Sourced: The National Interest
By Dave Majumdar
The United States places the blame on Russia for the breakdown in relations between NATO and Moscow. In the view of U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Russia chose to be strategic competitor to the United States and NATO.
“The NATO alliance tried to create a partnership—so, there’s a Russia-NATO partnership council,” Mattis told reporters on March 27. “There is a mechanism to keep us working together. And I think a number of us with my color hair can remember Russian marines in North Carolina working with U.S. Marines as we prepared for possible deployments together on U.N. peacekeeping missions—humanitarian relief.”
However, that attempt at building at partnership with Russia has now passed.
“That, regrettably, by Russia’s choice, is now a thing of the past,” Mattis said. “It’s not currently in the works because Russia’s chosen to be a strategic competitor, even to the point of reckless activity. And that’s the only thing that it can be called to the innocent people in Salisbury who were exposed to, possibly—to the potential of being murdered by this stuff.”
Read more at: http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/mattis-russia-has-chosen-be-strategic-competitor-25105