Friedman is right today in the main of his latest op-ed. But one needn't have been against NATO expansion in 1999 in order to have been against another round meant to include Georgia and Ukraine. Wisdom present in that first round is conspicuously absent in the second. When it comes down to it, 'cramming' expansion 'down Russia's throat' made for far less of a humiliation and inflicted far less damage than throwing Russia open to unfettered Western capitalism.
The blame for the failure to integrate Russia smoothly and successfully into the West -- if such a thing could ever have been done, it was then -- belongs at the feet of Clinton's international-economic team, not his foreign-policy team. Including Poland, Czeschoslovakia, and Hungary in NATO completed the poem of the Alliance, put the pupils in its eyes, choose your own metaphor; the enlistment of those nations in the triumphant Pact formalized and accomplished the West's longest-term geopolitical objectives -- taking central Europe off the table of conquest in any direction.
Pulling in the Baltics is another matter, weighted heavily by the fact that they were simply gobbled up by the Soviets in an act of plain annexation. Contrast, say, Ukraine. And Georgia, which is just too far away from continental Europe to make for much of a geostrategic link. If Georgia falls, NATO is safe. If Lithuania falls...
But the whole point is that these kinds of spasmodic fears are muted BOTH by the integration of central Europe into NATO and by the exclusion of Georgia and Ukraine. On the other hand, Russia, as I've speculated before, may be much more willing to 'lose' Georgia to NATO after leaving Georgia in whatever condition it pleases. Though surely this is extremely unlikely to happen in the Ukrainian case.
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