OVERBOARD!

SUMMARY

Hubris, West is Best boasting and domination led to imbalance and Putin snapping in frustration and anger.

Much talk these days of overfishing our seas.  Less about overgrazing our land and even less about overdominating, overextending and overinfluencing other countries.

Earlier this month, in an interview with Nick Robinson, German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said that the West was partly responsible for Russia's actions and the Ukraine War.  Unfortunately, Robinson did not pick him about it.  However, I think he meant the EU/NATO has been overenthusiastic in stretching its reach and influence to the former Warsaw Pact countries.

An open invitation to the former USSR countries to join us, first in the EU and then in NATO, was not essential.  I think it meant that Putin, a very different man from his immediate predecessors*, was pushed to the limits and finally snapped in February 2014, after his 'defeat' in the Revolution of Dignity in Maidan Square?

Or, did Merz mean that it didn't help with good relations with Russia when there was German reunification?  What exactly was said to the Russians about E Germany and NATO eastern expansion?  That must have been the seed, the start of EU/NATO eastwards overreaching of itself.  No magnanimity, no understanding of Russian/Moscow nationalism exemplified in Putin.

The sanity of MAD in the Cold War could have been maintained in an agreed balance between Russia and the American-led West.

* like Gorbachev (who served as the last leader of the Soviet Union from 1985 to the country's dissolution in 1991, Wikipedia) and Yeltsin.