To prove that we'd probably need a FOIA request or a large CIA/USAID/NED document leak. Saying "nobody forced them" while the US operated probably the most effective coercive soft power institutions the world has ever seen, by subsidizing NGOs and "pro-democracy movements", strikes me as incredibly naive.
You have no idea what you are talking about and are clearly trying to spin a narrative out of nowhere. I, like many others in my country, voted for decades for governments that supported entry into NATO because we universally saw cooperation with other European countries as vital to our security. Our diplomats and politicians went to extreme lengths to achieve this goal, and it is considered one of the crowning achievements of the post-USSR era, alongside EU membership. These are universally recognized as the two most important foreign policy achievements since the end of the Cold War.
This builds upon past experience: Hitler and Stalin were able to divide and conquer Europe in large part due to the Wilsonian belief in international law and neutrality by other countries. In the end, neutrality meant Hitler and Stalin could invade other European countries one by one at their convenience without triggering a wider backlash. That was a catastrophic failure of pre-WWII diplomacy, and we have no intention of repeating the mistake.
I don't need an American NGO to convince me that simply hoping we're not the next item on the menu is not a sound national security policy.
Do you have references for WHEN the Russians initiated support for anti-Georgian separatism? If it was after the major NATO expansions of 1999 and 2004 it's kinda a moot point.
There is a wider history behind it, like the April 9 tragedy from 1989, when Soviet soldiers killed 21 Georgians who demonstrated in favor of Georgian independence from the USSR. Most of the killed were women, their faces were smashed in with sapper shovels so badly that they became unrecognizable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_9_tragedy It was one of the pivotal moments of USSR's collapse. Georgia was much further away from the spotlight of international press than, say, Poland, and that allowed the Russians to adopt a much more violent approach there to prevent Georgia from seceding from the USSR. If this is all news to you, then you need to pick up a book on USSR's history to gain a frame of reference. And not some sterile study of diplomatic telegrams, but history as people experienced it.
>You have no idea what you are talking about and are clearly trying to spin a narrative out of nowhere.
I have no regional experience with the tiny backwater corner of the world known as "the Baltics"....but I absolutely understand how my country exerts influence in numerous larger, more important places, with even more significant risks.....and it's by heavily using the tools that I mentioned. I'm not willing to give our government the benefit of the doubt, given our extensive list of malevolent priors. If you are saying there was overwhelming domestic support for NATO, okay, but I'd consider that an exception, not a norm.
>I don't need an American NGO to convince me that simply hoping we're not the next item on the menu is not a sound national security policy.
Every nation that isn't at least a major regional power (Turkey as an example) is on somebody's menu. Maybe you guys have been punched in the face so many times by your local Great Powers that reaching for anyone else, even from across the ocean, seemed sound....but as we are witnessing now in real-time, you are also finding out that America's benevolence is neither infinite nor eternal.
Re: 1991 South Ossetia War. Why is it ok for the Georgians to secede from the Soviet Union but not ok for the South Ossetians to secede from Georgia? Why is it morally good for the US to arm the Ukrainians, who feel aggrieved, but not moral for Russia to arm the South Ossetians, who feel aggrieved?
I have no regional experience with the tiny backwater corner of the world known as "the Baltics"....but I absolutely understand how my country exerts influence in numerous larger, more important places, with even more significant risks.....and it's by heavily using the tools that I mentioned. I'm not willing to give our government the benefit of the doubt, given our extensive list of malevolent priors. If you are saying there was overwhelming domestic support for NATO, okay, but I'd consider that an exception, not a norm.
Yes, I can see that you have no regional experience, and pinning everything on the US is an obvious attempt to fill the gap with what you have. But you're wrong. These attitudes were the norm, not an exception. Hungary, for example, held a referendum in 1997 and 85.33% of voters expressed support for joining NATO. The 1956 Hungarian revolution and its violent suppression by Soviet soldiers, who killed 3000 civilians, did far more to shape the desire to join NATO than anything the US ever did. It is extremely provincial and backwaterish to fall back on US-centric explanations for everything that has happened in Europe.
Re: 1991 South Ossetia War. Why is it ok for the Georgians to secede from the Soviet Union but not ok for the South Ossetians to secede from Georgia? Why is it morally good for the US to arm the Ukrainians, who feel aggrieved, but not moral for Russia to arm the South Ossetians, who feel aggrieved?
As the USSR collapsed, the Soviet central government employed a strategy of inflaming ethnic divisions to weaken independence movements. Their strategy aimed not to support the separatist groups, but to create instability in Soviet republics and disrupt their ability to form independent states by creating frozen conflicts: ongoing, unresolved issues that would drain the resources and attention of the newly independent states and prevent them from fully consolidating their sovereignty. This strategy saw its widest successes in Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Nagorno-Karabakh, but attempts that ultimately failed were made in many other places too. We saw exactly the same strategy again in Ukraine, when unmarked Russian forces pretended to be local separatists and declared the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics.
Transnistria, South Ossetia, etc remain internationally unrecognized - even by Russian allies like Belarus - because they represent manufactured conflicts rather than genuine independence movements.
This builds upon past experience: Hitler and Stalin were able to divide and conquer Europe in large part due to the Wilsonian belief in international law and neutrality by other countries. In the end, neutrality meant Hitler and Stalin could invade other European countries one by one at their convenience without triggering a wider backlash. That was a catastrophic failure of pre-WWII diplomacy, and we have no intention of repeating the mistake.
I don't need an American NGO to convince me that simply hoping we're not the next item on the menu is not a sound national security policy.
1991: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Ossetia_war_(1991%E2%80%...There is a wider history behind it, like the April 9 tragedy from 1989, when Soviet soldiers killed 21 Georgians who demonstrated in favor of Georgian independence from the USSR. Most of the killed were women, their faces were smashed in with sapper shovels so badly that they became unrecognizable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_9_tragedy It was one of the pivotal moments of USSR's collapse. Georgia was much further away from the spotlight of international press than, say, Poland, and that allowed the Russians to adopt a much more violent approach there to prevent Georgia from seceding from the USSR. If this is all news to you, then you need to pick up a book on USSR's history to gain a frame of reference. And not some sterile study of diplomatic telegrams, but history as people experienced it.