For starters, it is based on the claim that, at the time of the Berlin Wall’s collapse and the Soviet Union’s disintegration, the West promised that there would be no NATO expansion. Even Mikhail Gorbachev, on the 25th anniversary of the Wall’s demise, accused the West of not keeping the promises it made in 1989, instead taking “advantage of Russia’s weakening” in the 1990s to claim “monopoly leadership and domination of the world,” including through NATO enlargement.