You make a good point. The EU/NATO expansion was deliberately intended to hem Russia in, and Russia's actions are at least partly in response to that.
However, there's a big difference between expanding your sphere of influence through "soft power" whereby those countries voluntarily join you, and expanding it through military invasion, as Russia is doing.
"Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting."
I don’t agree much with Machiavelli for one, but more importantly he and Sun Tzu lived during a time when war was very common and just happened all the time with little provocation. In the post WW2 world the goal should be to avoid war at all costs and achieve goals by other means.
I'd argue war is as common now as in the times of Machiavelli or Sun Tzu. Even after WW2 and only considering US boots on the ground, how many military conflicts have there been?
There are five major ones:
Korean War (1950-1953)
Vietnam War (1955-1975)
Persian Gulf War (1990-1991)
War in Afghanistan (2001-2021)
Iraq War (2003-2011)
If you count proxy wars, it wouldn't be such a stretch to say we've been fighting almost continuously since we dropped the bomb.
Realists try to wrap Putin's decisionmaking in layers of geopolitical reasoning, when the dude literally compares himself to Peter the Great and uses 17th century maps to claim that Ukraine is an illegitimate nation. This is bog-standard nationalist stuff.
Tucker Carlson literally sat down with Putin and did everything he could to tee up this nonsense about NATO that Westerners want to hear and believe was the real reason, and instead Putin dropped 45 minutes worth of nationalist pseudohistory on him that had nothing to do with NATO. Nobody in Russia pretends the war is about NATO. It's just not really part of their narrative at all.
Please explain how a Russian nationalism that sees the Russian Empire at its height as a golden age is not a legitimate threat to all of Europe but especially Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, and Ukraine, such that NATO expansion is fully legitimated.
You can't blame NATO expansion for Russian aggression (and call it "threatening") while at the same time literally admitting that Russia is strongly nationalist and would love to reclaim all of its former territories (which is why all of those countries desperately wanted to join NATO).
Fuck dude, Russia is the largest country on earth (see: expansionism) and has the first or second largest stockpile of nuclear weapons. They have no right to feel "threatened" by their smaller neighbors banding together.
Europe is as much Russia’s historical sphere of influence as the western hemisphere is ours. From the time of the Monroe Doctrine to the Cuban missle crisis and beyond, we have not tolerated any foreign incursion in North or South America—even to the point of removing democratically-elected socialists and installing pro-US dictators such as Chile’s Salvador Allende and Augusto Pinochet. Don’t be fooled by our own propaganda.
Seen in that light, a US strategy of overt and steady NATO encroachment combined with covert action to foment rebellion in multiple ex-Soviet states isn’t far fetched. And even if we didn’t secretly fund the latter, a paranoid Putin certainly wouldn’t doubt it and would react accordingly.
The attempt to rewrite history into "foreign encroachment" is either utterly ignorant of the actual facts, or just bad faith trolling.
The reasons why Eastern Europe was very passionate about joining NATO are clear from their history. And getting accepted into the organization was a major and very widely documented struggle. The Polish government went as far as threatening to sink Bill Clinton's re-election campaign in 1996 by urging Polish-Americans to vote for Republicans unless Clinton agreed to admitting Poland into NATO.
Now, people like you are trying to depict this as some sort of grand anti-Russian masterplan laid out in Washington. Nobody, not even Russians from that era, support this fringe story.
“You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.”
― Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Here are the facts of NATO encroachment from the fall of the Berlin wall to the annexation of Crimea:
1. Feb 1990: The US, through West German chancellor Helmut Kohl, hints at freezing NATO’s borders in order to secure German reunification.
"Kohl thus found himself in a complicated position as he prepared to meet with Gorbachev on February 10, 1990. He had received two letters, one on either end of his flight from West Germany to the Soviet Union, the first from Bush and the second from Baker, and the two contained different wording on the same issue. Bush’s letter suggested that NATO’s border would begin moving eastward; Baker’s suggested that it would not.
According to records from Kohl’s office, the chancellor chose to echo Baker, not Bush, since Baker’s softer line was more likely to produce the results that Kohl wanted: permission from Moscow to start reunifying Germany.”
European motivations for joining NATO are obvious and beyond debate: what formerly war-torn nation wouldn't want shelter under our nuclear umbrella?
But while whether or not gradual, but deliberate NATO encroachment was a Neocon stratagem may be debatable to you and me, I doubt Putin, a paranoid autocrat who considers the fall of the USSR one of history's great calamaties, looking at these facts, would have the least question whatsoever.
Perhaps I was mistaken in thinking this was obvious, but... their opinion is utterly irrelevant; only one person's opinion matters here and that's Putin's.
Exactly my point: this is the story that the current dictator is spinning to justify his crimes.
It's also funny how Putin now lies about how invading Ukraine is all about NATO, when in the first few years of the war, Russia denied any involvement and claimed that the tens of thousands of unmarked soldiers with Russian tanks, artillery and anti-air systems capable of shooting down high-altitude airliners were just disgruntled secessionist Ukrainians fighting against nazis in Kyiv with weapons from military surplus stores. According to Putin, it was a civil war in Ukraine, and Russia had nothing to do with it.
Please clarify how NATO encroachment is non-threatening to a Russian nationalism that sees the Russian Empire at its height as a golden age.
That's exactly the point: almost all of Eastern Europe rushed into NATO to prevent becoming unwilling participants in another "golden age of the Russian empire". NATO is a massive pain in the ass for those who dream of enslaving the peoples of Europe, and not a problem at all for those who are free from this sick desire.
One of the pre-Putin foreign ministers of Russia has maintained for decades that NATO offers free security on Russia's western border. Its rules, especially those related to civilian oversight of military affairs, ensure that NATO members remain stable and predictable. The mutual defense guarantee acts as a moderating force that reduces the likelihood of unexpected moves by a single country. What normal country wouldn't want to border a military alliance dominated by overly cautious pacifists?
Sure, the mutual-defense guarantee can be a moderating force, or it can be a ticket to rapid escalation (case in point WW1) and, potentially therefore, nuclear war.
The fact that the Cold War ended peacefully, and with the USSR‘s dissolution to boot, is one of history’s great miracles. With the world’s return to its default multi-polar state, we really shouldn’t press our luck.
Give Russia and China their spheres of influence while we protect our own. The tail risk of nuclear war just isn’t worth whatever gains Neocons promise. After all, how did their Iraqi and Afghan experiments in democracy turn out?
Russia already has its sphere of influence, but it is rapidly shrinking because aligning with Russia offers neither peace nor prosperity nor anything else of value. Politically, economically, scientifically, and culturally, it is a dead end. Russia is not the first country to slip into irrelevance and struggle to accept the loss of its influence, and no amount of temper tantrums has ever changed that for anyone.
The UK, France, Belgium, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Turkey, Mongolia, and many others were vast empires at some point in history. They have all had to adopt a self-image that reflects their true political, cultural, and economic weight in the present world. Russian ambitions are too detached from reality, given that they account for only a percentage or two of global GDP and population, and are in a downward trend.
I don't disagree about Russia's prospects. China, too, is facing a demographic collapse it will take generations to mend. But the nuclear arsenal of both countries makes this irrelevant for policy now.
However, there's a big difference between expanding your sphere of influence through "soft power" whereby those countries voluntarily join you, and expanding it through military invasion, as Russia is doing.
The two are not at all comparable.