Ukraine Joining NATO Is A Threat & Provocation To Russia

Just As A Standing Army In Washington, DC Controlled By Federalists Was Viewed As A Threat To the US Anti-Federalists In the 1780s

Since the Ukrainian coup d’etat of February 20, 2014, there has been much debate about whether Ukraine joining NATO constitutes an existential security threat to Russia. Russia certainly believed it does; in part, that’s why it launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Although Donbass separatism and the non-implementation of the Minsk II Agreement also precipitated Russia’s illegal invasion, Ukraine’s military relationship with NATO was Moscow’s explicit casus belli.

In fact, Ukraine doesn’t currently qualify for NATO membership for two reasons: 1) it’s government isn’t free enough; and 2) not all 30 current NATO members would have approved Ukraine joining, at least not before Russia’s full-scale invasion this past February.

Yet, the US and NATO members (the West) had been treating Ukraine as a de facto NATO member since the 2014 coup. The West had given billions in military and economic aid to Ukraine, NATO had conducted war games with the Ukrainian military inside Ukraine, a few miles from the Russian border, and NATO naval maneuvers occurred in the Black Sea, not far from the Russian warm-water naval base at Sevastopol.

And it has been noted before: NATO is no longer just a defensive alliance, nor does it concern itself only with European affairs. Over the last quarter century, NATO has been involved in four offensive wars: 1) in Kosovo in 1999; 2) in Afghanistan from 2001-2021; 3) in Iraq from 2003-2011; and 4) in Libya in 2011. Only the Kosovo War in 1999 took place in Europe.

Also, NATO today includes countries — Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia — which joined Nazi Germany in its June 22, 1941 Operation Barbarossa invasion of the old Soviet Union, which led to the most destructive war in human history, resulting in the death of 26.6 million Soviets by 1945 — 13.7 percent of the 1939 Soviet population. (By comparison, imagine if the US won a war today — a war which began in Sept. 2018 — which killed 45 million Americans in less than four years.) Although the invasions were indefensible, should we be surprised that the Soviet Union invaded Hungary in November, 1956 and Czechoslovakia [Slovakia joined Germany in 1941 in its Soviet invasion.] in August, 1968 when those nations elected anti-Soviet governments?

Additionally, we should note that in the debate over ratifying the US Constitution in the late 1780s, the anti-Federalists opposed the creation of standing army. The anti-Federalists believed that a Federalist government in power in Washington, DC, which possessed a standing army, was a threat and provocation.

Also note that in the late 1780s, three of the world’s most powerful nations had a presence in North America : Britain in Canada and what is now the northwestern US; France in Louisiana, which then stretched from Louisiana up to the Canadian border and west to Nevada; and Spain, which controlled Florida, Texas, California and what is now the American Southwest. Yet, in spite of this, the anti-Federalists correctly viewed the Federalists in Washington, DC possessing a standing army a bigger threat to their security.