Russian president Vladimir Putin could be turning the tables on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).  Policies once enacted by the United States to contain Soviet expansion into Western Europe are now being used to restrict NATO's eastward expansion into regions deemed critical to Russia's national interest. During his June 2017 interview with NBC's Megyn Kelly, President Putin chose to conclude their discussion with a particularly reflective comment: "I will never forget the state in which Russia was in 1991."  Having been an intelligence officer at the time, it is reasonable to assume that the events surrounding the Soviet Union's failure replay in Putin's mind quite often.  Surely, he has learned from them. Perhaps most useful among these lessons are those extracted from the U.S. policies that brought this demise to fruition, such as the Marshall Plan and its ensuing containment...(Read Full Article)