IN the Cold War, it was so much simpler. There was the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies and there were the Americans at the head of NATO. The assurance of mutual destruction if the nuclear option were triggered assured that it never was. Only once did the world step on to the threshold of Armageddon when in 1962 Moscow began to ship intermediate ballistic missiles to Cuba, which would have put been able to target much of the United States. President John F Kennedy was not prepared to countenance having the perceived enemy setting such a destructive capability on his country's doorstep. He told Russian leader Nikita Krushchev the missile sites would be destroyed if they were not withdrawn. If Krushchev tried to launch a nuclear attack in response, US missiles would rain down on the Soviet Union. The missiles were withdrawn. Under the Obama presidency came the proposal to set up US missiles in Poland and Hungary which had both once been part of the Warsaw Pact but have since become part of NATO. Within the State Department and Washington's Georgetown University were there no researchers or professors capable of analyzing the Kremlin's reactions to this missile plan, in the light of how the White House reacted to Krushchev's Cuban missile scheme half a century ago? Did any of the experts in Washington ask themselves what was substantively different from 50 years earlier when the boot was on the other foot? When Washington felt beleaguered and threatened it reacted robustly. Indeed so great a threat did the communist regime of Fidel Castro seem to the Kennedy White House, there was even a US-backed invasion of Cuban exiles that sought and spectacularly failed to overthrow the dictator. In five days in August 2008, the Russian army invaded the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, worsted the Georgian armed forces and seized two Georgian regions that wanted to break away. Washington declared this to be aggression. But it chose to ignore the reality that with its encouragement, Georgia was getting ready to apply to NATO. For good measure, a small American military base had been set up in the country. Georgia and NATO got the message. The application was shelved. But it seems that once again absolutely no lessons were learned. In 2014, the pro-Russian president of the Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown in a revolution. A new government struggled to reform an inefficient Soviet-style economy while battling ingrained graft. The EU was anxious to help economically but it was Washington that once again suggested that this former close ally of the old Soviet Union might think of joining NATO. And the Ukrainians liked the idea, seeing it as a guarantee of their independence in the face of their hugely stronger neighbor. But in the Crimea, Ukraine housed on lease the Russian Black Sea fleet. At a stroke, Moscow could have found a major naval facility actually in a country that was part of NATO. In this light the seizure of Crimea, however illegal, made substantial strategic sense. Now Montenegro is toying with NATO membership and so Russian troops have begun joint maneuvers with Serbs across the border. The Americans can claim all they like that NATO is a purely defensive alliance. The Russians don't believe them. And after NATO's "defensive" assaults in Afghanistan and Libya, it is hard to say they are wrong.
