The Origins of the NATO Standoff

There's a lot of complexity to all of this issue and as you said it's difficult to know where to start. The open door that was offered to Georgia and Ukraine at the April Bucharest summit was actually pretty much of a low point in the long chronology of all of this. As you're sort of suggesting with the framing of the question it was actually a pretty bad idea to give Georgia and Ukraine an open door to NATO but it was perhaps not the reasons that everybody is immediately thinking about.