This is Putin's narrative, but even Gorbachev has said this wasn't what was agreed upon.
The U.S. is
the world’s number-one spender on the military, and spends as much on the military as do all the next nine nations in the top ten. That includes (in order, after the U.S.): China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, France, Britain, Germany, Japan, India, and South Korea. Except for numbers 2 & 3 on that list, all of them are U.S. allies; and the U.S., France, Britain, and Germany, constitute
4 of the 28 member-nations in NATO.
NATO is, essentially, the club of purchasers of the weapons and services provided by U.S. military contractors. So: military contractors are an enormous lobby in Washington, and they need continual war, in order to be able to satisfy their stockholders. Expenditure of that military budget is spread throughout the U.S., so virtually every member of Congress relies upon the military lobbies, not only for re-election funds, but also for keeping unemployment down in his or her district or state.
As the reformed former CIA operative Ray McGovern documented on 15 May 2014, headlining
“How NATO Jabs Russia on Ukraine,” a historic end of the Cold War was agreed to at the Malta Summit on 3 December 1989, and finalized in February 1990, between George H.W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev, but was violated by Bill Clinton, and is now being utterly trashed by Barack Obama, via his Ukraine gambit (the subject of this documentary film).
Above all else, Russia doesn’t want to be
surrounded by NATO missiles and troops in Russia’s adjoining countries (now NATO-members) of Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and now, especially (though not yet NATO-member), Ukraine (the latter being especially important as it’s the pipeline route for transit of Russia’s gas supplies to Europe, as well as being the long-established base for Russia’s crucial Black Sea fleet). Here is Ray McGovern’s account of the key agreement between G.H.W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev:
“According to Jack Matlock, then-U.S. ambassador to the U.S.S.R. who took part in the Malta summit, the most basic agreement involved (1) Gorbachev’s pledge not to use force in Eastern Europe where the Russians had 24 divisions (some 350,000 troops) in East Germany alone, and (2) Bush’s promise not to ‘take advantage’ of a Soviet withdrawal from Eastern Europe.
In early February 1990, Bush sent Secretary of State James Baker to work out the all-important details directly with Gorbachev and Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze. Ambassador Matlock again was there and took careful notes on the negotiations, which focused on German reunification.
From memory, Matlock told me that Baker tried to convince Gorbachev that it was in Moscow’s interest to let a united Germany remain in NATO. Matlock recalled that Baker began his argument saying something like, ‘Assuming there is no expansion of NATO jurisdiction to the East, not one inch, what would you prefer, a Germany embedded in NATO, or one that can go independently in any direction it chooses.’ [emphasis added]
The implication was that Germany might just opt to acquire nuclear weapons, were it not anchored in NATO. Gorbachev answered that he took Baker’s argument seriously, and wasted little time in agreeing to the deal.
Ambassador Matlock, one of the most widely respected experts on Russia, told me ‘the language used was absolute, and the entire negotiation was in the framework of a general agreement that there would be no use of force by the Soviets and no ‘taking advantage’ by the U.S.”
He added, ‘I don’t see how anybody could view the subsequent expansion of NATO as anything but ‘taking advantage.’”
U.S. President Obama is so determined to tie a noose around the neck of Russia, that he has no hesitation about allying himself with
Ukrainian supporters of Adolf Hitler in order to
achieve it. And, so,
the Ukrainian civil war is the result, and it was sparked by
the massacre of hundreds of pro-independence civilians in Odessa on May 2nd, by U.S.-sponsored fascists.
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/05/ukrainian-civil-war-started.html
