American foreign policy is mindlessly driven by the machinery of our Warfare State---a vast accretion of economic, diplomatic, spying and military capabilities which are ceaselessly in search of missions and justifications for their colossal call on the nation's resources. If you don't believe that just read Ray McGovern's succinct summary below of the US's epic double-cross of Russia on NATO.

It began as a pledge by the first Bush Administration to Gorbachev that in return for German unification and liberation of the "captive nations" there would be "not an inch" of NATO expansion. It ended up its opposite, and for no plausible reason of American security whatsoever. In fact, NATO went on to draft nearly the entire former "Warsaw Pact", expanding its membership by 12 nations. So doing, it encroached thousands of kilometers from its old Cold War boundaries to the very doorstep of Russia.

So what was the grand logic by which the safety and security of the good folks living in Bangor ME, Lincoln NE and Spokane WA would be enhanced by the addition of Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Latvia, Slovakia and Slovenia, among others, to our military shield against, well, no identifiable industrial state enemy? In Dustin Hoffman's epigrammatic style, it was fear of one word: Wimp!

That's right. Bill Clinton came to Washington fresh from wandering the Ozarks for 20 years after his stint as a Rhodes Scholar---and with no clue about the post-cold war world which had suddenly emerged after the fall of the Berlin wall. Accordingly, he was a sitting duck for catcalls from neocon Republicans and spurious platitudes from the national security bureaucracy about "nation-building" and America's post-war role as the "indispensable" keeper of the peace.

So as McGovern explains, Clinton just unilaterally cast aside the solemn pledges to freeze NATO at its existing borders that had been made by President Bush and Secretary Baker. In making these pledges the latter represented a world-wise generation that had experienced the long, costly, perilous cold war twilight and had recognized the profound opportunity for a fresh start that had fallen upon the world when the Soviet Union disintegrated.

By contrast, Clinton didn't want to face re-election against the hawkish Bob Dole and be stuck with the foreign policy "wimp" tag:

From the campaign trail on Oct. 22, 1996, two weeks before he defeated Bob Dole for a second term as president, Bill Clinton used NATO enlargement to advertise his assertiveness in foreign policy and America’s status as the “world’s indispensable nation.” Clinton bragged about proposing NATO enlargement at his first NATO summit in 1994, saying it “should enlarge steadily, deliberately, openly.” He never explained why.

The startling thing in hindsight is that many of America's most respected and experienced cold war thinkers saw the absolute folly of NATO expansion long before a single former member of the Soviet bloc had been added. The father of the "containment" doctrine and the original instigator of Truman's excessively and unfortunately aggressive anti-Soviet policy, George Kennan, had no doubt about the distilled lessons of half a century:

Clinton made what quintessential Russian specialist Ambassador George Kennan called a “fateful error.” Writing in the New York Times on Feb. 5, 1997, Kennan asserted: “Expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era.” “Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”

Needless to say, Kennan could not have been more clairvoyant. Yet wisdom and analysis were impotent in the face of the inexorable drive of the Warfare State to perpetuate itself. Indeed, once the process of NATO expansion was set in motion by Clinton's feckless campaign sloganeering, it took on the aura of United Way membership drive: Any nation east of the old cold war boundaries that had a flag and a couple of generals was fair game.

This mindless drive was eventually extended by George W.Bush's neocon warmongers to encompass former constituent parts of the Soviet Union itself, including Stalin's home province of Georgia and Khrushchev's homeland in the Ukraine. The Warfare State machinery-minders in the beltway did not get the irony, nor did they heed the dire warnings from saner heads inside the national security bureaucracy itself.

The US ambassador to Moscow in 2008, William Burns, a pedigreed member of the War Party and current Under-Secretary of State, left nothing to the imagination in a dispatch prior to the fateful Bucharest summit in July 2008 in which NATO announced that Georgia and the Ukraine were being invited to join a military alliance against an unspecified enemy:

...we have the text of a State Department cable dated Feb. 1, 2008, from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow bearing the unusual title: “NYET MEANS NYET: RUSSIA’S NATO ENLARGEMENT REDLINES.”

As it turned out, Burn's cable was just as clairvoyant as Kennan's warning a decade earlier. He foresaw Ukrainian upheaval and civil war along almost the precise vectors which are unfolding today:

“Summary. Following a muted first reaction to Ukraine’s intent to seek a NATO membership action plan at the [upcoming] Bucharest summit, Foreign Minister Lavrov and other senior officials have reiterated strong opposition, stressing that Russia would view further eastward expansion as a potential military threat. NATO enlargement, particularly to Ukraine, remains ‘an emotional and neuralgic’ issue for Russia, but strategic policy considerations also underlie strong opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. “In Ukraine, these include fears that the issue could potentially split the country in two, leading to violence or even, some claim, civil war, which would force Russia to decide whether to intervene.”

That was written in early 2008, not mid-February of this year. Some future historian will doubtless wonder, therefore, about the next events in this baleful evolution. After all, six months later the "peace" candidate did win!

No matter. Barrack Obama quickly performed the beltway pivot and soon populated his government with leading lights of the War Party including Robert Gates and Hillary Clinton.

The rest is history. Not only was the utterly pointless expansion of NATO never re-considered, its aggressive encroachment on Russia's borders was actually intensified by the current administration.

There is an underlying lesson here. It matters not a wit what candidates for President say about foreign policy or America's role in the world. So long as the current massive Warfare State machinery is left in place, and fed by upwards of $900 billion per year in fiscal rations, it will determine policy, not the voters and not the officials they elect.

So the only platform that would make any difference in the future is the "dismantlement platform". That is, a campaign to: withdraw from NATO and liquidate it; shutdown entirely obsolete institutions like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the National Endowment for Democracy and the military and civilian aid bureaucracies; drastically curtail the NSA/CIA/DIA/spy state apparatus; and, of course, drastically demobilize and defund the Pentagon's machinery of power projection and wars of invasion and occupation.

Absent a dismantlement of the Warfare State machinery, giant policy errors like the Bill Clinton's double-cross on NATO and Obama's foolish present confrontation with Putin are nearly guaranteed to recur.

By Ray McGovern