No war. No NATO expansion.

In August, 1968 I was in what was then called Kiev, the capital of the Ukranian Soviet Republic of the U.S.S.R.

I was a twenty-year old, back-packing kid traveling through Europe, on a train from Sofia, Bulgaria to Moscow.

I have no vivid memories of Kiev. It was not much more than a couple hours lay-over between trains.

In August, 1968 it was not Ukraine that was getting attention. It was Czechoslovakia.

Soviet troops marched in that August to end what was known as Prague Spring.

Hitch-hiking around Western Europe that summer I had met and made friends with dozens of students from Prague.

If you are old enough you may have seen students just like them throwing rocks at Soviet tanks.

But at that moment I was in Moscow and not speaking or reading Russian I was not able to follow events too closely about what was happening in Czechoslovakia.

I could only grab an English-speaking Russian student I had met and had him translate a short announcement of the invasion at the bottom of page two in Pravda or whatever the paper was.

I had to wait to get to London to be able to consume every news report, along with the news from back home.

The news from back home was the anti-war protests in Chicago at the Democratic Convention.

These last few days it is no surprise that as I watch news from Ukraine that I am thinking about Prague Spring, Russian troops and Vietnam.

The invasion of Ukraine is a tragedy.

As was Vietnam and Czechoslovakia.

And Iraq.

Afghanistan.

I don’t buy the narrative that what we have here is a fight between despotic oligarchs seeking to restore what was the Soviet empire on the one hand and the democratic West on the other.

History has too many examples of both big powers ignoring borders and violation of international law for the source of recents events to be Russia alone.

The United States and NATO are not innocents in all this.

NATO is not a peace group.

In 1968 Europe was divided between NATO in the West and the Warsaw Pact in the East.

Only NATO remains. And it is expanding.

Some argue that recent events of the past week show the need for the continuation and expansion of NATO.

But it is chicken or egg.

Whether Putin needed a provocation or not, continued NATO expansion provides it.

There is not much popular support for a war with Russia or intervention in Ukraine.

Even the threat of economic sanctions raises concerns among Americans about a conflict between nuclear powers spiraling out of control.

There are anti-war protesters in the streets Moscow.

The people want peace.

What people want now is a de-esclation of the conflict.

And on this side of the Atlantic we should be asking why we need an expansion of a 70-year old military alliance, essentially controlled by the U.S., with 90,000 U.S. troops permanently stationed in Europe.