Velshi: It’s time to talk about the Warsaw Pact
Earlier this week Russia expressed a new yet old complaint that NATO is getting too involved in the conflict with Ukraine. The Kremlin spokesperson called NATO hostile and said the military alliance is quote trying its best to make its involvement in the conflict around Ukraine as clear as possible end quote. Russia's fuming over the increased military aid that's coming to Ukraine from NATO countries specifically advanced battle tanks that have been sent by the United States and Germany. But none of this should come as any surprise to Russia. NATO has consistently supported Ukraine over the last year of unprovoked warfare not to mention it was the possibility of Ukraine joining NATO which triggered Russia's invasion in the first place. To truly understand the geopolitics of this current conflict is to understand the long and brutal history of the Soviet Union, the creation of NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Goes back a century to the 1920s after the Russian monarchy was abolished as a result of the Russian Revolution.
A socialist government was formed. There was essentially a civil war and the pro-communist Red Army prevailed. In 1922 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR was formed out of Russia, Ukraine, Biola Russia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. Vladimir Lenin was its leader. It became one of the most powerful nations in the world and the biggest in the literal sense occupying nearly one-sixth of the Earth's land mass. Over the years and especially through and immediately after World War II the USSR grew it added even more countries and territory. Joseph Stalin took the helm in 1924 he would lead the USSR for three decades.
World War II began with an agreement between Hitler and Stalin to carve up much of Eastern Europe between German and Soviet spheres of influence. But less than two years into that deal Hitler broke the pact and invaded the Soviet Union. So Stalin worked with the West to liberate Nazi held countries in Eastern Europe. But as the Soviets liberated nation after nation they began to install their own communist governments claiming the land as their own and settling ethnic Russians in non-Russian speaking countries. At the war's end the US and the UK had feared the global spread of communism so in 1949 the United States, Canada and 10 European allies formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO. NATO was formed in 1949 with the sole intention of providing collective security against an expansionist Soviet Union. The foundations of the alliance were laid down with the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty more popularly known as the Washington Treaty.
The treaty reaffirmed the inherent right of independent states to individual or collective defense. Collective defense is really at the heart of the treaty. It's enshrined in Article 5 which commits members to protect each other. In other words if one NATO member is attacked the other members must respond as if they were attacked. After West Germany was admitted into NATO in May of 1955 the Soviet Union scrambled to set up a counterweight to the giant Western military alliance. The Soviet Union along with delegates from Hungary, Romania, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Albania and Poland which at the time were all communist countries under the sway and sponsorship of the Soviet Union signed the Warsaw Pact in Warsaw. It was the anti-NATO.
The Warsaw Pact even had a clause that mirrored NATO's Article 5 saying that an attack on any of its nations would be considered an attack on all. The Warsaw Pact endured for over 30 years but in 1989 as the Berlin Wall came down and communist governments across Eastern Europe began to fall with it one by one countries left the Warsaw Pact until it was formally dissolved in 1991. And NATO, the greatest military alliance in the history of the world, picked up the slack. Every single Warsaw Pact country ultimately joined NATO. NATO started with 12 members in 1949. Today the alliance is 30 member nations strong. Ukraine is notably not a member.
Russia has been trying to prevent NATO from accepting Ukraine because Russia sees Ukraine as its own land border protecting it from NATO expansion from the west. Over the past year NATO has united behind Ukraine almost as if Ukraine is an honorary member of the alliance. This might just be the strongest NATO has been in its nearly 80 years of existence. Putin's plan to occupy Ukraine and weaken NATO seems to have backfired.
Ali Velshi