Excellent analys and summing up

https://www.patreon.com/posts/putins-got-us-by-62893069

Postmodern Trendoid III wrote on Feb 22^nd, 2022 at 10:26pm:


Release the Kurds. It may come as some surprise, Mistie, but before the fall of Kabul, your Dear Leader was caving all over the globe. The Turks, the Saudis, Kim, Putin, no one was left with any illusions as to where he stood.

Maybe it will, maybe it won't. I don't see why it would be Russia. We'll have to wait and see what happens.

It's now left to Sleepy Joe to do what Dear Leader couldnt bring himself to do: shirt-front Putin.

You bet I am, you bet I will.

Russia, if you're listening...

Back in 2000, Putin repeatedly petitioned for Russia to be admitted to Nato, according to private conversations he had with the former head of the alliance and ex-Labour minister George Robertson, and again in interviews with the American filmmaker Oliver Stone. Putin was told that his country should ‘apply’ to join — there’s that contempt again — and he replied with the deliciously Putinesque response: ‘Well, we’re not standing in line with a lot of countries that don’t matter.’

He was not the first Russian leader to have made such overtures. Boris Yeltsin proposed Russian membership in 1991 and the year before Mikhail Gorbachev had ventured the possibility to the then US Secretary of State, James Baker, only to be told that it was merely a ‘dream’. Rather than grasp an opportunity which 30 years later would be to our enormous advantage in dealing with China and radical Islam, the suggestion was dismissed out of hand.

Instead, western countries sent to Moscow scores of free-market ‘consultants’ to oversee the privatisation and massed asset stripping of the formerly state-controlled Soviet industries which led directly to two catastrophic depressions, enormous unemployment and the creation of a semi-criminal or simply criminal oligarchic elite. No wonder that by the end of the 1990s the notion of ‘western democracy’ was viewed by the general population with scorn verging on loathing: a superpower reduced to impotence and penury. It is not difficult to see how the appetite for Vladimir Putin was fostered.

Remarkably, even the Soviet Union, during the most fraught early moments of the Cold War, had asked to be allowed to join Nato. A year after the death of Stalin and a few months after the sidelining of Malenkov, the USSR’s minister for foreign affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov, proposed that his country join an alliance for the collective security of Europe on the grounds that it would be of ‘cardinal importance for the promotion of universal peace’. Molotov’s biographer, Geoffrey Roberts, observed: ‘In May 1954 the western powers rejected the Soviet proposal to join Nato on grounds that the USSR’s membership of the organisation would be incompatible with its democratic and defensive aims. However, Moscow’s extensive and intensive campaign for European collective security continued until the Geneva Foreign Ministers Conference of October-November 1955.’ There was quite possibly geopolitical mischief in Molotov’s design, but the proposal was nonetheless meant in earnest and had the full backing of the premier, Nikita Khrushchev.

So at least four Russian leaders have implored the West to let them into this gilded club and each time they were contemptuously brushed off. But then this has been the history of Russia’s relations with the West. At various times throughout the past 800 years Russia has attempted to ingratiate itself with the West, most notably of course during the reign of Peter the Great, who even forced courtiers to shave off their Russian beards, wear European-style clothing and speak French in the hope that this might impress upon visiting westerners how civilised they were. But on every occasion the Russians have tried this cosying up they have been met with either pronounced sniggering or malevolent opportunism from the rest of Europe.

What usually follows is a period of revanchism, in which subsequent leaders retreat into the comparative comfort of Russia’s roots in Asia, its Slavicness, its difference to the West, out of dismay or pique. St Petersburg itself was renamed Petrograd in 1914 because the old name sounded too western and had the whiff of Germany about it. Vladimir Putin comes from the city and however autocratic and authoritarian his regime, he is — or was — someone who looked to the West: hence that tentative approach to joining Nato. What seems to be happening now is simply what has happened so many times before: Putin has given up the occidental ghost. He is looking east, to China, to ever greater autocracy and a cultural programme which once again sets Russia ideologically at odds with western Europe. We have had many chances to neutralise Russia’s potential threat. They have all been passed up.
Rod Liddle
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/we-blew-our-chance-to-befriend-putin

Frank wrote on Feb 23^rd, 2022 at 1:27pm:


Oh, I see. And you take Putin's word for that, do you?

Putin tried to join NATO? After he's spent the past decade launching cyber and military attacks against any Eastern European country who even talks to NATO?

Come come. Dear Leader might believe it. You?

Mattyfisk wrote on Feb 23^rd, 2022 at 3:37pm:


That's  enough grimacing and wanky-wanky, paki.

Vladimir Putin wanted Russia to join Nato but did not want his country to have to go through the usual application process and stand in line “with a lot of countries that don’t matter”, according to a former secretary general of the transatlantic alliance.

George Robertson, a former Labour defence secretary who led Nato between 1999 and 2003, said Putin made it clear at their first meeting that he wanted Russia to be part of western Europe. “They wanted to be part of that secure, stable prosperous west that Russia was out of at the time,” he said.

The Labour peer recalled an early meeting with Putin, who became Russian president in 2000. “Putin said: ‘When are you going to invite us to join Nato?’ And [Robertson] said: ‘Well, we don’t invite people to join Nato, they apply to join Nato.’ And he said: ‘Well, we’re not standing in line with a lot of countries that don’t matter.’”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/04/ex-nato-head-says-putin-wanted-to-join-alliance-early-on-in-his-rule

Oh, old boy, so you do believe it. Who's a silly boy then?

To join NATO, Russia would need to make commitments. One of those commitments is not to make trouble with your fellow members.

OF COURSE Putin would not agree to that. His plan is to gain back control of the former USSR, and that means control of NATO members such as Poland, Romania, Latvia and Estonia. 

All those countries who "don't matter".

Putin wants to be in with Europe, he doesn't want to be in Europe. Putin wants control of the Eastern Empire, as it were. But Rome wasn't built in a day, no?

Do you know? I fell for the Oliver Stone narrative once too, dear. We've all done it. Poor old Russia, left at the alter, neglected, forgotten, so unfair.

That might have been true in the 1990s, but not now, not after 20 years of Putin. Today, it's a new day, now we know.

Putin isn't fooling anyone now. Except you.