NATO expansion: the road to the Cold War and to war itself

Photo by Marek Studzinski

“If NATO countries are willing to donate aircraft to Ukraine and train pilots, why don’t we let the same newly trained pilots fly missions from bases on NATO territory – and also refuel, upgrade and repair these jets there?”

– Washington Post editorial, July 2024.

In the mid-1990s, I was a professor of international relations at the National War College and a member of the Brookings Institution’s Russian Study Group, which held regular off-the-record discussions on important issues. This was an important time when the main topic of the study group was the question of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) expansion. The group had fairly senior members from the National Security Council, the State and Defense Departments, and the intelligence agencies, particularly the CIA and the INR, the State Department’s intelligence agency. These individuals were largely supporters of the absurd idea that we had won the Cold War, and there was a mood of triumphalism and exceptionalism that was evident in their support for NATO expansion.

Among the strongest advocates in this regard were Nicholas Burns, the current ambassador to China, and the late Helmut Sonnenfeldt, the secretary of state who worked closely with Henry A. Kissinger during the crucial events in the 1970s that led to arms control and détente. Brookings scholar Fiona Hill, who later served on Donald Trump’s NSC, and James Steinberg, a former deputy national security adviser and deputy at the State Department, were members who actively supported the expansion.

Because of my strong opposition to any NATO expansion, I was essentially an outsider at these meetings. I also received strong support from a leading Sovietologist, Ray Garthoff, a former ambassador and key player in the negotiations on the SALT and ABM treaties.

Our opposition was based on the danger of expanding an alliance that once shared a common threat perception into a larger organization that would be split into an eastern and western wing, as is the case now. But our main opposition was that Russia was a failed state in the 1990s, unable to argue against expansion, but that Russia would not be failed forever, or even for long. And that Russia – which is in many ways a national security state – would never tolerate NATO members in the east, and certainly not NATO members all along its border.

It should be noted that in 1990, when we were trying to negotiate the withdrawal of Soviet troops from East Germany, we told the Soviets at the highest levels that if they withdrew their troops, we would never leapfrog East Germany to invade Eastern Europe. Former Secretary of State James Baker told the Soviet foreign minister that, and President George H.W. Bush conveyed a similar message to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. I interviewed Baker for my book on Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, and Baker confirmed the use of the word “leap frog.” He even had his assistant look up the notes of his meetings with Shevardnadze to confirm the use of the word “leap frog.” Unfortunately, none of this was put in writing. Baker wanted to draft a political statement with the Soviets, but National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft blocked that effort. The general opinion was that Scowcroft was a moderate; He was not, he was a bigger hardliner than people thought at the time, and the same was true of President Bush, who opposed Ronald Reagan’s disarmament policy.

Frankly, anyone who has studied the Soviet-Russian problem even a little should understand the Soviets’ and Russians’ great fear of encirclement and war on their vulnerable borders. Nevertheless, over the years a large group of so-called specialists enthusiastically supported taking things a step further by expanding NATO to the former Soviet republics (Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia), deploying a so-called defensive weapons system in Romania, Poland and the Czech Republic against Iran of all places, sending German troops to the Baltics and establishing US bases in Bulgaria, Poland and Romania. Fortunately, we were spared the thought of Camp Trump in Poland, but I don’t know who was responsible for that.

So we are in the midst of a two-and-a-half-year-old war in Ukraine that is not going well for Ukraine and really doesn’t give Russia much to brag about, given its sadistic war crimes. But when politicians and pundits snicker that Putin’s war was “unprovoked,” that is simply wrong. We clearly played a role in provoking that war, and only the United States can give Ukraine and Russia the security guarantees that would end it. Meanwhile, our politicians and pundits argue that if Putin cannot be stopped in Ukraine, he will move on. Move on to wherever, to whichever of the many NATO countries that surround him. His conventional tactics failed against a small, backward state on his border, so he resorted to a war of terror. I don’t think Russia is capable of attacking a NATO country.

In my next article, I will look at the role the United States could play if we had a president who could take on such a difficult task and a State Department that understood the strategies and processes of such an endeavor. Unfortunately, we have neither. The prospect of a Trump-Vance administration offers no hope. Trump says he “doesn’t give a damn” about NATO, and Vance says he doesn’t give a damn about Ukraine.

Unfortunately, the United States has no plan for Ukraine, let alone how to end the war or negotiate a peace. We are simply caught in a spiral of retaliation that keeps raising the stakes. The latest proposal in a WashingtonPost A comment from a former naval officer is indicative of the kind of sleepwalking we are doing that will potentially lead to a major war. He wants “Ukraine to fly its jets from ‘safe bases’ on NATO territory. This nonsense scheme is designed to scare the Russians in the same way the Russians scare us with threats of using tactical nuclear weapons. The author says there’s no need to worry about any of this because ‘strict rules of engagement’ will be put in place. It doesn’t get any more stupid than that.

One final note on this tragic cycle of events that will trigger a permanent Cold War and possibly a larger war in Europe. President Bill Clinton did not originate NATO expansion, but he did it in response to his opponent, Senator Bob Dole, who had said he would use the lack of expansion to criticize Clinton for missing an opportunity. Neither Dole nor Clinton were thinking about U.S. interests and U.S. foreign policy; they were thinking about ethnic votes in key states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. So Clinton—the master of triangulation—expanded NATO to win an election, and now the upcoming election will bring even more uncertainty to the entire geostrategic picture of Europe. The only certainty is that Ukraine has no path to victory.