Fiona Hill

And then when, you know, kind of basically Russia starts to get its act back together again, all of these security nationalist types who had never wanted Ukraine or Belarus or Moldova or anywhere else to kind of move away, they didn't worry that much about Central Asia, to be frank, but they know they did want Ukraine.

you know, the core states in their view to come back.

And Moldova was part of that, even though it's not Slavic.

But, you know, they wanted Belarus and northern Kazakhstan and probably Kazakhstan as well, which wasn't really thought about being part of Central Asia, back in the fold as close as possible.

So anything that gave those countries an alternative was seen as negative.

It could have been an association with China, them joining kind of an association with Latin America or Africa or something else like that.

But of course, NATO has all of those larger connotations of it being the Cold War opposing entity.

And Putin has always seen NATO as being the direct correlation of the Warsaw Pact, which is, in other words, just something dominated completely by the United States.

Now, that, of course, is why getting back to Trump again, Trump was always going for

You know, to the Europeans, if this is really supposed to be collective security in a mutual defense pact, why are you guys not paying?

You know, why does the US states pay for everything?

But, you know, NATO was actually conceived as collective defense, you know, mutual security.

And it was set up by, you know, the United States, along with the UK and France and, you know, Germany and Turkey and, you know, other countries.

And we see that now with the entry of Finland and Sweden.

They didn't have to join NATO.

They didn't want to join NATO for a long time.

They wanted to partner with it, just like Israel and the other countries partner with NATO.

But once they thought that their security was really at risk, they wanted to be part of it.

And so, you know, kind of you're now really seeing, you know, that NATO is something other than just being, you know, a creature or an instrument of the United States.

But that's how Putin always saw it.