Putin Recognizes That NATO is Falling Apart: Ex-CIA Analyst

Before the Russian invasion, NATO’s leadership kept reminding the news media that Ukraine was not a member

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Russian President Vladimir Putin can see that NATO is coming apart at the seams as the Ukraine War drags, Ray McGovern, the former CIA analyst, told Judge Andrew Napolitano’s “Judging Freedom.”

McGovern asked about the incoming Trump administration. Moscow has called NATO membership a red line and would likely insist on assurances that Kyiv will not be joining any time soon. He said, “If NATO is going to fall apart in the next 10 years, you know, there’s a deal to be cut there.”

“NATO is already falling apart,” he said. “There are no governments in Germany of France to speak of. [Prime Minister Robert] Fico, from Slovakia, was up there in Moscow yesterday…talking about gas deliveries and also talking about Ukraine. Italy is a dubious thing.”

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Putin recognizes that the alliance is falling apart, he said.

“Will he let them down gently? I think he will,” he said.

The U.S.’s position on the war has been clear: Russia’s invasion was illegal and Ukraine has every right to fight for its territory. The West, while claiming it is not officially involved in the conflict, has been providing near-limitless weapons support, intelligence, and has been training Ukrainian forces to fight as NATO members would.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced in 2022 that he would file an expedited application to join NATO in light of Putin’s decision to annex four occupied regions in the eastern part of his country, but the alliance did not accept the request.

Before the Russian invasion, NATO’s leadership kept reminding the news media that Ukraine was not a member—thus not protected under Article 5.

TRENDPOST: John Mearsheimer, a distinguished professor in political science at the University of Chicago, and Sebastian Rosato, the professor of political science at Notre Dame, penned a column last week titled, “The Russian Invasion Was a Rational Act.”

They noted how—in the early days of the invasion—Putin was described as a madman. They quoted Nina Khruschcheva, a Russia expert, who said, “with his unprovoked assault, Mr. Putin joins a long line of irrational tyrants.”

Part of the reason that many in the West considered Putin irrational, was the thought that he would be unable to emerge victorious from the conflict. But the two scholars note that rationality “is not about outcomes. Rational actors often fail to achieve their goals, not because of foolish thinking but because of factors they can neither anticipate nor control.”

But they wrote that Putin’s concerns about Ukraine is not a “lone wolf” theory. It is shared in Russia—and understood by some in the West, like William Burns, the current CIA director who once served as ambassador to Russia. In 2008, he called Ukraine’s entry into NATO the “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, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests… I can conceive of no grand package that would allow the Russians to swallow this pill quietly.”

Ukraine is mainly flat farmland and has been used by Napoleon, Imperial Germany, and Nazi Germany to stage attacks under Moscow’s soft underbelly.

Thomas Friedman, The New York Times columnist, wrote an article back in May 1998—the year Poland became a member of the alliance—that included a quote from George Kennan, a diplomat credited for his strategy of U.S. Cold War containment:

“I think this is the beginning of a new Cold War. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. Of course, there’s going to be a bad reaction from Russia and then [NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are—but that is just wrong.”

He wrote that Russia, in turn, will turn to countries like Iran and China to counter the development. Kennan wrote in his diary that NATO expansion was the “greatest mistake of the entire post-Cold War period” and called it a “colossal blunder.”

His warning did not stop Warsaw, the Czech Republic, and Hungary from being added to the Alliance in 1999 and then countries like Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Romania in 2004.