JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Professor Crowley, I wanted to ask you about this New York Times piece that came out on Sunday about the CIA’s long involvement in training elite troops that were — some of them were conducting sabotage and assassinations during the period not after the Russian invasion, but before the Russian invasion, during the war in Donbas. And so it’s clear that the CIA was involved back through about 2014 and 2015 on the ground in Ukraine. Does that reshape the way we look at — because, surely, Putin must have known that. He must have known about the CIA involvement on the ground in Ukraine. Does that shed new light on the reasons why Putin decided to invade?
STEPHEN CROWLEY: I think it might, Juan. If you look closely at that New York Times article, they sort of briefly brush past the — a couple of sentences where they said that Russia was aware of this and saw this as rather provocative, that perhaps the United States was intending to, perhaps, act aggressively or even, you know, invade Russia. And they just sort of then said, “Of course, that’s not true, so we don’t really need to consider that any further.” But we have grievously failed to consider the other side, to look at things from the Russian perspective. And it’s very easy to demonize Putin. He does a very good job of making that quite possible. His policies are really quite vile. But we have made a mistake in understanding the provocative nature, going back to NATO expansion, as your readers and listeners will be well aware of, and this happened for years. This predated Putin being in power.
And unfortunately, this is — this sort of mentality is continuing, and if we don’t recognize the dangers, the provocations that led to this conflict, this war, even though this was Putin’s decision to invade, but, nevertheless, there is another side to this — if we don’t learn that lesson, we’re going to slow walk into another war, I’m afraid, between the United States and China over Taiwan, because we’re still thinking in terms of deterrence — we have to be strong to deter the other side — and we neglect the fact that this can create insecurity on the other side, that just leads to build-up, escalation, and eventually to violence and war.
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