Here’s a snippet from the conversation in the video below, between Brian Becker and Eugene Puryear (transcribed by me from the Youtube transcript). You will notice that it is a version of history that you’ve likely never heard before, certainly not in our current Cold War II climate. The complete discussion (the whole video) is worth watching.

“In the united states certainly when I was growing up we were told NATO is important because it’s defending Europe from the Warsaw Pact. Now. what people don’t know is that the military alliance of the Soviet Union is formed in 1955. But in 1954 – Stalin has just died in 1953 — in 1954 the Soviet Union asks the United States to join NATO. the Soviet Union asked to join NATO in 1954 and the Soviet Union also proposed that Germany be reunited. You know this whole thing about East Germany West Germany … the Berlin Wall, the whole image in the West is that the Soviets wanted to keep the Germans divided … but the Germans … the Soviets offered to reunify all of Germany, but make sure it wasn’t re-militarized because the Soviets had lost 27 million people to the … largely to the German invasion. And they want to come into NATO and the United States says no. And then the Soviet Union forms the Warsaw Pact … We talked about this last week. We said … at the end of the Soviet Union when it collapsed why wasn’t Russia which is now led by Boris Yeltsin, an American puppet and very weak, why weren’t they just brought into NATO? That’s a very important question for people to understand. because my belief is that if the Soviet Union had entered NATO then, the U.S. would have lost the discipline over the European capitalists who would have gravitated in the direction of the Soviet Union, which is their natural – you know – trade partner. Just like after the collapse of the Soviet Union Russia could have been integrated into NATO but eventually Russia – when it got back on its feet – would be an economic and political pole that would allow Europe to have an alternative to American hegemonic domination. And I think that’s so important, because I think that gets to the nub of why NATO was in fact – um, you know – not dissolved in 1991. But again, I think most Americans would have no idea that the Soviet Union asked to be part of NATO in the middle of the Cold War.”

“And this is again coming up now because the Russians have referenced the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe agreements between the U.S., NATO and Russia in 1999 and 2010 … this idea of an indivisible security that is a Europe-wide security, where everyone’s concerns are considered and where collectively there are decisions made about how to keep the peace. And this is what the Russians wanted, the Soviets wanted. It’s what the Soviets wanted in the 70s. it’s what the Russians wanted in the 90s. It’s what the Soviets wanted in the early 90s. It’s what the Soviets continued … Russians continue to want now. I mean it’s a very clear, very consistent position coming from the Soviet Union slash Russia over almost the entire period stretching from the 50s until now … that they want a security architecture that essentially – you know – recognizes that they have real interests, real concerns and real fears, but that also you know where they will recognize that other people have real interests real concerns and real fears, but that we could … sit down together. There can be conversations about it …

[…]

“It’s unbelievable, the National Security Archive in 2017 at George Washington University has revealed a range of documents that show not only [James] Baker, every single top leader of France, the UK, and West Germany assured the Soviets … we’re not going one inch eastward. But even more so, they then subsequently release a second tranch of documents that say that the Clinton administration went out of their way to deliberately mislead Boris Yeltsin and to say that we’re actually going to work on that kind of shared security strategy. Russia is included in whatever we want to do. At the same time they’re actually planning to expand NATO to the East, explicitly against what they’re telling Russia at the time. And so, ultimately the U.S. cannot have a strategy of peace in Europe, because as the Wolfowitz Doctrine said about Western Europe, it’s critically important to keep it as a zone of U.S.influence. And so, at the end of the day, even though the Soviet Union collapsed, the only way for the United States to assert itself as a unipolar imperialist hegemon is to not only contain Russia but to prevent — in the wake of a peace dividend – Western Europe working closer with the post-Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe, and becoming potentially a Eurasian rival to the United States of America, which they absolutely do not want, but which was at least one of the potential options vis-a-vis what could have happened in Europe at that point. So they maintain NATO, they push it to the East and they bamboozle – and you know, in many ways I think Yeltsin was open to being bamboozled, he was obviously a fool and an idiot in many ways – um – you’re still being generous – I’m being extremely generous — but nevertheless, they went out of their way to try to mislead him, and to you know essentially recognize that Russia had concerns while trying to undermine them at every single front.”

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The US ‘Betrayed’ Russia, but It Is Not ‘News That’s Fit to Print’

AN OPPOSING ARGUMENT:

“What Gorbachev Did Not Hear”
Excerpt:

“Like the spurious no-NATO-enlargement narrative, it revolves around a series of broken promises—commitments to respect Ukrainian territorial integrity embodied in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, the 1997 Black Sea Fleet Agreement, the 1997 Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership between Ukraine and the Russian Federation, and a host of other agreements great and small. Never mind what Gorbachev supposedly heard; consider instead Moscow’s multiple treaty obligations with respect to Ukraine.”