In spring of 2008, I was living in Vienna, Austria and carefully followed the reporting on the NATO Bucharest Summit from April 2-4. For readers who don't remember this momentous occasion: it was during this summit that the NATO issued a declaration stating that Georgia and Ukraine would eventually become NATO members.

What most people don't remember about this summit was that the Bush administration pushed for the immediate granting of a Membership Action Plan (MAP) to Ukraine and Georgia. Fortunately, German Chancellor Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy successfully blocked this initiative but nevertheless appeased President Bush by agreeing to the vague promise that both nations "will become members of NATO."

Russian President Putin, who attended the summit, stated in his address that NATO's expansion into Ukraine and Georgia was "direct threat to Russian security." A the time it occurred to me that US policy wonks welcomed this unequivocal statement by Putin—on the record at a NATO summit—because with this statement, Putin publicly stated his red line, the crossing of which would force his hand to take military action.

Make no mistake: The horrible people who run US foreign policy wanted Putin to take military action in Ukraine because they believed it would lead to an Afghan style quagmire for Russia in Ukraine. As I tell this story in my new book, Mind Viruses: America's Irrational Obsessions:

They apparently reasoned that, with the Ukrainian army equipped with sophisticated US weaponry and targeting assistance, the Russian army would suffer the same kind of humiliating defeat it had suffered in Afghanistan at the hands of the US-armed Mujahideen, who succeeded in getting the Soviet Army to withdrawal from in the country in February 1989. Hillary Clinton explicitly made this comparison in a February 28, 2022, MSNBC interview in which she said:

Remember, the Russians invaded Afghanistan back in 1980. It didn't end well for the Russians . . . but the fact is, that a very motivated, and then funded, and armed insurgency basically drove the Russians out of Afghanistan.

Later in the interview, Clinton conceded that arming the Afghan Mujahideen had produced unintended consequences like the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. The actions of these groups resulted in the US government sending the American military to Afghanistan and occupying the country for twenty years. After getting thousands of American servicemen killed and maimed and spending $2.3 trillion, the US government made its own chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan on August 30, 2021, leaving the country back in the hands of the Taliban that was supposed to have been vanquished twenty years earlier.