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Ukrainian participation in NATO should be “off the table,” according to retired Army Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis, who warned that President Joe Biden had to be willing to “take the political heat” of acceding to the reality that NATO will never allow Ukraine to join — thus allaying Russia’s main concern — and potentiality averting a war that would not accomplish any American national security objectives.
In an exclusive interview with Breitbart News on Friday, Retired Army Lt. Col. Daniel Davis warned of a potential major conflict between the U.S. and Russia as President Joe Biden continues to spar with Russia over Ukraine, announcing plans to send U.S. troops to Eastern Europe “in the near term” amid increasing tensions between the two countries.
Davis, a Defense Priorities senior fellow and military expert, spent over two decades in active service, which included combat deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, and was awarded two Bronze Star medals.
Russia’s Red Lines “Ignored”
Calling the current tensions a “crisis” that “should never have arisen,” Davis laid the blame on the continued ignoring of Russian warnings that Ukraine’s joining the NATO alliance “is a red line and a non-negotiable issue” for them.
“All the way back to 1994, when [then-President of the Russian Federation Boris] Yeltsin first took issue with it, and especially since 2008 when [Russian President Vladimir] Putin expressly said so, Ukraine membership in NATO is a red line,” he said.
“Now they’ve been consistent with that all the time, and we’ve ignored them at every point up until now,” he added.
He attributed the “foolish” move to poor foreign policy.
“Because we’ve had such a foolish, bad foreign policy for the last two decades, and probably going back three at least, we’ve based our policies on what we want to be true, not what is true,” he said, “and so we’ve ignored Russia.”
Asked why the president was continuing to ignore Russia’s red lines, Davis called out the “Washington foreign policy establishment that’s been making so many bad choices for decades,” adding that it is “continuing to make a bad choice by suggesting that [Biden] stand firm [against Russia regardless of the rationale] and all that’s gonna get people killed.”