Amazing? Far from it. The Chicken Kiev speech was widely seen as a major failure and embarrassment. Not only by his political opponents in the US, but also by the people of Eastern Europe, who were struggling to break free from Russian-controlled dictatorships that had been forced upon them at the end of the WWII. Instead of continuing to live in the prison camp that Gorbachev was offering to reform (with US support), a hundred million people in Eastern Europe regained freedom of speech, freedom of movement, and other basic human rights within months from Bush instructing them "not to rock the boat". The Chicken Kiev speech was quite a downgrade from Reagan's speech a few years prior, in which he challenged Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin wall and let people live as free human beings.

The US and its allies in Western Europe were not carving off parts of the Eastern Bloc and the USSR like some try to depict nowadays, nor did they have any interest in extending mutual defense guarantees to the nations that had just restored their independence.

The desire to live again as free people came first and foremost from within. After independence, membership in the European Council, the European Union, and NATO became the holy grails of foreign policy in most newly independent countries to secure permanent freedom and prosperity. The goal was to integrate with the free world as tightly as possible to make it as difficult as possible for Russia to tear them away again.

The "big push to expand NATO" that you keep repeating is a disgusting lie. Pick up the memoirs of Vaclav Havel, Aleksander Kwasniewski, Lennart Meri, Vytautas Landsbergis, or any other statesman of the era, and you'll usually find entire chapters dedicated to the immense struggle of entering European cooperation frameworks like the EU and NATO: how nobody wanted to see them there and the incredible lengths they had to go to just to be considered potential candidates.

Your entire frame of reference is just wrong. You don't get the basic push-pull factors that have shaped the relations in Europe - what happened, why it happened, and how it happened -, which leads you to blame victims and make excuses for aggressors.

In 1938-1940, Hitler and Stalin cooperated and destroyed every single independent country along a line that ran from the Atlantic coast of France to the Ural mountains so far in the east that they mark the border between Europe and Asia. A key to their success was the foolish belief by smaller nations in Wilsonian concepts of international law and neutrality. Not looking out for each other and failing to support nations under attack enabled Hitler and Stalin to pick countries off one-by-one at their convenience. Neutrality was a fundamental mistake that the generation of national leaders active in the 1990s sought to avoid repeating at all cost. Many of them were old enough to have personal recollections of pre-war Europe and its destruction, and as they write in their memoirs, that greatly influenced their attitudes toward European cooperation. The idea that they were somehow forced or coerced into this by the Americans is, first, not true, and, secondly, has no connection to the actual history and motivations that guided people. They were the most passionate group from the start.