In the waning days of the Cold War US Secretary of State James Baker made a solemn vow to Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward” beyond a reunited Germany, a promise that was broken in just nine years. Now Russian leaders feel vindicated as the rest of the world is waking up to the increasingly capricious and self-serving nature of 21st-century US foreign policy.
Amid Kiev’s flopped counteroffensive, with corruption and low morale eating away at Ukraine s Army, the popularity of funding the increasingly dysfunctional regime has been plummeting, forcing the US to revise “instructions” it hands down to its proxy war ally.
European Union President Alexander De Croo expressed the anxieties of many of the bloc’s leaders in a speech before the European Parliament, which lacks the power to write legislation.