Noam Chomsky Quotes
[Mikhail] Gorbachev said that he would agree to the unification of Germany, and even adherence of Germany to NATO, which was quite a concession, if NATO didn't move to East Germany. And [George] Bush and [James] Baker promised verbally, that's critical, verbally that NATO would not expand "one inch to the east," which meant East Germany. Nobody was talking about anything farther at the time. They would not expand one inch to the east. Now that was a verbal promise. It was never written. NATO immediately expanded to East Germany.
Chomsky, Noam. Who Rules the World? Metropolitan Books, 2016.
Bush wanted to expand NATO to include Poland and Hungary. However the German and American governments had previously (before the collapse of the Soviet Union) given promises to the Russians that NATO would never be expanded Eastward from East Germany. See {32678}. Bush went ahead and violated those promises anyway using the excuse that the agreement had not been part of a treaty. That decision had implications for Russian attitudes towards the United States and Western Europe. The Russians repudiated their agreements in 2014 and invaded the Crimea and took it from Ukraine. The Russians however had broken promises many time whereas the United States reversals of promises, like this were few. Bush’s logic however was not in keeping with traditional American standards. We made a deal with Russia when they were a strong superpower who could easily damage many of our national interests. However, when they were weak, we no longer have to do anything we agreed to when they were strong. The great irony was that reacting against Westernization of Ukraine, Premier Putin, by seizing the Crimea and successfully supporting ethnic Russian separatists in Ukraine put Russia back on the map as a major power in the world who could act with impunity against the interests of the West, Europe, the United States and the NATO countries. Most Russians rejoiced that Russia was again an empire that could not be dictated to.
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He is Laureate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona and Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and is the author of more than 150 books on topics such as linguistics, war, politics, and mass media. Ideologically, he aligns with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism.
