Chuck Spinney: NATO’s Failure Predicted in 1998

It is pretty clear from Vladimir Putin’s recent speech regarding the Russian moves into Crimea that the expansion of NATO is a major grievance.  Russians believe the quid pro quo for disbanding the Warsaw Pact and their withdrawing from Eastern Europe was a promise by the West not to expand NATO eastward.  Putin’s speech drips with a sense of betrayal, and not entirely without reason, as Ambassador Jack Matlock explains here.  It is not as if the problems of NATO expansion were unforeseeable.  Attached herewith is a warning about NATO expansion made 16 years ago by my friend Lee Gaillard warned that NATO expansion might lead to problems.