Former President Bill Clinton just released an op-ed in The Atlantic. You can read the full article here but I suffered through reading it so you don’t have to. It appears that Clinton felt his legacy was being threatened as the truth is coming out about NATO expansion and how it lead directly to the current conflict in Ukraine. You can listen to more about that and how many experts warned against expanding NATO in the latest episode of Crawdads and Taters, which I co-host with Erin McCarley.
Bill Clinton’s piece in The Atlantic reads like CIA propaganda from start to finish. The first sentence says:
When I first became president, I said that I would support Russian President Boris Yeltsin in his efforts to build a good economy and a functioning democracy after the dissolution of the Soviet Union—but I would also support an expansion of NATO to include former Warsaw Pact members and post-Soviet states.
This is the first of many lies. In fact, there are so many lies in this piece, I won’t have time to cover them all. The fact of the matter is that the US did not support building a “good economy” or a “functioning democracy” at all in post Soviet Russia. Instead, they pushed privatization and actually rigged the election to make sure Boris Yeltsin was elected instead of his opposition. The very same publication that just released Clinton’s op-ed, The Atlantic, published an article in 2018 entitled The U.S. Needs to Face Up to Its Long History of Election Meddling. I recommend reading it all, but the key quote is:
What many Russians, but few Americans, know is that 20 years before Russia tried to swing an American presidential election, America tried to swing a presidential election in Russia. The year was 1996. Boris Yeltsin was seeking a second term, and Bill Clinton desperately wanted to help. “I want this guy to win so bad,” he told Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, “it hurts.”
The Clinton administration would go on to lobby the IMF to give Russia a $10 billion loan which Yeltsin promised to use on social spending during his campaign. The campaign itself was anything but fair with the state and privately owned media firmly in the pocket of Yeltsin. And there were also allegations that the election itself was rigged:
But Michael Meadowcroft, a Brit who led the election-observer team of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, later claimed there had been widespread voter fraud, which he had been pressured not to expose. In Chechnya, which international observers believe contained fewer than 500,000 adults, one million people voted, and Yeltsin—despite prosecuting a brutal war in the region—won exactly 70 percent.
President Clinton did not support democracy in Russia. He supported a corrupt President Yeltsin and was terrified that Yeltsin’s communist opponent would win and turn economy back into one which took care of its people’s material needs.
But enough on the first sentence of Clinton’s article…he continues:
Lately, NATO expansion has been criticized in some quarters for provoking Russia and even laying the groundwork for Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The expansion certainly was a consequential decision, one that I continue to believe was correct.
As United Nations ambassador and later secretary of state, my friend Madeleine Albright, who recently passed away, was an outspoken supporter of NATO expansion.
Here Clinton is telling the truth. But it is easy to discern that this was not the correct decision. Knowing that his good friend, Madeleine Albright supported it is a red flag in itself. Madeleine Albright also supported killing babies in Iraq, because the price was worth it.
Clearly this psychopath was giving out great advice all the time…on Iraq and on NATO. But Clinton could not resist the call out to her memory.
Clinton goes on to highlight a few people who opposed NATO expansion including George Kennan, Tom Friedman, and Mike Mandelbaum. He conveniently does not mention that a letter was written to his administration opposing the expansion which was signed by 50 foreign policy experts that included former Secretary of State Robert McNamara. Even the architect of the Vietnam War was against it!
After this glaring omission, Clinton continues to claim he supported democracy:
I did everything I could to help Russia make the right choice and become a great 21st-century democracy.
Rigging an election to make sure the communists lost was certainly the US definition of supporting democracy! He continues to talk of all the great things his administration did for Russia. One sentence in particular stands out:
In 1999, at the end of the Kosovo conflict, Secretary of Defense Bill Cohen reached an agreement with the Russian defense minister under which Russian troops could join UN-sanctioned NATO peacekeeping forces.
Wait a minute…the Kosovo conflict? Does that ring a bell? What happened there? Oh right, NATO bombed Belgrade for 78 days straight. Because NATO is a defensive alliance…
Clinton continues:
Yes, NATO expanded despite Russia’s objections, but expansion was about more than the U.S. relationship with Russia.
At this point, the sheer absurdity of his statements are becoming grating. Russia objected to NATO expansion but somehow the expansion was about the US relationship with Russia. He does not explain how going against Russia’s security interests was going to improve the US relationship. Maybe he means it was about starting a new Cold War and worsening the relationship.
But Clinton doesn’t stop there, he goes on:
Many countries that had been behind the Iron Curtain were seeking greater freedom, prosperity, and security with the EU and NATO, under inspiring leaders such as Václav Havel in the Czech Republic, Lech Wałęsa in Poland, and, yes, a young pro-democracy Viktor Orbán in Hungary.
Who was Václav Havel? Just an anti-communist leader who was toasted by Margaret Thatcher in 1993. Lech Wałęsa oversaw the privatization of the Polish economy after they declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1989. The results of this “shock therapy” program are described in Tadeusz Kowalik’s book From Solidarity to Sellout: The Restoration of Capitalism in Poland and have been summed up as:
Instead, Poland was subjected to a harsh return to the market, resulting in the wildly unequal distribution of the nation’s productive property—often in the hands of former political rulers, who, along with foreign owners, constitute the new capitalist class.
And lastly, Viktor Orbán is anything but pro-Democracy, though I suppose Clinton is reminiscing about the old days, not when The Economist wrote in 2018 “The EU is tolerating—and enabling—authoritarian kleptocracy in Hungary.”
At this point, Bill Clinton appears to go into comedy mode with the following statement:
Madeleine Albright excelled at every step. Indeed, few diplomats have ever been so perfectly suited for the times they served as Madeleine.
This is laughable. Almost as bad as Henry Kissinger receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. It seems that Bill thinks appealing to the ghost of Madeleine Albright is a surefire way to back up his decisions since this is the second time he’s done it in the article.
Per capita GDPs have more than tripled in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. All three countries have participated in a variety of NATO missions since joining, including the peacekeeping force in Kosovo.
And he’s back at it with Kosovo. This peacekeeping mission has been documented by Human Rights Watch:
Human Rights Watch concludes that as few as 489 and as many as 528 Yugoslav civilians were killed in the ninety separate incidents in Operation Allied Force.
And:
As noted, there are seven confirmed and five likely incidents involving civilian deaths from cluster bomb use by the United States and Britain. Altogether, some ninety to 150 civilians died from cluster bomb use.
Keeping the peace required using indiscriminate force in civilian areas. And Clinton is proud that these new NATO nations participated in these war crimes. But Bill isn’t done with the lies and misinformation yet:
Now Russia’s unprovoked and unjustified invasion of Ukraine, far from casting the wisdom of NATO expansion into doubt, proves that this policy was necessary. Russia under Putin clearly would not have been a content status quo power in the absence of expansion. It wasn’t an immediate likelihood of Ukraine joining NATO that led Putin to invade Ukraine twice—in 2014 and in February—but rather the country’s shift toward democracy that threatened his autocratic power at home, and a desire to control the valuable assets beneath the Ukrainian soil.
All of this we thoroughly debunked in Crawdads and Taters so I will only briefly cover it here. Putin’s redline was in fact the likelihood of Ukraine joining NATO. This was stated repeatedly and ignored by the US and Zelensky. Putin did not invade Ukraine in 2014 as the Crimea decided peacefully to join Russia. Ukraine did not shift towards democracy as a democratically elected president was unlawfully removed in a coup that was strongly influenced by the US and neo-Nazi groups.
Bill finishes his piece with another callout to the ghost of Madeleine Albright:
She was right about NATO when I was president and right about Ukraine now. I miss her so much, but I can still hear her voice. So should we all.
Yes, we can still hear here justifying that “it was worth it.” If she were alive today, no doubt she would say the deaths of thousands of civilians in Ukraine in the Donbas and the current war is worth it. As are those dying to US bombs in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Somalia. And all those who continue to die under US sanctions in Afghanistan and Russia. It was worth it.
Reading Bill Clinton’s article was not worth it. Zero stars, do not recommend.