Oksana Markarova reacts to the uncouth behaviour of the president of Ukraine and the quarrel in front of cameras. I felt exactly the same way as this Ukrainian envoy.
If I was a leader of a small country and saw what happened yesterday in the oval room in Washington, I would try to get nuclear weapons by all means possible. The President of the USA said to the President of Ukraine: you have no cards to play. Exactly. They had cards back in 1994. Ukraine had third largest stockpile of nuclear weapons. If they did not believe the assurances they got from the USA in the Budapest Memorandum, they would not have given them up. They would have strong cards to play with now.
4 years earlier U.S. Secretary of State James Baker assured Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in February 1990 that if Germany remained part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization after reunification
and if the United States “maintained a presence” in that country, “there would be no extension” of NATO’s jurisdiction “one inch to the east.” The Americans, as Gorbachev himself put the point in 2008, had “promised that NATO wouldn’t move beyond the boundaries of Germany after the Cold War but now half of central and Eastern Europe are members, so what happened to their promises? It shows they cannot be trusted.”
Pacta sunt servanda? Not really. How did the world loose the opportunity to make friends not foes?
