NATO's Decision To Add Baltic States Was 'Emotional' – Newt Gingrich

What You Need To Know:

✅ “The US should be helping the Ukrainian military… It’s in our interest to enable Ukraine to defend itself.”

✅ Gingrich, an avid Trump supporter, says that people who are committed to change tend to support Trump, while the ‘old order’ is for Clinton;

✅ “Very unlikely that NATO would accept Ukraine at the present time;"

✅ Bringing the Baltics into NATO increased Russian paranoia.

Bringing the Baltic states into the Northern Atlantic security community was an emotional mistake, Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the United States House of Representatives suggested in an interview to Hromadske. 

"I think it was emotionally very appealing, I think it had the direct effect of increasing Russian paranoia, increasing Russian sense of being encircled by NATO, and that was particularly true for Putin who was trained by the KGB and who was in many ways… you know, he represents the generation that in a sense saw the collapse of the Soviet Union. I think the next leader, I suspect, will be dramatically less engaged than Putin in trying to rebuild the great Russian state," Gingrich says.

“The US should be helping the Ukrainian military… It’s in our interest to enable Ukraine to defend itself,” says Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the United States House of Representatives.  Gringrich adds that he is prepared to do everything in the United States to maximize Ukrainian independence.

Gingrich, an avid Trump supporter, says that people who are committed to change tend to support Trump, while the ‘old order’ is for Clinton.  “People everywhere are frustrated with elites that seem to be corrupt, out of touch with reality and incapable of solving problems,” he says.

When asked about NATO, Gingrich thinks it’s “very unlikely that NATO would accept Ukraine at the present time.” He also believes that the Russians would see it as a provocative act, and bringing the Baltics into NATO increased Russian paranoia.

Hromadske’s Nataliya Gumenyuk and Kyiv Post’s Josh Kovensky spoke to Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, at the YES Conference on September 16, 2016 in Kyiv.