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No, NATO Expansion Did Not Cause the War in Ukraine
There is a persistent myth going around that we need to discuss. It’s a myth that embodies decades of supposed American aggression and Russian victimization.
Stop me if you’ve heard this before:
Russia is acting in preemptive self-defense!
When the Berlin Wall fell, the U.S. promised that they would never expand NATO to any countries east of Germany! Then, the U.S. engineered the collapse of the Soviet Union and forced the new country of Russia to destroy its own economy by privatizing too quickly. Once Russia was crippled, the U.S. went back on its word and expanded NATO into Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. Then, the U.S. lied about there ever having been an agreement! After that, America annexed the Baltic states Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania!
Russia had no choice but to push back and defend itself from unchecked NATO aggression by first invading Georgia and then Ukraine.
This “Russia is the victim” mentality has been most popularized by Professor John J. Mearsheimer in “Why is Ukraine the West’s Fault?”, Professor Stephen F. Cohen in “The Ukrainian Crisis — It’s not All Putin’s Fault”, and journalist Vladimir Pozner in “How the United States Created Vladimir Putin”, whose combined YouTube videos have been watched over 40 million times.
