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56232
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Unheeded Warnings
URL: https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/11/01/unheeded-warnings-sagan-eisenhower-and-the-ultimate-gamble/
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November 1, 2024 Unheeded Warnings: Sagan, Eisenhower and the Ultimate Gamble David S. D’Amato Photograph Source: Enrique Cornejo – CC BY-SA 3.0 CZ In his book The Cold and the Dark: The World after Nuclear War, published in 1984, Carl Sagan (with his co-authors, biologists Paul R. Ehrlich and Donald Kennedy and astronomer and atmospheric physicist Walter Orr Roberts) warned of the unimaginable devastation that would ensue from a nuclear war. Sagan and his team reviewed dozens of nuclear war scenarios, presenting an analysis that predicted “nuclear winter,” a dramatic worldwide cooling event following a nuclear war. Sagan rigorously detailed “the impact of the huge amount of dust and smoke generated by nuclear blasts and the resulting fires,” describing a rapid plunge in global temperatures that would lead to catastrophic crop failures and resultant food shortages. Even a “limited” nuclear war “could cause hundreds of millions or billions of humans worldwide to starve to death,” as these crop failures combine with broader ecosystem destruction, the breakdown of human support of agricultural systems, and the collapse of food transportation and distribution infrastructure. As Khrushchev once remarked, “The living would envy the dead.” Today’s nuclear weapons release an inconceivable amount of destructive energy; it is almost impossible to overstate their power. The detonation of a 1-megaton nuclear bomb is capable of generating heat several times that of the center of the Sun, with temperatures reaching 180 million degrees Fahrenheit. Today’s thermonuclear weapons use fission bombs like those used against the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to generate the extreme heat necessary to create a secondary fusion reaction, which yields a blast many orders of magnitude more powerful. Not all countries that currently possess nuclear weapons have successfully developed such second-generation thermonuclear weapons, the creation of which is difficult and expensive. As Sagan noted in the book, the yield of nuclear weapons has been underestimated consistently since the very first explosion, the test code-named Trinity, on July 16, 1945. The blast that came from “Gadget,” the nickname of the bomb itself, was equal to more than 20,000 tons of TNT—about four times stronger than scientists working on the Manhattan Project had expected. The Castle Bravo test of March 1, 1954 produced an explosive force almost three times the pre-test estimate, equaling an incredible 15 million tons of TNT, or about 1,000 Hiroshima bombs. Like the Castle Bravo test, the Castle Romeo experiment was part of the Operation Castle series of tests that took place near the Marshall Islands in March and April of 1954; also like Castle Bravo, the Castle Romeo bomb, nicknamed “Runt,” produced a larger than expected explosive yield, with a blast equal to 11 million tons of TNT, against a prediction of about 4 million tons of TNT. As the power of the bombs themselves has increased, so have the means of delivery improved over time. Already in 1984, Sagan noted that the distinction between strategic and tactical weapons had become increasingly artificial, as both types of weapons could be “delivered by land-based missiles, sea-based missiles, and aircraft, and by intermediate-range as well as intercontinental delivery systems.” Today, the Federation of American Scientists estimates that as of early 2024, “nine countries possessed roughly 12,121 warheads.” Though this number represents a significant reduction from the approximately 70,000 nuclear warheads at the height of the Cold War arms race, it is still more than enough to present an existential risk. Due to the criminal irresponsibility of American leaders and decades of diplomatic malpractice in Washington, nuclear war is now perilously close—much closer than most Americans of any political persuasion or party generally understand. U.S. relations with Russia are worse than they have been at any point since the Cold War, and, Washington propaganda notwithstanding, the predominant factor in this breakdown of diplomacy is persistent enlargement of the NATO military bloc in the post-Soviet era. As many others have already pointed out, papers declassified by the U.S. government clearly confirm that this consistent push eastward toward Russia’s borders was a repudiation of a long and explicit series of assurances made by U.S. government officials. The documents demonstrate that “subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion were founded in written contemporaneous memcons and telcons at the highest levels.” The evidence could not be more clear and unambiguous: the United States promised repeatedly that “not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction.” Current U.S. gaslighting about its broken promises—facilitated as usual by the Western corporate media—is perfectly consistent with its general approach to relations with other sovereign states: any U.S. promise, even its treaty obligations, can be ignored or discarded freely without reasons or consequences, because the United States sees itself as running the world. Today, NATO mission creep has now even expanded to the Pacific region, with Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand attending July’s NATO summit in Washington. The Declaration issued at the summit specifically identifies the Indo-Pacific as a region of importance to NATO, despite the organization’s founding documents limiting its geographical scope to Europe and North America. We are arguably in a much more dangerous position than we were in the Soviet era, when there were at least open and active lines of communication between American presidents and their Soviet counterparts. The U.S. has consistently shown itself as an untrustworthy and dishonest actor in its foreign relations, reneging on its commitments to Russia, most recently with regard to Ukraine. Ukraine has become a symbol of the dangers of American duplicity, its people paying a heavy price for Washington’s decision to meddle in its domestic affairs and push it into an unwinnable war with Russia. Russian battlefield forces have vastly outnumbered their Ukrainian opponents, and while confirming the number dead with certainty during an ongoing war is impossible, the military and civilian death toll has been extremely high—likely much higher than either Ukraine or the United States has been willing to admit. By the time of the invasion in February of 2022, the conflict had already been ongoing for 8 years, as thousands of people in the east of Ukraine sought to separate from Ukraine and join Russia. Tensions boiled over, with an armed conflict beginning in 2014 after the U.S. conspired to remove Viktor Yanukovich as Ukraine’s president. In a now-infamous leaked phone call, Victoria Nuland, who was Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs at the time, spoke with then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt on their preferences for the makeup of the new Ukrainian government—all while the country still had a duly-elected president. After the successful removal of Yanukovich and the installation of a pro-Western government riddled with right-wing nationalists (frequently unabashed Nazis, which was widely reported in major media outlets before they agreed to pretend that Ukraine’s Nazi problem was a figment of the Russian imagination), the U.S. turned Ukraine into its key base of operations against Russia. Earlier this year, even the New York Times acknowledged that the CIA has been conducting anti-Russian operations out of Ukraine for many years, including supporting paramilitary groups and helping to organize the assassinations of Russian leaders. Yet even after February of 2022, there was hope for peace. In March of that year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had reiterated his openness to a negotiated settlement to the conflict. Earlier, in December of 2021, he had stated in no uncertain terms that direct, in-person conversations with Putin would be necessary to ending the conflict. There had also been talks in Paris in January of 2022, and there was a high level of optimism for fruitful negotiations on a ceasefire. Ukraine remained open to neutrality at that point, which is consistent with a permanent commitment to neutrality that was explicit in its 1990 Declaration of State Sovereignty.[1] Ukrainian neutrality and its nuclear weapons-free status were further memorialized in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994. The general terms on the table during the negotiations of March 2022, which were mediated by the Turkish, were an affirmation of Ukraine’s neutral status, a Russian move back to the borders in place before its 2022 invasion, and an opening of further talks on the Crimean Peninsula and the Donbas. In an interview earlier this month, Victoria Nuland suggested that the U.S. and the British disrupted the talks and scuttled a possible peace deal. Whatever one thinks of Russia, the United States has repeatedly made it clear that injecting itself to disrupt these talks was in no way an effort to help the people of Ukraine—quite to the contrary, its goal was and is to bleed Russia using Ukrainian bodies, and it has indeed cost tens of thousands of Ukrainian lives. U.S. support of the Ukrainian government has also conveniently meant that tens of billions of dollars have been funneled to American weapons manufacturers (as of this writing, United States aid to Ukraine since 2022 totaled about $175 billion). The Ukrainian government’s alliance with the United States has cost actual Ukrainian people dearly. According to a CIA report published earlier this month, Ukraine has the lowest birth rate and the highest death rate in the world. The report notes that “[t]he birth rate this year has decreased by 1.5 times compared to pre-invasion levels: 87,655 children in 2024, compared to 132,595 in 2021.” These data represents the deepening of a crisis that began in 2013, according to the country’s Ministry of Health, which reports that “[f]ertility rates in Ukraine have been falling by about 7% per year since 2013.” Indeed, with friends like the United States, Ukraine doesn’t need enemies. Importantly, none of this has anything to do with one’s assessment of Russia. Putin’s Russia has an abysmal record of domestic political repression, human rights abuses, censorship and attacks on journalists, and torture. In United States-Russia relations, there is no good guy. Without a thoughtful and nuanced understanding of the interests and key security concerns of both, further escalations are virtually guaranteed, aggravating the risk of an exchange of nuclear weapons. It is under-appreciated in American civic discourse today how many senior military leaders—many of whom still held to the now quaint-seeming view that civilians should not be the targets of weapons of mass destruction—opposed the use of nuclear weapons against Japan during World War II. From the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945 until his death in 1969, Dwight Eisenhower never stopped being troubled by the horrific act of terror. In his memoir Mandate for Change, first published in the fateful year of 1963, Eisenhower recounts a conversation he had in 1945, in Germany, with then-Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. In apprising General Eisenhower of the plan to use an atomic bomb on Japan, Stimson was “apparently expecting a vigorous assent,” but Eisenhower recalls “a feeling of depression.” He writes, I voiced to [Stimson] my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. Eisenhower goes on to note that Stimson was “deeply perturbed” and instantly and “almost angrily” countered Eisenhower’s points. In an interview with Newsweek, also in ‘63, Eisenhower discussed that meeting with Stimson, saying, “It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.” Though we don’t hear much about it these days, when chauvinism and detachment from reality go uncontested in the imperial core, Eisenhower was of course not alone in this opinion. William D. Leahy was also famously critical of the use of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, putting his condemnation of these crimes in the strongest, clearest possible terms. Leahy retired as Fleet Admiral and was the most senior officer in the United States Navy from 1937 to 1937, later holding titles including Governor of Puerto Rico, Ambassador to France, and the first person to chair meetings of the newly formed Joint Chiefs of Staff (first formed in 1942 and formalized by law in 1947). Like Eisenhower, Leahy was of an older generation of American military men less comfortable with atrocities directed at innocent noncombatants. As his biographer Henry H. Adams put it, Leahy “belonged to an earlier age, when the phrase ‘officer and gentleman’ was no mere cliché.” It is no exaggeration to say that Leahy was disgusted by the use of nuclear weapons. In his 1950 book I Was There, he wrote: The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that, in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children. We were the first to have this weapon in our possession, and the first to use it. There is a practical certainty that potential enemies will develop it in the future and that atomic bombs will some time be used against us. Leahy’s words remind of the difference between acknowledging war as a historical fact and giving ourselves over completely to a debased, mindless philosophy of wanton destruction and open contempt for civilian life. He laments the advent of the “new concepts of ‘total war,’” dragging us back into “cruelty toward noncombatants.” “These new and terrible instruments of uncivilized warfare represent a modern type of barbarism not worthy of Christian man.” There is a long list of others like Eisenhower and Leahy who had been close to war and saw that the opening of this new age was gravely tragic for humanity. It seems necessary to quote at length from decorated military leaders like them because today’s chicken-hawk politicians are so hideously unembarrassed in their public ignorance. Knowing nothing of the stakes, they push and provoke, putting threats and violence in the place of diplomatic relations with other global powers, believing, as children might, that this makes the United States strong. Whatever their faults, Eisenhower and Leahy understood that the use of nuclear weapons demonstrated profound moral degeneracy and thus weakness, not the projection of global strength. The public conversation has buried their opinions, just as it has buried the old-fashioned notion that elected officials should be public servants, not cringeworthy, self-dealing, power-lusting celebrities. We talk a lot these days about opinions that are “very online,” but perhaps we ought to start talking about opinions that are very Washington, DC. Of all the bizarre notions bandied about among the political class, the single most Washington take is the unhinged idea that brinkmanship on the subject of nuclear war is a viable foreign policy position that is good for the American people—or anyone else on the planet. The hegemonic narrative that the military superiority of the United States makes us immune to the threat of nuclear weapons could end up producing the most fatal of all the many Washington miscalculations to date. Unlike the others, though, in the event of a nuclear exchange, even the upper echelons of the ruling class will not be able to guarantee their own safety or survival. There will be no safety to be found. Sagan’s prescient warnings about the dangers of nuclear war were not well met during his life: he remarked that the conversation ensuing from those warnings was “perhaps the most controversial scientific debate I’ve been involved in.” Nuclear weapons have been used before and, as long as they exist, it is almost certain they will be used again. Nuclear disarmament is therefore the most pressing geopolitical issue of our time, particularly given escalating tensions among the world’s major nuclear powers. U.S. hawks rattling the sabers in the direction of Russia, China, and Iran seem not to understand what has been obvious for decades to anyone who knows even a little about the science of nuclear war: there can be no winner in a nuclear exchange. Any further use of nuclear weapons, in even the most “limited” or “tactical” manner is insane and suicidal. As Lewis Thomas wrote in the foreword for The Cold and the Dark, “any territory gained will be, at the end, a barren wasteland, and any ideology will vanish in the death of civilization and the permanent loss of humankind’s memory of culture.” While a more multipolar balance of global power will be important to the future of global peace and security, the global community must continue to work together in the direction of nuclear nonproliferation. Notes. [1] “The Ukrainian SSR solemnly declares its intention of becoming a permanently neutral state that does not participate in military blocs and adheres to three nuclear free principles: to accept, to produce and to purchase no nuclear weapons.” David S. D’Amato is an attorney, businessman, and independent researcher. He is a Policy Advisor to the Future of Freedom Foundation and a regular opinion contributor to The Hill. His writing has appeared in Forbes, Newsweek, Investor’s Business Daily, RealClearPolitics, The Washington Examiner, and many other publications, both popular and scholarly. His work has been cited by the ACLU and Human Rights Watch, among others. |
56239
From: chaskuchar@stcharlesmo, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Unheeded Warnings
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i hopefully believe jesus when he said in one of the messages he would stop the war if it turned nuclear. he said he would bring on the warning at that time. i know most think the messages are a fable but in scripture after the assention it talks about messages being received. this time3 in life we need truth from somewhere and i beleive the message are some of the gtruth. |
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56236
From: old timer, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Unheeded Warnings
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good article. the war hawks have been pushing these conflicts and the current global instability puts us closer to nuclear war. it is time to stop the war hawks and push peaceful solutions |
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56234
From: akira, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Unheeded Warnings
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ah, thank god it's really you, Bopp! I thought your buddy kidnapped you and stole your website... Just think of how many Ukrainians really didn't have to die after all. So Putin was right all along. But we knew this, didn't we. "the predominant factor in this breakdown of diplomacy is persistent enlargement of the NATO military bloc in the post-Soviet era. As many others have already pointed out, papers declassified by the U.S. government clearly confirm that this consistent push eastward toward Russia’s borders was a repudiation of a long and explicit series of assurances made by U.S. government officials. The documents demonstrate that “subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion were founded in written contemporaneous memcons and telcons at the highest levels.” The evidence could not be more clear and unambiguous: the United States promised repeatedly that “not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction.” Current U.S. gaslighting about its broken promises—facilitated as usual by the Western corporate media—is perfectly consistent with its general approach to relations with other sovereign states: any U.S. promise, even its treaty obligations, can be ignored or discarded freely without reasons or consequences, because the United States sees itself as running the world. " |
56240
From: chaskuchar@stcharlesmo, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Unheeded Warnings
| we only lie when it is needed. |
Responses:
None
56235
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Unheeded Warnings
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i figured you would like that and try to run with it...it's good to examine all the rhetoric...pootie has never been right about anything...he is consumed by his inability to let go of what happened to the ussr...nations and their leaders lie like rugs all the time...nothing new...the russian model of governance is nothing to support... but did nato and the west promise not to expand to the east? that's not how it seems... Fact-checking claims that NATO, US broke agreement against alliance expanding eastward If Your Time is short No legal agreement prohibits NATO from expanding eastward. Russians have argued that comments made by U.S. and other Western leaders during the negotiations over the reunification of Germany constituted a promise that NATO would not extend beyond then-East Germany. Those allegations have sparked decades of debate amongst those involved in the events, and scholars studying them. Even scholars who say they believe western powers did offer the Soviet Union assurances about NATO expansion say Owens’ claim is misleading. See the sources for this fact-check Two days before Russia invaded Ukraine with an assault that intelligence officials had warned was coming, conservative commentator Candace Owens insisted that the U.S. was "at fault." "NATO (under direction from the United States) is violating previous agreements and expanding eastward," Owens said in the Feb. 22 tweet, which directed her more than 3 million followers to remarks from Russian President Vladimir Putin that she said showed "what’s actually going on." Owens’ comment echoed a grievance claimed by Putin and other Russian leaders regarding the West’s negotiations with the Soviet Union after the Cold War. The subject of the grievance is whether the U.S. and its Western allies promised the Soviet Union during negotiations over the reunification of Germany that they would not allow NATO to expand its membership east of the Cold War border. The question has fueled decades of debate and disagreement over what was said around those negotiations, what was meant by it all, and whether Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and other leaders received certain assurances regarding NATO’s expansion beyond East Germany. But even historians who argue that the Soviets were led to believe that NATO would not expand farther to the east told PolitiFact Owens’ statement is more wrong than right. No binding, legal agreement ever codified the terms that Putin’s camp — and Owens — now say were violated. "Such an agreement was never made," NATO says in a fact page on its website, one of multiple pages that addresses the Russian allegations. "NATO’s door has been open to new members since it was founded in 1949 — and that has never changed." Negotiating German reunification After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, a divided Germany and the four powers that had occupied it since World War II were discussing whether the country should be reunified. The treaty they signed in 1990 extended NATO into East Germany, which had been zoned to the Soviet Union. To appease the Soviets, it also granted the territory a "special military status" that ruled out the stationing of foreign NATO forces there. The agreement said nothing about NATO’s ability to expand farther east, a process that began with the admission of Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary as members in 1999. Subsequent agreements, like the NATO-Russia Founding Act in 1997, also made no mention of a prohibition on eastward expansion. "I know of no agreement signed by the United States, Germany, Britain, France or any NATO member that foreswore NATO enlargement," said the Brookings Institution’s Steven Pifer, who was the deputy director of the State Department’s Soviet desk at the time the 1990 deal was struck. "This claim (from Owens) is factually incorrect," added John Lough, an associate fellow at Chatham House, a London-based think tank, who served from 1995 to 1998 as NATO’s first representative based in Moscow. "NATO never made a commitment to Russia not to enlarge." The source of controversy, however, is centered around statements made during the negotiations by Western leaders — particularly James Baker, the U.S. secretary of state, and German Foreign Minister Hans Dietrich Genscher. U.S. President George H. Bush signs an arms-reduction treaty as Secretary of State James Baker, left, talks with Germany's Hans Dietrich Genscher in Paris on Nov. 19, 1990. (AP) "Not shift 1 inch eastward" One key statement came during a Feb. 9, 1990, meeting between Baker and Gorbachev. After explaining why the U.S. wanted the reunited Germany to stay within the framework of NATO, Baker told Gorbachev that "if we maintain a presence in a Germany that is a part of NATO, there would be no extension of NATO's jurisdiction for forces of NATO 1 inch to the east." "I put the following question to (Gorbachev)," Baker recounted in a letter to German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. "‘Would you prefer to see a united Germany outside of NATO, independent and with no U.S. forces, or would you prefer a unified Germany to be tied to NATO, with assurances that NATO’s jurisdiction would not shift 1 inch eastward from its present position?’" U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, left, looks on while Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev gestures during their meeting at the Kremlin, on Dec. 16, 1991 in Moscow. (AP) Those comments, along with similar remarks from Baker’s European allies, like Genscher and Kohl, were part of what researchers at George Washington University’s National Security Archive called a "cascade of assurances" offered to the Soviets. But Baker and other officials involved in the events have denied that the conversation ever turned on expanding NATO to other countries. Featured Fact-check Donald Trump stated on August 8, 2024 in a press conference Says his Jan. 6, 2021, speech on the White House Ellipse drew the “same number of people,” as the 1963 March on Washington where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. true false By Louis Jacobson • August 9, 2024 The comments, they say, were made in the context of the German reunification debate. Talk of NATO’s expansion to the rest of Europe never came up, in part because the Soviet Union and its associated Warsaw Pact were still intact. And in any event, those assurances were not baked into the final U.S. position and agreement around "special military status," they say. "There was a discussion about whether the unified Germany would be a member of NATO, and that was the only discussion we ever had," Baker told CNN during a 2009 interview. "There was never any discussion of anything but (East Germany)." Other figures have said that assurances were made, including Jack Matlock, the last U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, and Robert Gates, the deputy national security adviser at the time. Gates said the Soviets "were led to believe" NATO would not expand eastward. Gorbachev has sent mixed messages. On one occasion, he insisted that he was promised NATO would not "move 1 centimeter further east." In another interview in 2014, he said the question never came up, though he added that NATO’s eventual expansion was "a violation of the spirit of the statements and assurances made to us in 1990." He said: "The topic of ‘NATO expansion’ was not discussed at all, and it wasn’t brought up in those years. I say this with full responsibility. Not a single Eastern European country raised the issue, not even after the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist in 1991. Western leaders didn’t bring it up, either." Scholars have landed on both sides of the debate. Some, like Lough and Harvard University’s Mark Kramer, who wrote about it in 2009, have argued that the idea of a no-NATO-enlargement promise is a "myth." Other interpretations say the question is more complicated. "At one extreme, there’s a position you sometimes hear from the American side, that none of this ever came up, it’s a total myth, the Russians are psychotic," Johns Hopkins University’s Mary Sarotte, the author of a book examining the issue, told the New Yorker. "On the other end, you have the very adamant Russian position: ‘We were totally betrayed, there’s no doubt about it.’ Unsurprisingly, when you get into the evidence, the truth looks to be somewhere in between." When Russian President Boris Yeltsin protested NATO’s expansion, President Bill Clinton’s administration asked the German foreign ministry to look into the matter. The ministry reported that Yeltsin’s complaint was formally wrong, but it said it could understand "why Yeltsin thought that NATO had committed itself not to extend beyond its 1990 limits," according to the Guardian. Candace Owens' claim: Candace Owens stated on February 22, 2022 in a tweet: “NATO (under direction from the United States) is violating previous agreements and expanding eastward.” Why Owens’ claim is misleading, regardless To support her argument, Owens shared via Twitter an 2016 op-ed that Joshua Shifrinson wrote for the Los Angeles Times. Shifrinson, an associate professor of international relations at Boston University, wrote that while no formal agreement restricted NATO’s expansion, Baker and other diplomats had offered the Soviets verbal assurances that NATO would not enlarge to the east. In an interview with PolitiFact, Shifrinson said that he still holds the same view, and that a new document he recently discovered in the British National Archives supports that case. The record, from 1991, quotes a German official as telling British and American policymakers, "We had made it clear during the 2+4 negotiations that we would not extend NATO beyond the Elbe (a river in Germany). We could not therefore offer membership of NATO to Poland and the others." But Poland joined NATO in 1999. The reason that was allowed is the same reason why Owens’ statement about NATO "violating previous agreements" is misleading: whether or not assurances were made, the West did not tie NATO’s hands with any formal agreement. "Candace Owens’ statement is more fiction than not," Shifrinson told PolitiFact. "No. 1, NATO as an organization did not make this commitment. No. 2, it wasn’t an agreement." "There is a legitimate point to say that the U.S. offered assurances to the Soviets that NATO would do something, but that is not the same thing as saying NATO offered an agreement," Shifrinson continued. "NATO is not violating, and it never offered an agreement." None of that justifies Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he added. Marc Trachtenberg, a professor emeritus from the University of California, Los Angeles, has summarized the research on the NATO-enlargement-promise debate. His writing also argued that U.S. officials made assurances to the Soviets that they ultimately reneged on. But in an email to PolitiFact, he also took issue with Owens’ use of the word "agreement." "What we had here were purely unilateral statements made by high U.S. and German officials," Trachtenberg said. "Strictly speaking, this does not show there was an ‘agreement’ … I think the term ‘tacit understanding’ is a better way to put it." Our ruling Owens said, "NATO (under direction from the United States) is violating previous agreements and expanding eastward." There is an ongoing historical debate over comments that Western leaders, including Baker, made during post-Cold War negotiations, and whether what they said amounted to assurances that NATO would refrain from welcoming in countries closer to modern-day Russia. But NATO as an organization made no such pledge, and the formal agreement signed at the end of those negotiations said nothing about the alliance not expanding eastward. We rate this claim Mostly False. |
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