s a fun historical tidbit:¶

Following the formation of...

Here's a fun historical tidbit:

Following the formation of NATO, the USSR's first response was not to form the Warsaw Pact. They first asked to join NATO, an ostensibly non-polar, purely defensive agreement. They only formed the Warsaw Pact after being rejected. The primary reason for asking to join was that they wanted to expose it as a blatantly anti-communist, US-led system of puppet states. But they were also totally on board with the possibility of actually joining and potentially ending the cold war. Churchill actually lobbied for this in the hopes of achieving peace. The Soviet proposal kept getting reworked internally, deliberately leaving plenty of room for western powers to accept it on their terms. They were even willing to accept a partially rearmed West Germany. In the end, it was rejected on the grounds that the USSR joining was incompatible with NATO's "defensive aims," thereby exposing its role, not as a defensive treaty, but an explicitly anti-Russian arrangement. If your goal is peace, obviously you would accept peace.