see Buchanan here. Other commentators in the U.S. hasten to blame Putin for starting the war before admitting it was NATO creeping up on Russia and ignoring Putin’s reasonable demands for security agreements that led to this. One may consider that Putin did the world a favor keeping Ukraine out of NATO, for otherwise any future confrontations would be directly between nuclear powers.
So what’s the rules to join nato? What if putin asked to join nato? lol.
‘… via their various yarmulke wearing Chabad Lubavitch agents (Zelensky, Putin, Biden, Johnson etc)…’
Putin does not fit your line-up. Please listen to this account by Putin of the Russian-Ukrainian relationship:
https://www.thebernician.net/pcp-update-blind-mans-bluff-in-ukraine-the-end-of-covid-1984/
Has any present-day political leader of ours spoken so rationally and in obvious good faith about the matter to hand … or about anything else?
@Sophie…Wrong…just view the evidence revealing your yarmulke Chubad Lubavitch agent:
https://lorddreadnought.livejournal.com/3483.html
It’s all kabuki theatre that has already been discussed. Just another way of reducing the excess population as they are all from the same group.
Note: Putin is Jewish – Sephardic Rabbi. They are all part of the big group and the herd is not in the big group.
@James Reinhart…Excellent
Carl Jones, why don’t you write columns under your real slavic name and tell us what the heck you want?