csillagkohó’s Reviews > Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate > Status Update

The US did all it could to support Yeltsin despite his political weakness and lack of legitimacy: "A US diplomat serving in the Moscow embassy at the time of the [1996] election, Thomas Graham, asserted that the Clinton administration knew the election was not truly fair, but it was a case of 'the ends justifying the means'."

"In what the Times called 'the clearest rejection to date of collective internationalism', a Pentagon strategy paper asserted bluntly that the US mission was not to cooperate with Russia but 'to insure that no rival superpower is allowed to emerge'. A Ukrainian minister later asserted that, in 1992, an undersecretary at the State Department reached out to Kyiv's ambassador to urge Ukraine to seek NATO membership."

🚀 "When Gorbachev asked why Washingtin could 'find $100 billion for a regional war' in the Gulf, 'but none to make the Soviet Union a new country', Bush gave Moscow's nuclear arsenal as the reason: 'we feel the missiles aimed at New York'."

Thatcher was apparently opposed to NATO enlargement? Textbook broken clock