Russian Aggression as NATO Response Was Foreseen Decades Ago
NATO was founded in 1949 as an alliance of 12 Western nations intent on countering Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe. In 1990, it still consisted of just 16 members. Today, NATO comprises 30 member states – including several from the former Warsaw Pact, the Soviet counterpart to NATO. This eastward expansion – sometimes even called “imperialist” – led Russian President Vladimir Putin into the humanitarian and political disaster that his war in Ukraine has been.
NATO’s original purpose was to tie the United States and Canada together with their closest allies in Western and Southern Europe. In 1993, US President Bill Clinton pushed to include the former Warsaw Pact countries of the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary; they joined in 1999, one year before Putin was first elected as President. Ten other Eastern and Southern European states formed the Vilnius Group to lobby for NATO membership; by 2020, all had joined. This placed many former Soviet republics under NATO’s sphere of influence, and pushed the Western alliance directly against the Russian border. In the 1990s and 2000s, almost all newly independent former Soviet republics tried to avail themselves of NATO’s military protection.
NATO’s “open door policy,” described in Article 10 of the Atlantic Treaty, states that any “European State in a position to further the principles of this Treaty and to contribute to the security of the North Atlantic area” can become a member. But this open door policy is polarizing: to the West, it’s an assertion of their independence; to Russia, it’s a threat. And even given this policy, joining NATO has never been easy, as the Ukrainians have learned. One needs buy-in from all 30 member states, and many have opposed Ukrainian membership. There are also conditions, including a Membership Action Plan (MAP) that outlines concrete steps to guide countries toward membership.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has complicated matters even further. Early on, Moscow put forward a set of highly contentious demands towards NATO and the US. The demands included a permanent exclusion of Ukraine from NATO and a limit on troop and weapon deployment in the easternmost NATO countries, “in effect returning Nato forces to where they were stationed in 1997, before an eastward expansion,” says the Guardian. These demands were bluntly rejected, with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken saying: “NATO’s door is open, remains open, and that is our commitment.”
Even in the Clinton Administration in the 1990s, when NATO first expanded into the former Warsaw Pact, some in the West questioned whether it would corner Russia and provoke it. William J. Burns, Joe Biden’s current CIA director and an ambassador under Clinton, wrote that NATO’s expansion into Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic was “premature at best, and needlessly provocative at worst.” He predicted that this would “[leave] a mark on Russia’s relations with the West that would linger for decades.”
Several years later, in 1997, 50 prominent foreign policy experts wrote to Clinton, agreeing with Burns that “the current US-led effort to expand NATO … is a policy error of historic proportions” that would “unsettle European stability.” Since then, with each step that NATO makes toward Russia, government officials from the East and the West have advised caution. Putin, too, was always clear that if NATO’s expansion started to “threaten” its borders, it would be met with military resistance.
The problems were evident early on. Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright noted “[Russian president Boris] Yeltsin and his countrymen were strongly opposed to enlargement, seeing it as a strategy for exploiting their vulnerability and moving Europe’s dividing line to the east, leaving them isolated.” They even viewed NATO expansion as an extension of the Cold War; Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott said then that “many Russians see NATO as a vestige of the Cold War, inherently directed against their country.”
In 2007, at the annual Munich Security Conference, Putin said that “NATO has put its frontline forces on our borders… [NATO expansion] represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our Western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact?” After the end of the Cold War and the Soviet Union’s collapse, Russia was not keen to reignite that conflict. To them, the existence of NATO, and its seemingly unchecked expansion into what Russia still considered its own territory, was a threat to Russia, communism, and the world order.
In some ways, they were right: the US used NATO membership as an incentive for liberalization in communist countries and therefore, removed them from the post-Soviet Russian sphere of influence. These countries chose to approach NATO because they wanted to be out from under Russia’s thumb. But today, the collective agreement is that NATO is no longer an anti-Russian or anti-Communist organization; it is a “collective security agreement aimed at protecting its members from outside aggression and promoting peaceful mediation of conflicts within the alliance.” Even Western observers questioned whether NATO actions would force Putin to act rashly, which is exactly what happened. And that raises the question: Was that wise?
Despite Ukrainian independence that is otherwise beyond question, Putin continues to view the country as a part of Russia; he says that they are “connected with us by blood [and] family ties.” In the earlier years NATO seemed unconcerned with how its expansion would be received in Russia, and that has proven to be a mistake. “Our first action that really set us off in a bad direction was when NATO started to expand, bringing in Eastern European nations, some of them bordering Russia,” said Clinton’s Defense Secretary, Bill Perry. “At that time, we were working closely with Russia and they were beginning to get used to the idea that NATO could be a friend rather than an enemy … but they were very uncomfortable about having NATO right up on their border and they made a strong appeal for us not to go ahead with that.”
In Ukraine, attitudes toward NATO were largely ambivalent until 2014, when Putin’s invasion of Crimea heightened Ukrainian fears of Russia and sent them running to the West for protection. Conversely, though, the more NATO edged towards Western Russia, the more threatened Putin felt, and the more unpredictable and reactive he became.
Nothing can remove the blame from Putin for the devastation his invasion has caused, and the more that he has tried to control Ukraine, the more he’s pushed Ukrainians to work with the West. Even if NATO’s expansionism is problematic or threatening, it does not compare to the Russian invasion that has killed more than 2,000 Ukrainians, destroyed entire cities, and forced an estimated 10 million Ukrainians to flee their homeland as refugees. While NATO has expanded, with consent from all member countries, Putin has “annexed neighbors and funded separatists, cracked down on activists and allegedly poisoned enemies.” And although NATO’s expansion has been provocative and dangerous, as President Biden said, “this was … always about naked aggression, about Putin’s desire for empire by any means necessary.”
Image courtesy of Jura via Wikimedia Commons, ©2022, no rights reserved.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the wider St. Andrews Foreign Affairs Review team.
