{"id":7442,"date":"2015-04-20T05:53:40","date_gmt":"2015-04-20T10:53:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=7442"},"modified":"2015-04-20T05:53:40","modified_gmt":"2015-04-20T10:53:40","slug":"nato-increasingly-surrounds-the-russian-threat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=7442","title":{"rendered":"NATO Increasingly Surrounds the \u2018Russian Threat\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 class=\"entry-title\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonsblog.com\/2015\/04\/nato-increasingly-surrounds-russian-threat.html\" target=\"_blank\">NATO Increasingly Surrounds the \u2018Russian Threat\u2019<\/a><\/h3>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">On Saturday, April 18th, the Commander of \u00a0the U.S. Army in Europe, Ben Hodges,\u00a0<a title=\"told Britain\u2019s Telegraph\" href=\"http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/news\/worldnews\/europe\/russia\/11547247\/Europe-faces-a-real-threat-from-Russia-warns-US-army-commander.html\" target=\"_blank\"><span class=\"s2\">told Britain\u2019s<i>Telegraph<\/i><\/span><\/a>\u00a0 that \u201cThere is a Russian threat,\u201d and that \u201cThe best insurance we have against a showdown is that NATO stands together.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">Ever since the Soviet Union\u2019s military alliance, the Warsaw Pact, dissolved in 1991, NATO has expanded eastward to Russia\u2019s borders, and now it is preparing to admit yet another nation on Russia\u2019s border: Ukraine. This eastward expansion broke (and breaks, since it\u2019s continuing) a verbal agreement which had produced the termination of the Warsaw Pact (the Soviet Union\u2019s equivalent of America\u2019s NATO alliance).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><span class=\"s3\"><a title=\"In February 1990, U.S. President George H.W. Bush sent his Secretary of State, James Baker, to Moscow to negotiate with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev an end to the Cold War. According to Jack Matlock, the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union then, Baker offered Gorbachev the following deal:\" href=\"https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/2014\/05\/15\/how-nato-jabs-russia-on-ukraine\/\" target=\"_blank\">In February 1990, U.S. President George H.W. Bush sent his Secretary of State, James Baker, to Moscow to negotiate with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev an end to the Cold War. According to Jack Matlock, the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union then, Baker offered Gorbachev the following deal:<\/a><\/span><span class=\"s4\">\u00a0\u201cAssuming there is no expansion of NATO jurisdiction to\u00a0the East, not one inch,\u00a0what would you prefer, a\u00a0Germany embedded in NATO, or one that can go\u00a0independently in any direction it chooses.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">Baker knew that Russia, after Hitler\u2019s invasion of Russia in June 1941 (<a title=\"\u201cOperation Barbarossa\u201d\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Operation_Barbarossa\" target=\"_blank\"><span class=\"s5\">\u201cOperation Barbarossa\u201d<\/span><\/a>), feared, more than anything, the possibility that an independent Germany would build a nuclear-weapons force and use it against Russia. According to\u00a0<a title=\"Ray McGovern\u2019s account of the meeting,\" href=\"https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/2014\/05\/15\/how-nato-jabs-russia-on-ukraine\/\" target=\"_blank\"><span class=\"s5\">Ray McGovern\u2019s account of the meeting,<\/span><\/a>\u00a0Gorbachev \u201cwasted little time agreeing to the deal.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>NATO Increasingly Surrounds the \u2018Russian Threat\u2019 On Saturday, April 18th, the Commander of \u00a0the U.S. Army in Europe, Ben Hodges,\u00a0told Britain\u2019sTelegraph\u00a0 that \u201cThere is a Russian threat,\u201d and that \u201cThe best insurance we have against a showdown is that NATO stands together.\u201d Ever since the Soviet Union\u2019s military alliance, the Warsaw Pact, dissolved in 1991, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[4850,149,4851,359,3793,2534,553,694,742],"class_list":["post-7442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-bill-clinton","tag-cold-war","tag-george-bush","tag-germany","tag-jack-matlock","tag-mikhail-gorbachev","tag-nato","tag-russia","tag-soviet-union"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7442"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7442\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7443,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7442\/revisions\/7443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}