Discussion: Gorbachev: US Was Short-Sighted After Soviet Collapse

  1. Americans still have yet to get a grip on how extremely despised is Gorbachev within Russia. 2. George H. W. Bush was prevailed upon by ex-president Nixon to do exactly what G. said and send armies of Consultants to Russia to help out. Bush listened, did it, and spent a whole lot of money sending duplicative Consultants to Russia. Maybe it was a good thing, you decide. But you cannot say like Gorbachev (is he senile?) that it is a Pity that it didn’t happen because it did.

The ONLY time I agreed with Richard Nixon is when he said we failed by not supporting Russia’s path to democracy at the fall of the Soviet Union. He was correct.

@maricaibo

You’re dreaming up facts. Of course we supported democracy! One can lead a horse to water!

Richard Nixon was wrong about more than a few things but dead wrong here. This may be hard to get though an American skull but there is little demand for a democracy in Russia. Look at the chants today “democracy doesn’t work” and “America’s democracy is a failure”. They don’t want it and in the immediate post USSR period they didn’t want ANYTHING from America. The USA was blamed for all of the USSR’s ills. The Russian people were saturated with that propaganda.

Richard Nixon was an American that thought he had Russia figured out. There is no such thing as an American that has Russia figured out.

If Europe and the West are- to get decent to live in again we need to lessen the load a bit. ISIS and the Jihadi boyz are enough of a problem. A reemerging and belligerent Russia is the last thing we need. The USA’s policy, if its purpose is the advancement of American interests, should be one of containment when it comes to the Russian Federation. HRC had a very good plan for that. Trump has a plan for the opposite.

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A wall of democracies would have been accomplished by EU expansion alone. NATO expansion into Estonia was an unnecessary military threat.

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NATO doesn’t expand anywhere. It’s a treaty organization and you ask to join it. NATO cannot force itself on anyone.

The EU offers NO protection against “old Russia”. The USA does. NATO = USA. NATO threatens no one. It’s there to stop the threat from Russia which history tells us is very real.

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Yep. This is MORE of the cowardly bullies attempts at intimidation. We’ll see what Whitefish intends to do about it. Being that it is a HUGE tourist area we’ll watch from the more sane parts of the West to see how they handle it.

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What’s with Estonia? It’s been in NATO more than a decade. Estonia was under Russian hegemony for 50 years and made the decision to never again be. They chose to join NATO. Russia didn’t like it but the USA is not obligated to keep Russia happy.

You don’t make deals with Russia. They don’t value holding on to them. The USA didn’t miss an “opportunity” it dodged a con job. Don’t you think it telling that Gorbachev is saying this now, not 25 years ago, when Russia sees it’s best shot ever at using the USA?

Just as the Russians were treated brutally in their history, they visited that brutality on their neighbors and then can’t understand why they are not loved. You have some back-trackers like Hungary but they don’t border Russia, do they? Funny how that works.

Obama should have put tens of thousands of troops in Georgia and Ukraine as ‘trainers’ as payback for Putin’s interference. Then let Putin’s Bitch remove them with his tail between his legs. Play Chess, not checkers.

NATO has to choose to expand, expansion isn’t forced upon it.

Yes it does, diplomatic protection; soft power if you will. This kind of arrangement would deter Russia without threatening it because, baring any aggressive action by Russia, the EU is no threat on the border.

NATO is a very active, very powerful military alliance. That’s why it is so important to its members and a threat to any nation in conflict with any NATO member.

The only time the NATO alliance was activated was to invade Afghanistan. It isn’t just about Russia, but Russia is its main target.

NATO didn’t have to let them in. But letting Estonia in, NATO moved the FEBA right up to Russia’s borders. That was an act of aggression, a threat, on the part of NATO.

A closed mind much?

You’ve crossed from Russophilia to idiocy. NATO is a Self Defense force. It was against the SU but ALSO to preoccupy the German military and keep it busy. Why do you think the Spanish did not slide back into Fascism? The French almost did too. NATO and Western unity is the reason.

NATO is also a way to keep the European countries from keeping Nukes. Do you think the Baltics would go Nuke-less without NATO? What other bargaining chip would they have? Do I care if Spain and Italy And Turkey have Nukes, not really but the more there are the greater the possibility of miscalculation and absolute disaster.

Gorbachev: US Was Short-Sighted After Soviet Collapse

I wouldn’t call the USSR or Russia perfect in their assessment of us. Shit, I live in the US and I don’t understand my country sometimes.

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Rationale will go nowhere. I grew up next door to Russia. And am very comfortable saying you haven’t clue of what you are speaking. Only assholes take someone else’s post apart line by line. Look. NATO is voluntary. The European countries did NOTHING to constrain the USSR and the former East Bloc has no faith in the EU as anything other than an economic entity. Go read your blogs. Russia is a shit hole of a country…go there…you don’t make deals with it.

The USA is not at fault here. Gorby said some stuff. He knows that right now…the USA is more in play than at anytime since 1940. All he’s doing is “his part” for the father land. Don’t be fooled by this. It’s just an old man saying what he would have said 30 years ago if he meant it.

Considering that the USSR was the only one of Germany’s allies to win WW II it is impossible to take them at their word on anything.
If they had not partnered up with Germany for the partition of Poland and allowed to seize the Baltic states in as crude a land grab as seen it could be argued that WW II in Europe would have either not happened or it would have been contained.
And if he is happy with land being returned I am sure he would approve of russia allowing the Finish to reclaim the finnish land seized my brute force.
So any day, if russia were actually to beleive in this tripe justifying the forcible seizure of Ukrainian territory of Crimea, we will see the russian forces withdraw from Viipuri, the Karelian Isthmus and all the other land and islands it illegally ( League of Nations) seized through brute force and after some time when the Finnish feel it is appropiate they will have a referendum run exclusively by the Finn’s.
If russia is not willing to do that it is even more obvious that they will use any lie available to justify their aggression born out of paranoia, quivering fear, and religiously promoted ignorance.
This hypocrisy cannot be allowed to go unchallenged.
Either russia admits that they are intent in rebuilding the czarist/soviet empire with violence and brute force or it returns those lands to Finland with apolagies and compensation.

Ever since George Kennan wrote his article as X proposing the strategy of containment with the idea that internal forces within the Russian/soviet empire would lead to its collapse and Truman adopted it every president followed that policy and it did work as Kennan predicted.
So addled ronnie raygun was only the beneficiary of 40 year policy established by Truman a D.
But like all thugs they have to rewrite history ignore their ineptitude and claim credit for a policy that wass not theirs and, if Truman had listened to them, would have never been put in place.
So that makes the thugs like russia - just rewrite history to rationalize and justify their brutality and emphasize their ignorance.

Is NATO not a military organization? Didn’t NATO move the FEBA to the Russian border and far from the original, core, area of the alliance? NATO threatens Russia by these moves because it changes the military balance between NATO and Russia. Denying these things is simply foolish.

Europe did a lot of things to break the cycle of war. NATO was one; it bound all the traditional belligerents into the same, single alliance. Europe also joined the UN. Most dramatically, Europe constructed the European Union. The points you make are secondary.

But NATO was also created to confront the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. That was its primary and motivating rational. Claiming otherwise is revisionist.

How could NATO have been created to “Confront the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact” when it was literally the other way around? (NATO was formed in 1949. Warsaw Pact formed in 1955, as a response to West Germany joining NATO)

The Soviet Union Part was correct however? And after the WP was formed, it was also identified (and was in actuality) the enemy, yes?

NATO use to identify the members of the WP as the enemy and after the collapse of the WP, figured out a way to make them allies. That the alliance continued to frame Russia as the enemy is the greatest blunder of the post Soviet era.

I lived in and was born in West Germany before and after the “collapse”…

Russia was no innocent and was labeled the “Enemy” by their own actions. It was not the actions of NATO that drove Russians in to the arms of Putin, it was the same type of ultra-nationalist perpetual victimhood propaganda that Trump used to win here.

Russia has been on the “Blame Someone Else For Our Problems” train pretty much sense they decided to overthrow the Czar. Why is Chechnya a hotbed of anti-Russian sentiment and violence? “Why NATO and pro-western agitators, of course! Not our treatment of Chechens!” Why is Georgia clammoring to break away? “Again, the west is stirring up unrest! It’s certainly not anything we did!” Why is our economy in the shitter? “The greedy capitalists in the US!!! Certainly not the massive systemic corruption baked into our system since Stalin!”

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