The increasingly fraught endgame to the Russia-Ukraine war reflects a larger ongoing debate in the US policy community about who is ultimately responsible for the conflict.
Did NATO Expansion Start the War in Ukraine? An Analysis
President Trump has asserted on several occasions that the war happened mostly because of the incompetence of the Biden administration. Several commentators have stepped forward opining that the United States is ultimately responsible for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine because allegedly we broke the promise given to Moscow in the waning months of the Cold War that if the Soviets agreed to the unification of Germany, there would be no NATO presence East of the German border.
By this logic, even the first round of NATO enlargement in 1999 that brought Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary into the alliance should be seen as the cause of the subsequent devastation unleashed by Russia against Ukraine. Of late, academics with impeccable credentials have been repeating this argument in lectures and podcasts.
In short, much public debate over the war in Ukraine seems increasingly disconnected from reality. The responsibility for the invasion and the carnage is unequivocally Vladimir Putin’s, and this simple fact ought to be the departure point for any rational path forward to ending the conflict.
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