On January 21st, after meeting in Geneva with the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, Secretary of State Antony Blinken issued a rather understated assessment of the high-stakes impasse between Russia and the United States, with Russia threatening the prospect of. “I think the charitable interpretation would be that sometimes we and Russia have different interpretations of history,” Blinken said.
The many arguments, myths, and crises that have arisen from this one utterance led Mary Elise Sarotte, a historian and professor at Johns Hopkins University, to borrow it for the title of the book she published last November, “.” Sarotte has the receipts, as it were: her authoritative tale draws on thousands of memos, letters, briefs, and other once secret documents—including many that have never been published before—which both fill in and complicate settled narratives on both sides.
Sarotte’s interpretation of the key phrase begins with the context of the moment in which it was said. In early 1990, with the Berlin Wall having fallen just months before, German unification was the central policy question in Europe. But on this matter the Soviet Union had an automatic say: as one of the officially recognized victors in the Second World War, the U.S.S.R. retained a political veto over Germany’s future, not to mention three hundred and eighty thousand troops in East Germany.
In her book, Sarotte explains that this one sentence would take on a life of its own in the years to come: “Various leaders in Moscow would point to this exchange as an agreement barring NATO from expanding beyond its eastern Cold War border. Baker and his aides and supporters, in contrast, would point to the hypothetical phrasing and lack of any written agreement afterward as a sign that the secretary had only been test-driving one potential option of many.
But the truth was that, by then, Russia’s opinion didn’t matter all that much. The West needed Moscow’s buy-in on German reunification in 1990, but there was no formal or practical reason that it needed approval on the question of extendingmembership to other countries. Washington “must be very careful not to be seen as running after the Russians, offering them concessions,” Clinton’s Secretary of State at the time, Warren Christopher, said.
fuputin
The NATO thing, PRETEXT. Get over it.
Please, stop talking of “Putin fears expansion of NATO” as a real issue. What he WANTS is to expands Russia. That is the one and only reason for invading my country!
you can’t even imagine how ridiculous this artificial hysteria is for people living in Russia
a 9 year old explains Russia and Ukraine border crisis
Thought the same thing. This is scary.
Sad to say but if Russia was to invade Ukraine, nothing too serious would happen because of the alliance between China and Russia and because of the diverging interests of the EU member States. Ukraine
Putin doesn't have a choice it's either war with Ukraine or internal war and the slow disappearance of Russia. He just brings internal hell to foreign lands.
Four countries that border Ukraine are members of the EU and NATO. Why is President Biden sending U.S. military forces when Ukraine is not a NATO member? This is a European problem.
Why doesn’t he just educate his people and build an economy - then he wouldn’t need to take everything he wants from other countries.
Well, until China invades Taiwan.
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