On February 9, 1990, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker assured Mikhail Gorbachev that if the Soviet leader would cooperate with German unification, NATO would not expand “one inch eastward.” This was just one of many assurances of Soviet security made by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991.

On December 12, 2017, the National Security Archive at George Washington University declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents about these assurances. As the National Security Archive reported at this time:

The documents show that multiple national leaders were considering and rejecting Central and Eastern European membership in NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991, that discussions of NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990 were not at all narrowly limited to the status of East German territory, and that subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion were founded in written contemporaneous memcons and telcons at the highest levels. 

The documents reinforce former CIA Director Robert Gates’s criticism of “pressing ahead with expansion of NATO eastward [in the 1990s], when Gorbachev and others were led to believe that wouldn’t happen.” The key phrase, buttressed by the documents, is “led to believe.”

As we now know, the U.S. broke these assurances—a decision characterized by George Kennan, America’s chief architect of Soviet containment policy during he Cold War—as “A Fateful Error” in his Feb. 5, 1997 New York Times editorial.

At the 2008 NATO Summit in Bucharest, Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed the assembly and stated his opposition to U.S. plans to deploy missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic, and his opposition to Georgia and Ukraine’s NATO membership bids.

I suspect that by stating his vehement opposition to Ukraine’s membership in NATO, Putin signaled to NATO leaders precisely how they could bait him into committing to a risky military adventure in Ukraine. Since I read George Kennan’s 1997 Times editorial, it’s been clear that the U.S. government has sought to maintain enmity with Russia in order to maintain NATO and to justify the DoD’s enormous ongoing expenditures on weapons systems. In other words, during the Cold War, NATO became a Sacred Cow that no one in Washington would dare slaughter.

Likewise, anyone who has seriously studied medical history understands that rigorous public sanitation and antibiotics are the true vanquishers of infectious diseases, and NOT vaccines. The Vaccine Cult was born and promulgated during a time when most of humanity lived in squalor. Enormous advances in sanitation, clean water, modern washing appliances for bed linens, etc., have revolutionized public health. Moreover, many infectious diseases that formerly killed children are now easily treatable with antibiotics and other medical advances.

And yet, vaccines remain, like NATO, a Sacred Cow. Will Trump & Kennedy take on two of the most powerful entrenched interests in the history of mankind?

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