Turn About is Fair Play
Russia is now implying that it might deploy troops and weapons to Cuba and Venezuela in response to the current diplomatic deadlock in the Ukraine.
If you find it alarming that Russian troops, and potentially missiles, even conventional ones, as little as 1800 km from Washington, DC, imagine how the Russians feel about American troops and weapons located 750 km from Moscow:
Russia has refused to rule out a military deployment to Cuba and Venezuela if talks with the west on European security and Ukraine fail to go its way, while warning the latest discussions with Nato were hitting a dead end.
In an apparent attempt to up the ante with the Biden administration, Sergei Ryabkov, who led Russia’s delegation in a meeting with the US on Monday, told Russian television he could neither confirm nor exclude sending military assets to Cuba and Venezuela if talks fail. Asked about these steps, he said “it all depends on the actions by our US counterparts”.
Meanwhile another senior Russian diplomat threatened unspecified “necessary measures” if Moscow’s security demands were not met.
This is all the poisonous fruit of the expansion of NATO started in the 1990s by Bill Clinton.
Clinton wanted additional markets for US defense contractors, and so he ignored the promises that were made when Germany was reunified.
The negative fallout from this, even US Boris Yeltsin, who literally had the US campaigning for his reelection in the mid 1990s, was outraged, so it was foreseeable that NATO expansion would come back to bite us in the tuchus. (Clinton also pressured Boeing to merge with McDonnell Douglas, screwed the poor with welfare reform, deregulated finance by repealing Glass Steagall, etc.)
In fact, it was foreseen, with George Kennan describing NATO expansion as a, “Strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions,” in 1996.
The Americans want a market for our weapons and the Europeans want a European defense establishment, and neither of these have anything to do with the original purpose of NATO.
