You say "[welcome] to NATO' and I say "bare-faced empire building"

Last week, an episode of The Political Butterfly Effect posited the thought-provoking notion that an incident at sea, by scotching the electoral chances of Al Gore in Florida (in  his presidential campaign in 2000), resulted in a big hit for global warming.

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At first I thought this was a spectacular own goal for Gaia; but then I realized that this was (typically – in the Anthropocene) anthropomorphic. Gaia doesn't care about global warming: So it wipes a few species out.... And?
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The previous presidential campaign, in 1996, was mentioned in an article I heard mentioned in an interview with Jeremy Bowen on the BBC news last week. It was George Kennan's Op-Ed article in the New York Times shortly after Bill Clinton's second inauguration (25 years ago). In it Kennan wrote (prophetically) that

...expanding NATO would be 'most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era;' ...[and] that such  would inflame nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion and have adverse effect on development of Russian democracy 

His opening paragraph argues:

Laterr in the same article he writes:

Such a decision [expanding NATO] may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking. And, last but not least, it might make it much more difficult, if not impossible, to secure the Russian Duma's ratification of the Start II agreement and to achieve further reductions of nuclear weaponry.

Nobody in their right mind...

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 (which, of course, excludes Donald Trump, who is filled with admiration for the criminally insane psychopath:

"You gotta say, that's pretty savvy....This is genius. Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine ... Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that's wonderful."

Source

)
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...could defend the fiendish excesses of Putin, but one couldn't say NATO  hasn't been coat-trailing for the last 30-odd years. Well, now the wounded and caged bear has lashed out, just as Kennan predicted. And the West looks on in horror mixed with shocked fascination, just as the crowds did in former times at many another bear-baiting. (In that case the smart money was on the dogs, but this time I'm not so sure....)

b

Update: 2022.02.28.16:25 – Added PS

PS to underline Kennan's point, here are his last two paragraphs:

Russians are little impressed with American assurances that it reflects no hostile intentions. They would see their prestige (always uppermost in the Russian mind) and their security interests as adversely affected. They would, of course, have no choice but to accept expansion as a military fait accompli. But they would continue to regard it as a rebuff by the West and would likely look elsewhere for guarantees of a secure and hopeful future for themselves.

It will obviously not be easy to change a decision already made or tacitly accepted by the alliance's 16 member countries. But there are a few intervening months before the decision is to be made final; perhaps this period can be used to alter the proposed expansion in ways that would mitigate the unhappy effects it is already having on Russian opinion and policy.

Those 'few intervening months' slipped by unused about 25 years ago, and see what's happened.

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Incidentally, I see the BBC are following the Wikipedia-endorsed phonemic pronunciation

not reading to the end of the sentence (to get the phonetic nitty-gritty):

Kyiv (/kiːv/ KEEV; Ukrainian: Київ, pronounced [ˈkɪjiu̯] ...

But writing comes after speech, and when they transcribed that sound they felt that two distinct letters were needed. I don't buy the /ki:v/ pronunciation, and will continue with the /ki:ev/ pronunciation that has been current in British English throughout my life. And when Clive Myrie et al. trot out their monophthong as if they had a monopoly on Slavonic phonological rectitude it gets up my nose rather more than somewhat. 

I don't know what is right; besides, should one use the right Ukrainian or the right Russian? But I would lay money on its not being a monophthong; judging by the Ukrainian spelling, it could even be a tetraphthong (don't bother looking that up – it's hot off the presses 😉)^PPS
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