Post by Aufa100

🪞1919–2020s 💯 Two and a half years after the Russian invasion into Ukraine and two years following the Nordstream pipelines act of sabotage, Central European scholars and military experts from the recently diminished neutral camp commented the present and structural developments from a historical point of view. World War One (1914–19) events were referred to by Glenn Diesen and Markus Reisner: Diesen: ‘The decision to abandon the agreements to form a pan-European security architecture after the Cold War functioned as a second Treaty of Versailles in which peace in Europe would rely on perpetuating the weakness of Russia. Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defence, William Perry, recognised that NATO expansion was a betrayal of the post-Cold War peace, but his colleagues did not care as Russia was weak and kept getting weaken. George Kennan, the architect of the US containment policy against the Soviet Union, criticised the decision to expand NATO as a reversal back to confrontational bloc politics: “Why, with all the hopeful possibilities engendered by the end of the cold war, should East-West relations become centered on the question of who would be allied with whom and, by implication, against whom”.[3] In an interview with the New York Times, George Kennan outlined the folly and predicted the consequences of expansion: “I think it is the beginning of a new cold war… There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves…. Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are —but this is just wrong”.[4]’ Reisner, quoted by Alexander Dubowy (BZ):