John Mearsheimer

And I would note that there were all sorts of people in the 1990s, like George Kennan, William Perry, who was Bill Clinton's Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Paul Nitze, and so forth and so on, who argued that NATO expansion would end up producing a disaster, which it has.

I would note that at the famous April 2008 Bucharest summit where NATO said that Ukraine would be brought into the alliance, Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, the German and French leaders respectively, opposed that decision.

Angela Merkel later said that the reason she opposed it was because she understood that Putin would interpret it as a declaration of war.

Just think about that.

Merkel is telling you that she opposed NATO expansion into Ukraine because she understood correctly that Putin would see it as a declaration of war.

What did the United States and its friends in Europe do?

They continued to push and push because we thought that we could push NATO expansion down their throat after 2008, the same way we did in 1999 and 2004.

But we were wrong, and it all blew up in our face in 2014.

And when it blew up in our face in 2014, what did we do?

Did we back off and say, well, maybe the Russians have some legitimate security interests?

No, that's not the way we operate.

We continued to double down.

And the end result is that in 2022, you got a war.

And as I've argued for a long time now, we, the West, are principally responsible for that, not Vladimir Putin.

Yeah.

To put it in more general terms, what we were trying to do was turn Ukraine into a Western bulwark on Russia's border.

And it really wasn't NATO expansion alone.

NATO expansion was the most important element of our strategy.

But the strategy had two other dimensions.

One was EU expansion, and the third was the color revolution.