As NATO holds its summit in Madrid this week, the war in Ukraine is taking center stage. During a pre-summit June 22 talk with Politico, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg bragged about how well-prepared NATO was for this fight because, he said: "This was an invasion that was predicted, foreseen by our intelligence services." Stoltenberg was talking about Western intelligence predictions in the months leading up to the Feb. 24 invasion, when Russia insisted it was not going to attack. Stoltenberg, however, could well have been talking about predictions that went back not just months before the invasion, but decades.
Stoltenberg could have looked all the way back to when the USSR was dissolving, and highlighted a 1990 State Department memo warning that creating an "anti-Soviet coalition" of NATO countries along the USSR's border "would be perceived very negatively by the Soviets."
