Dave Smith: evaluation

Transcript context

…We should make very clear, because the way that comes across, the full responsibility of the invasion of Ukraine lays at the hands of Vladimir Putin. Sure. I completely agree with that. Vladimir Putin launched a war where… Again, I don’t know exactly what the numbers are. I’ve read a whole bunch of estimates, some that contradict each other. But the consensus seems to be it’s at least in the hundreds of thousands, possibly well north of a million, if you’re talking about the casualties on both sides. Vladimir Putin launched a war that led to that, and he’s responsible for that. That being said, you can also point out that really what we’re talking about here is the George H.W. Bush administration, the Clintons, Bush again, Obama, and then Trump. And the people who were in charge of the foreign policy in those administrations, the same ones who gave us Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, they were also in charge of our European foreign policy. The most reckless policy of all was their NATO policy, and that they drove up to this conflict with Russia, with nothing but off-ramp after off-ramp after off-ramp, and consciously decided that we’re not going to take any of those, we’re going to drive it all the way up to this point. Thomas Friedman for The New York Times interviewed George Kennan in 1998, and George Kennan was the Cold Warrior. He is credited as founding the containment strategy in the Cold War. He was talking about the first round of NATO expansion, which he and many other foreign policy graybeards opposed. He was like, “This is the worst thing we could possibly do after the fall of the Soviet Union, to now say that we had this alliance in NATO that was an anti-Russian military alliance, and now that the Soviet Union isn’t there anymore, and it’s Boris Yeltsin’s Russia, that now we’re going to expand NATO because of that. ”. He literally said in 1998, he goes, “The people advocating that we expand NATO are going to continue advocating it and advocating it and advocating it. And then there will be a Russian reaction. And then they’ll say, ‘See? That’s why we were right to expand NATO.’. But they’ll get this completely wrong.”. When do you think a deal is reached?…

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