...when the admission of former Eastern bloc countries to NATO first came up for serious consideration in 1993, it was with a view to more extensive engagement and partnership with Russia—including possible Russian membership in a revamped NATO at some point in the future.
Notably, too, the NATO enlargement that began in the 1990s did bring Russia into NATO-adjacent structures: first the Partnership for Peace program in 1994, then the NATO-Russia Council in 2002. Both not only provided a framework for military cooperation—including NATO assistance to Russia in such areas as job training for decommissioned officers—but stipulated that NATO would consult Russia about its security concerns and possible threats. NATO-Russia cooperation was only suspended in 2014 after Russia’s annexation of Crimea and (first) invasion of Ukraine.
Blame-the-West narratives often claim that Russia was never given a real chance to integrate into the free world because the United States, drunk on Cold War triumphalism, treated it as a defeated enemy rather than a partner. But this is a highly skewed and selective account of history after the Soviet collapse.
It leaves out massive Western economic aid to Russia (totaling $55 billion just in 1992-1997 alone, not counting private charity and business investments). It leaves out...
And, as a show of political respect, Russia was included in the annual forum for leaders of the world’s top industrial democracies—first in an informal “G7+1” arrangement, then from 1998 onward as a full member of the G8—despite the fact that neither its economic performance nor the state of its political institutions qualified it for membership.
...the main reasons...lay within Russia itself. Among them were the corruption, incompetence, and robber-baron mentality that bedeviled the transition to a market economy; the failure to grapple with, and fully confront, the horrors of the country’s Soviet legacy; the profound ambivalence on whether integration into the West should be seen as liberation or occupation; and the widespread sense that the loss of empire was a humiliation and not being feared was a cause for regret.
If anything, the threat of aggression from Russia was the cause of NATO enlargement, not the other way round.
Zitat von WhiteHorse
Wer geht denn noch von einem schnellen Sieg aus (bzw. wer tat das überhaupt mal?)? Die Amis? Darauf deutet deren Unterstützung für die Ukraine null hin. Was die USA und Partner (wir) momentan tun, nennt sich langfristige Untertützung.
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