Russia’s military offensive against Ukraine is an act of aggression that will exacerbate already worrying tensions between NATO and Moscow. The West’s new Cold War with Russia is heating up. Vladimir Putin bears primary responsibility for this latest development. But: NATO’s arrogant, deaf policy towards Russia over the past quarter century also has a large part to play in this.
Analysts committed to a realistic and cautious US foreign policy have warned for more than a quarter century that further expansion of the most powerful military alliance in history to another major power would not end well. The war in Ukraine definitively confirms that this was not the case.
“It would be extraordinarily difficult to expand NATO eastwards without this being viewed as a hostile act by Russia. Even the most modest expansion plans would bring the alliance to the borders of the old Soviet Union. Some of the more ambitious plans would see the alliance virtually encircle the Russian Federation itself.” I wrote these words in my 1994 book Beyond Nato: Staying Out of Europe’s Wars. At a time, then, when proposals for enlargement were merely occasional speculation in foreign policy seminars in New York and Washington. I added that enlargement would constitute “an unnecessary provocation by Russia”.
Bill Clinton hat’s verbockt
What was not publicly known at the time: Bill Clinton’s administration had already made the fateful decision the year before to press ahead with the admission of some former Warsaw Pact countries to NATO. The government would soon propose inviting Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary as members – and the US Senate approved adding those countries to the North Atlantic Treaty in 1998. This should be the first of several expansion waves.
Even this first phase provoked Russian resistance and anger. Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s Secretary of State, concedes in her memoirs: “Russian President Boris Yeltsin and his compatriots strongly opposed enlargement, seeing it as a strategy that would exploit their vulnerability and push the European dividing line eastwards, thereby isolating them stayed.”
Strobe Talbott, Deputy Secretary of State, similarly described Russia’s stance: “Many Russians see NATO as a Cold War remnant turned against their country. They point out that they dissolved the Warsaw Pact, their military alliance – and ask why the West shouldn’t do the same.” An excellent question to which neither the Clinton administration nor its successors have given an even remotely convincing answer could.
Final friendly warning
George Kennan (the spiritual father of America’s Cold War “containment policy”), in an interview with the New York Times in May 1998, astutely warned of what would set in motion the Senate’s ratification of the first round of NATO enlargements: ” I think this is the start of a new cold war,” Kennan said. Adding, “I think the Russians are going to react quite negatively over time and it’s going to affect their policies. I think it’s a tragic mistake. It was absolutely no reason for this action. No one threatened anyone else.” He was right.
But US and NATO leaders went ahead with new rounds of expansion. Including the provocative move to include the three Baltic republics in the alliance. These countries had not only been part of the Soviet Union, but also part of the Russian Empire during the Tsarist era. With this wave of expansion, NATO was now on the border of the Russian Federation.
Moscow’s patience with NATO’s increasingly intrusive behavior was slowly coming to an end. Russia’s last (moderately friendly) warning that the alliance must exercise restraint came in March 2007, when Putin was speaking at the annual Munich Security Conference. “NATO has moved its front-line troops to our borders,” Putin complained there. The NATO enlargement represents “a serious provocation that reduces mutual trust.” And the Russians have the right to ask: “Who is this enlargement aimed at? And what has become of the assurances given by our western partners after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact?”
2008: Putin attacks
In his memoirs, Robert M. Gates, who served as Secretary of Defense under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, stated that “relationships with Russia were poorly managed after Bush (senior) left office in 1993.” Among other missteps, “US agreements with the Romanian and Bulgarian governments on the rotation of troops through bases in those countries were an unnecessary provocation.” In an implicit rebuke to the younger Bush, Gates claimed that “trying to get Georgia and Ukraine into NATO really went too far.” The move was a case of “ruthless disregard for what Russians see as their own vital national interests.”
The year after Putin’s speech at the Munich Security Conference, the Kremlin showed that its dissatisfaction with continued NATO encroachments on Russia’s security zone can go beyond verbal objections. Moscow used an idiotic provocation by the pro-Western Georgian government to launch a military offensive that brought Russian troops to the outskirts of the Georgian capital, Tbilisi. After that, Russia finally separated two breakaway Georgian regions and placed them under Russian control.
However, Western leaders (particularly the US) continued to turn off red flag after red flag. The Obama administration’s shockingly arrogant interference in Ukraine’s internal political affairs in 2013 and 2014, helping protesters to overthrow the pro-Russian President-elect of Ukraine, was the brazen provocation that fueled tensions. Moscow reacted immediately by confiscating and annexing Crimea – and a new Cold War had broken out with full force.
NATO plaything
The events of the last few months represented the last chance to avoid a hot war in Eastern Europe. Putin demanded guarantees from NATO on several security issues. In particular, the Kremlin wanted binding assurances that the alliance would reduce the size of its growing military presence in Eastern Europe and would never offer Ukraine membership. He underpinned these demands with a massive military build-up on Ukraine’s borders.
The Biden administration’s response to Russia’s demands for significant Western concessions and security guarantees has been lukewarm and evasive. Putin then clearly decided to escalate the situation. Washington’s attempt to turn Ukraine into a political and military plaything for NATO (even without the country’s formal membership in the alliance) could end up costing the Ukrainian people dearly.
History will show that Washington’s dealings with Russia in the decades after the fall of the Soviet Union was a political blunder of epic proportions. It was entirely foreseeable that NATO enlargement would ultimately result in a tragic (perhaps violent) severing of relations with Moscow. Attentive analysts have warned of the likely fallout. But these warnings were ignored. Now we are paying the price for the myopia and arrogance of the US foreign policy establishment.