Across the political spectrum, a persistent minority of voices insists that Russia's invasion of Ukraine was provoked by the eastward expansion of NATO in the 1990s and 2000s. Others couch their criticism in more nuanced terms, but suggest that Russia should not pay a significant price for its invasion and war crimes, the better to get back to business as usual.
Political scientist John Mearsheimer, a conservative, blames the U.S. and NATO for the invasion. So does Noam Chomsky on the far left, propounding a few historical distortions along the way. Academic gadfly and tax delinquent Cornel West, wading into the unfamiliar waters of foreign policy, claims that NATO expansion "provoked" Russia into attacking Ukraine. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a congresswoman and public nuisance, hasn't explicitly blamed NATO for the invasion, but her demand that the U.S. cease all aid to Ukraine and withdraw from NATO is a tacit endorsement of the opinion that Kyiv got what it deserved because of its dangerous liaison with America and NATO. The argument has become a leitmotif of the American far left and far right.
