TAC | No serious person in Washington can say they were not warned of the impact of their power-lust in expanding NATO. But the lie continues. The top foreign policy leaders who spoke up over the years against the destructive interventions were ignored.
William Burns, Biden's director of the CIA—the agency charged with knowing how other nations will act and react—has had a ringside seat on Russian and NATO policy for more than 30 years. In 1990, Burns served under Secretary of State James Baker in a planning role during the period when Baker made the pledge to Russia that NATO would not advance past the borders of the newly reunited Germany.
Burns's career as an anointed cardinal of the Deep State is well documented. In fact, he is a bit of a legacy. Burns's father, a major general in the Army, was deeply involved in intelligence work and served Reagan and Bush I on the Disarmament Councils. Burns himself was a Clinton appointee in 1995 when he wrote, while serving as counselor for political affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, that "hostility to early NATO expansion is almost universally felt across the domestic political spectrum here."
The intensity of Russia's antipathy to the expansion of NATO toward their border, and Ukraine in particular, was accentuated in a 2008 report by Burns—at that time U.S. ambassador to the Russian Federation—to Bush II Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: "Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests."
Even if Biden’s CIA director was not able to bring his extensive experience to bear this year, others in the State Department knew full well how Russia would react to open moves to add Ukraine to the membership rolls of NATO. Yet Victoria Nuland, mandarin in the neocon ranks of the foreign policy establishment and State Department, in 2013 boasted that the U.S. had spent more than $5 billion promoting pro-Western "civil society" groups in Ukraine since the end of the Cold War.
In 2014 the United States assisted, if not outright directed, a coup d'état against an elected government in Ukraine because that government wanted friendly relations with Russia—a larger neighbor with a shared history stretching back centuries. The Deep State could not tolerate that friendship. An infamous leaked call between then Assistant Secretary of State Nuland and former U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt discussing helping "midwife" the February 2014 revolution can be heard here. University of Chicago Professor John Mearsheimer gave a 2015 lecture in which he warned about the problems and dangers wrought by the 2014 U.S.-engineered Ukraine crisis.
After numerous rebuffed Russian diplomatic overtures to resolve the dangers posed by an unfriendly and NATO-armed Ukraine, Russia did act—as Kennan, Burns, and others predicted. The Russians moved in 2014 to defend their southern border. By supporting local Russian-speaking separatists, Russia was able to secure Crimea, a peninsula that had been central to the Russian Navy for 300 years. Did they go further? No. Did they start a full-on war? No. But they did as they had promised and moved to defend their nation’s southern front. As Professor John Mearsheimer pointed out in a June 6, 2022, lecture, there was a long list of provocations by the U.S. and NATO leading up to that.
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