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Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) received some unexpected company last week in citing NATO expansion as a main reason Russia invaded Ukraine. Pope Francis echoed Paul's earlier sentiment that NATO played a significant role in provoking Russia and shares a large part of the blame. The pontiff declared that Russia's invasion was "perhaps somehow either provoked or not prevented" in an interview with La Civilta Cattolica.

Sen. Paul initially made his comments during an exchange with Secretary of State Antony Blinken at a hearing about the crisis in Ukraine. The fact that Pope Francis endorsed this theory as well should come as no surprise. It has been a prominent theory in geopolitics for several decades. Yet Democrats and other left-wingers refused to acknowledge this, despite decades of evidence supporting Paul's claim. Instead, they vilified and attacked Sen. Paul, along with anyone else who repeated this theory.

Paul offered his criticism in April and was accused of being a Putin apologist. Are we to presume now that Pope Francis is also a Putin puppet?

But now that Pope Francis has supported the NATO expansion theory, this will surely change the minds of the leftists out there calling anyone who said such a thing as pro-Putin, right? Not likely, according to some of the feedback Pope Francis received.

"Someone may say to me at this point: but you are pro-Putin! No, I am not," Francis said. "It would be simplistic and wrong to say such a thing. I am simply against reducing complexity to the distinction between good guys and bad guys, without reasoning about roots and interests, which are very complex."

The refusal to acknowledge NATOs role in the war is indicative of the toxicity of contemporary left-wing ideologues.

As aforementioned, both the pope and Sen. Paul are right, of course. The idea that the eastward expansion of NATO and recruiting former Soviet republics into NATO would antagonize Russia has been at the crux of U.S.-Russian geopolitics since the 1990s. Renowned American diplomat, historian, and Cold War strategist George Kennan declared as much in a 1997 op-ed for the New York Times.

In "A Fateful Error," Kennan opined that "expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era. Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion to restore the atmosphere of the Cold War to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking."

Furthermore, President Joe Biden's CIA Director, William J. Burns, stated what the pope and Sen. Paul said about NATOs expansion decades earlier. Burns previously claimed that NATO expansion would antagonize Russia into conflict in two memos over a decade apart.

First, in 1995, while a counselor for political affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, Burns wrote in a memo, "Hostility to early NATO expansion is almost universally felt across the domestic political spectrum here."

Then, in 2008, Burns wrote in a memo to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, "Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players ... I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests."

As the war in Ukraine continues and as the United States keeps sending billions of dollars in aid, it's essential to realize the truth behind what the pope and Sen. Paul stated. This doesn't excuse or justify Putin's invasion in any way. However, it reveals that those in power criticizing this theory are woefully ignorant of facts. Moreover, their refusal to acknowledge these facts warrants questioning their credibility on all future foreign policy decisions.

If they could not comprehend decades of geopolitical intelligence and briefings, we shouldn't trust them with our country's present and future foreign policy decision-making. We'd be better off listening to Sen. Paul and the pope.

See the rest here:
The pope agrees with Rand Paul about NATO expansion and Russia - Washington Examiner