This map has featured in many posts on this site. For years it has been my stock response to the widely held view of Russia as a nation so aggressive that “we” – taxpayers in the Western Bloc – must part with trillions of dollars to stop it overrunning our civilisation. 1
Yet even the best visual aids need now and again to make way for the new and better. Future cartographic responses to idiocies widely peddled (and bought by the credulous) on Russia’s belligerence against peace loving NATO will therefore use a more recent offering:
Since the end of the Cold War, the anti-Russian NATO military alliance has added 14 member nations, including nations on Russia’s border. (Source: Monthly Review)
Note the new shadings for Ukraine and Georgia, the examples most cited – by folk who could not locate them on a map to save their lives – as proof of Russian aggression. How would Washington respond were Canada and Mexico to enter a Moscow led alliance predicated on ‘containing’ the threat, for which there is infinitely more hard evidence, posed by the USA?
Which brings me to where I happened upon my new and improved map of NATO enlargement. I found it today in a CovertAction piece posing three questions about America as force for good. For the many who are increasingly disturbed by all that is happening at the hands of the USA and junior partners – but are not quite ready to let in the full horror of US imperialism – it is well worth a read.
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- For a more materially grounded, so more reliable, take on why post Yeltsin Russia is once more The Enemy, see my post on Our Beautifully Democratic Wars.