#Kissinger #video from 02022 commenting on, perhaps, the #Ukraine war. #toread
on 02025-09-10#history #video #news (PBS MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour) from December 5, 01994 over #NATO expanding to include Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. Yeltsin opposed it at the CSCE Summit in Budapest. Jack Matlock (former #USA ambassador to the USSR): “The question is not if but when.” #Kissinger: “The Russians are not unhappy about the timing; they are unhappy about the fact [of NATO expansion].” Kissinger thought the expansion should happen as soon as possible, while Matlock didn’t, but both agreed that the Russians were very unhappy. Kissinger: “If we are reluctant to antagonize the Russians today when they’re weak, it is an illusion to think that somewhere three, four years down the road, we can suddenly move in that direction when they’re stronger.” Later, he says, “I don’t see why [adding Poland] should provoke them especially since we could make military, we have, for example, in Eastern Germany we have military arrangements whereby no non-German troops go beyond the Elbe.” I suspect those arrangements no longer exist. “We could make similar arrangements for Poland that no non-Polish troops will be stationed on Polish territory.” Kissinger paraphrases Yeltsin: “Anything east of that yellow-shaded area [Poland, Slovakia, Hungary] was connected to Russia as blood brothers.” Interviewer: “That’s Belarus and #Ukraine.” Kissinger: “...and strongly implied that no outside influence was permissible there.” More shockingly, Kissinger said, “I don’t think the Russian situation will ever become a clear-cut military threat.” Matlock: “There is one other factor we seem to be forgetting, and we did (though it was not a legally binding assurance) we gave categorical assurances to Gorbachev, back when the Soviet Union existed, that if a united Germany was able to stay in NATO, NATO would not be moved eastward.” So that wasn’t just something Putin invented. Kissinger (who at one point slips and refers to things being subject to “negotiation with the Soviets”) comes off as a terrible liar. Matlock: “It will definitely, as things stand now, leave the impression in Russia that the West is cutting them off and moving the line closer to their border. (...) the impact would be very negative in Moscow, in Russian politics, and would not be a service to those who want democratic institutions.”
on 02025-09-10