So he gets promised that NATO would not advance. But here's an interesting thing that no one talks about. It's just not about just NATO advancement. OK, so the same time that Baker and Bush are making this deal with Gorbachev, the hey, why don't we, you know, dismantle Soviet Union and we dismantle the Berlin Wall. And it's going to be like we're not going to be one inch. Exactly. That was the promise.

Like, you don't get any more hawk than this guy.

And let's get into the fact that after 1991, when Russia expected that it would be welcomed into the brotherly family of civilized nations, nothing like this happened. You tricked us. I don't mean you personally when I say you. Of course, I'm talking about the United States. The promise was that NATO would not expand eastward. But it happened five times.

Not an inch of NATO's present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction. Memorandum of conversation between Mikhail Gorbachev and James Baker in Moscow. On February 9th, 1990. And then George Herbert Walker Bush confirmed that in speeches and in policy statements.

Yeah, that just had to do solely with NATO expansion into East Germany. The question became entirely irrelevant as Germany reunified.

Gorbachev has given interviews about the negotiations with Baker, and he said that the topic of other countries joining NATO never came up. There wasn't an agreement except that NATO troops would not be stationed in East Germany. So, we're starting off here on a false premise that only serves to legitimize Putin's argument for invading. And to be clear, I'm not necessarily saying that NATO expansion is a positive thing, and I think there's a lot of fine arguments against NATO and how it operates. What I am saying is that claiming that NATO agreed to not expand what Gorbachev negotiated with Baker is not true.

It may be the case that they rethink some other things, too, like the prospect of supporting Ukraine's bid to join NATO. I'm not saying that's necessarily going to be the case, but if anything, it seems like this invasion could make that more likely.