> Stop eastward expansion of NATO and make it clear Ukraine will not be allowed to join NATO. Yep, this is Putin's demand but it's a demand in bad faith as we'

> Stop eastward expansion of NATO and make it clear Ukraine will not be allowed to join NATO. Yep, this is Putin's demand but it's a demand in bad faith as we'll get into in a minute. > Just visualize what would American response would be if Mexico or Canada considered joining a non-American Security Alliance. We already know how America will respond, when Venezuela brought up joining Russian security alliance, few years ago. This is just whataboutism. I don't know the details of Venezuela, but it's totally possible the US was in the wrong. Whatever the case, it has no bearing on whether Russia is in the right. > And, now we are seeing the poisoned fruits of how it is threatening world peace. This is the meat of my objection, since arguing NATO's a threat to world peace is empirically Russian nationalist nonsense. Between Russia and NATO, one has been militarily invading its neighbors for years now and the other is a purely defensive pact. Which is not to say that NATO is not an arm of American imperialism, but supposing a NATO member state wanted to start an aggressive war against Russia or its allies, NATO would not apply. When the US invaded Iraq, for instance (another popular whataboutism topic from Russian nationalists, but one with more merit than Venezuela IMO), they had to drum up support from allies without being able to invoke NATO. Those allies could have refused to support the invasion. > Ukraine has become an American pawn in geo-political chess. On this, however, we can agree.