If you believed in the two central tenets of Western dogma and propaganda about the war in Ukraine, namely that the invasion of Russia was unprovoked and that Moscow has imperial ambitions beyond the borders of Ukraine, then you would naturally see NATO as the best defense against this threat. If, however, you paid attention to history and what Russian officials say and actually did and their initially deliberately limited conduct of this war, you would conclude that Russia was massively encouraged to invade by the impending absorption of Ukraine by NATO and by Kiev's ongoing ethnic cleansing of Russian-speakers in the Donbass. An aggression that experienced a considerable increase at the beginning of 2022.

If you were to study fact rather than fiction, you would also observe that the narrative of Moscow's imperial ambitions was concocted after the 2014 US-backed neo-Nazi putsch in Kiev. Before that time, as Professor John Mearsheimer has noted, Putin was not considered an imperialist. But once NATO took its place, bristling with weapons, on Russia's porch, the narrative of imperialist Moscow came in very handy. NATO created a danger that needed more NATO to resolve. Now this ill-begotten mess has massacred hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and tens of thousands of Russian soldiers, and thanks to NATO, the United States is almost at war with Russia, while humanity reels in the above the nuclear abyss.

None of this would have happened without NATO and its relentless and mad expansion into eastern Russia, breaking many official Western promises not to. Moscow has been shouting for decades that if kyiv joins NATO's axis, Russia will destroy Ukraine. And that is what is happening. For what ? Because Moscow sees Ukraine in NATO as an existential threat, which it probably is. The truth is that NATO should have died when the Cold War ended. Tons of American defense intellectuals and national security luminaries have said so. But instead of driving a stake through this vampire's heart, the West allowed it to live, draining its members' money, fattening the wallets of war profiteers and arms tycoons and wreaking havoc in places like Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya, now Ukraine and soon, as the vampire informs us, the China Sea. NATO even helped cripple democracy, as it was, here in the United States.

read the article