February 28, 2022
The 'adults in charge' have bumbled us into a new Cold War
By Jim Daws
During Thursday's speech announcing ever greater sanctions on Russia, Joe Biden claimed, "The Russian military has begun a brutal assault on the people of Ukraine, without provocation, without justification, without necessity." This was a Western chauvinist point of view that does not take into account Russia's security concerns and historic grievances since the Soviet Union's defeat in the Cold War.
There is another reading of history — one from a Russian chauvinist point of view — that Western governments and media turn a blind eye to, and that has inevitably led to the current conflict and the specter of a much wider one.
Putin recounted an event during his extensive pre-invasion speech on February 21. In 2000, when he first became president of Russia, he had proposed to then–U.S. president Bill Clinton that Russia join NATO and be integrated into Europe. Russia was an economic basket case after decades of ruinous communist rule and its military a shell of its former greatness. It was an opportunity for America to seize on its Cold War victory, similar to how we had capitalized on our victories over Germany and Japan after World War II.
We can speculate as to why this opportunity was squandered, but I suspect that Europe's leaders feared competing economically with a newly liberated Russia and that America's defense industry was reluctant to lose a geostrategic foe that had justified decades of huge military budgets.
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https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/02/the_adults_in_charge_have_bumbled_us_into_a_new_cold_war.html
