Member-only story
Russian-Chinese Collusion and the Approaching Fall of the U.S.
Will this be Biden’s Chamberlain moment?
It has been clear since the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008 that Vladimir Putin is unwilling to tolerate NATO’s expansion straight to the borders of the old Soviet Union. Although relatively weakened from decades of war in Afghanistan, he did not hesitate to snuff out that threat when the Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili got too cozy with NATO and harbored ambitions of joining the EU.
The calculus at the time, both in the Georgian and the Western circles was that the Soviet military and political machine was too weakened by the un-winnable war in Afghanistan and the break up of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that the Kremlin would have to live with hostile forces on its eastern flank. It didn’t quite work out that way.
The resulting incursion into Georgia’s Southern Ossetia and Abkhazia ended up with Russia’s recognition of those regions as autonomous, and sent a clear signal to other post-Soviet Republics such as Ukraine that inclusion in NATO would cause a military incursion and the break-up of their country.
Now in 2021, a NATO pummeled by 4 years of internal discord sown by Trump and a bloodied U.S. military with a mutiny of anti-vaxxers in its ranks, is faced with the same…
