Radosław Sikorski said on X yesterday:
💬 Russia is waging a hybrid war not only against Poland or the West as a whole. It tried to influence the outcome of the referendum in Moldova with bribery and information aggression, and is now doing the same in Georgia.
| Min. @sikorskiradek for 🇵🇱 media pic.twitter.com/rlEoMWtyG4
— Ministry of Foreign Affairs 🇵🇱 (@PolandMFA) October 28, 2024
This places the blame entirely on the Russian side. There have been, however, a minority of leading experts like John Mearsheimer and Noam Chomsky who have put a lot of blame on the US too for NATO expansion.
In this 2022 interview, former British prime minister Tony Blair spoke about the "first Putin" he met and "Putin's evolution". He described the first Putin as western facing and said that Russia's entry into NATO was at least a talking subject. It was not, so to speak, written in stone that Russia was an enemy of "the West".
At around the same time, former US president Bill Clinton, published this piece in The Atlantic, arguing that he had not pushed Russia into a corner and, in fact, the expansion of NATO that he supported prepared The West for Russia's aggression - as if the two were unrelated.
Documents published this year, however, suggest that Clinton had adopted at least an imperial tone with Russia to the dismay of Yeltsin - a leader who turned out to be much more pro-western than his successor.
Of course the war in Ukraine is anything but cold, but the historical "Cold War" included several "proxy wars" that were equally hot for their respective regions, such as Korea (North Korea having made a notable escalation in the war last week.)
The broader context emerging suggests that the situation the world is in is much closer to Cold War Encore than an entirely New Global Order. Warm relations of Russia and Venezuela and the USA and eastern Europe - in the "backyards" of the respective powers - also seem to be more of a continuation than a break with history.
Sources: X, The Atlantic, CNN, People's World
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