China & Taiwan: Xi Jinping’s Policies Causing Tensions

Despots have a way of concocting pretexts to justify their aggression, and they can almost always rely on foreign collaborators to amplify their propaganda. The notion that Vladimir Putin’s brutal war against Ukraine owed in part to NATO expansion has found many receptive ears, even those of respected foreign-policy savants.

Condoleezza Rice, the national-security adviser and later secretary of state under President George W. Bush, chafed at this specious claim. “In the eight years that I worked with Vladimir Putin he did not mention NATO expansion to me or to President Bush,” Rice said in a lecture at the Hoover Institution. “The only time that NATO became an issue was when we decided we would put missile defenses in Poland and Romania and possibly in the Czech Republic. Then he said that it would be a threat. But the idea that NATO expansion was a problem for him is simply ahistorical.”

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Cheney Wen

Cheney Wen recently graduated first in class from Taiwan’s National Chengchi University with a dual degree in Diplomacy and Korean.

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Despots have a way of concocting pretexts to justify their aggression, and they can almost always rely on foreign collaborators to amplify their propaganda. The notion that Vladimir Putin’s brutal war against Ukraine owed in part to NATO expansion has found many receptive ears, even those of respected foreign-policy savants.

Condoleezza Rice, the national-security adviser and later secretary of state under President George W. Bush, chafed at this specious claim. “In the eight years that I worked with Vladimir Putin he did not mention NATO expansion to me or to President Bush,” Rice said in a lecture at the Hoover Institution. “The only time that NATO became an issue was when we decided we would put missile defenses in Poland and Romania and possibly in the Czech Republic. Then he said that it would be a threat. But the idea that NATO expansion was a problem for him is simply ahistorical.”