Thread by @ClimateAudit

100% agree. There seems to have been a fork in the road in 1991 in which we in the West took the wrong fork. Russian democracy movement was flush with victory over communism.
Matlock reminds us that it was victory of Russian democrats - not US arms manufacturers and corporations

https://twitter.com/HansMahncke/status/1507529341411995654

but instead of welcoming Russia, NATO more or less re-invented itself as a sort of mean girls' sorority whose entire subsequent purpose was the exclusion of Russia, demonizing and marginalizing it to make it into the enemy they desired

in the process, NATO expanded to include all the east European countries which had been the primary perpetrators of the Holocaust, thus further transforming its focus from liberal western European nations to amplifying eastern European grudges and ideologies

when candidate Trump sensibly floated the idea of good relations with Russia, the uniparty Beltway warmongering class turned on him and undercut his administration so thoroughly that any rapprochement was made impossible for a generation, with Trump himself now leading the hounds

right now, we don't seem to have any good history of the past 30 years, showing how the fork in the road taken in 1991 has led to the rise of increasingly insolent US regime change wars that, in the end, have done so much to damage the culture, character and economy of US itself.

I've long been an admirer of how the great US statesmen at end of WW2 chose to re-build enemy states of Germany and Japan, rather than perpetuate cycle of revenge through traditional extortion and punishment.

In contrast, rather than using end of Cold War as an opportunity to similarly end cycle of revenge in Russia and E Europe, venal Clinton administration officials implemented policies that both destroyed Russian economy while enriching corrupt oligarchs and Western carpetbaggers