From leohohmann.com

Finland became the 31st member of NATO on Tuesday — a once-unthinkable step that significantly changes the geo-political landscape in Europe, making it far more volatile and susceptible to war.

Why do I say this? Look at a map. Finland’s membership more than doubles NATO’s borders with Russia and, as Axios reports, formally ends Helsinki’s decades of official neutrality.

This represents yet another in-your-face provocation to Russian President Vladimir Putin who, in launching the Russian invasion of Ukraine, vowed to block the alliance’s eastward expansion. Now he has NATO sitting on his massive border with Finland. It will be interesting to see if Finland allows U.S. troops to be deployed on its soil, which would be the ultimate provocation.

Finland represents NATO’s ninth major expansion since its founding in 1949, with the biggest additions coming in the mid-1990s under Bill Clinton, in the early 2000s under George W. Bush and now with the additions of Finland and Sweden under Joe Biden.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg stated the following while officially welcoming Finland into the alliance: “President Putin wanted to slam NATO’s door shut. Today we showed the world that he failed, that aggression and intimidation do not work. Instead of less NATO, he has achieved the opposite: more NATO. And our door remains firmly open.”

We’ll see how this idea of an ever-expanding NATO encircling Russia works out for the U.S. and its allies. Something tells me it could end in a Third World War that brings catastrophic losses of life to the peoples of Russia, Europe and U.S.

Here are the facts:

Mikhail Gorbachev unilaterally disbanded the Warsaw Pact military alliance in 1990. When he did that, Gorbachev was given repeated assurances by the U.S. and Germany that NATO would not fill the geo-political power vacuum with U.S. bases and military alliances in the former Soviet republics.

Jeffrey Sachs, an economist who served as an advisor to Gorbachev during that time, has recently issued a statement saying the U.S. lied to Gorbachev’s face.

The military-industrial complex and its neoconservative backers in Washington immediately began plotting the eastward advancement of NATO, Sachs says in a new video commentary that explains a fascinating and little-understood period in history. And in each of these new NATO member states, eventually came the deployment of American military personnel and/or advanced missile systems.

I had never heard this before, about these broken U.S. promises made to Gorbachev, and I am a college graduate who studied history with a major in political science. So I didn’t want to take Sachs’ word for it. I researched it myself and found that Sachs is correct. You can read about this history, conveniently withheld from American students in high schools and universities, in an 2017 article by Larry Kummer citing original documents in the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

Kummer writes:

Take a listen to Sachs’ recounting of this completely ignored history that led up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. It will blow your mind. I had to watch it twice to absorb it all.