DOES NATO EXPANSION THREATEN RUSSIA?

 

Responding to a question in a recent interview longtime noted journalist Diana Johnstone says:

US-Russian relations are determined primarily by an ongoing US geostrategic hostility to Russia which is partly a matter of habit or inertia, partly a realization of the Brzezinski strategy of dividing Eurasia in order to maintain US world hegemony, and partly a reflection of Israeli-dominated Middle East policy toward Syria and Iran.  Between the two major nuclear powers, there is clearly an aggressor and an aggressed. It is up to the aggressor to change course if relations are to be normal.

Simply compare.  Is Russia urging Quebec to secede from Canada so that the province can join a military alliance led by Moscow?  Evidently not.  That would be comparable, and yet mild compared to the recent U.S. gambit led by Victoria Nuland aimed at bringing Ukraine, including the main Russian naval base at Sebastopol, into the Western orbit. The material reality of this political orbit is NATO, which since the end of the Soviet Union has systematically expanded toward Russia, which stations missiles whose only strategic function would be to provide the United States with a hypothetical nuclear first strike capacity against Russia, and which regularly holds military manoeuvers along Russian borders.  Russia has done nothing against the United States, and recently provided President Obama with a face-saving way to avoid being voted down in Congress in regard to military action against Syria – action which was not desired by the Pentagon but only by the fraction of Israeli-oriented policy makers called “neocons”. Russia professes no hostile ideology, and only seeks normal relations with the West.  What more can it do?  It is up to Americans to come to their senses.

- Diana Johnstone is the author of Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions.