28 The New York ReviewNunn and Brent Scowcroft, who had
been President Bush’s national security
adviser, wrote another Times op- ed,
calling for “a definite, if not permanent
pause” to enlargement, quoting John
Maynard Keynes on the errors made in
the aftermath of World War I: “the fatal
miscalculation of how to deal with a de-
moralized former adversary”—an error
that “we must not repeat.”But some of Clinton’s senior aides
took on NATO enlargement as a mis-
sion. His top Russia adviser (and for-
mer Oxford classmate) Strobe Talbott
wrote in these pages that containing
Russia was not NATO’s only function;
the West might face threats from else-
where, and besides, the alliance helped
strengthen its members’ democratic
institutions and devotion to free mar-
kets. He acknowledged the critics’ case
that Russia might see enlargement as
evidence “that the noose is tightening
around its neck and will take defen-
sive if not offensive countermeasures,”
and allowed that “unless it is handled
with skill and foresight, the process of
expanding NATO could create new ten-
sions and divisions,” but he argued that
“freezing NATO in its cold war configu-
ration would itself be a huge mistake.”^3
It was a weak argument and was the
subject of a rebuttal in the following
issue.^4 Sarotte’s archival research re-
vealed, to her surprise, that Talbott
himself didn’t fully believe his own
case. In a memo to Secretary of State
Warren Christopher on September 12,
1994, a year before his New York Re-
view article, Talbott admitted, “NATO
expansion will, when it occurs, by
definition be punishment, or ‘neo-
containment,’ of the bad Bear.” He also
dismissed contending views as irrele-
vant or worse. When French president
Jacques Chirac warned a colleague of
Talbott’s that NATO was expanding too
far and too quickly—writing, “We have
humiliated them too much... the situa-
tion in Russia is very dangerous,” and
“One day there will be dangerous na-
tionalist backlash”—Talbott suspected
that Chirac and some other European
leaders were colluding with Russia’s
foreign ministry to develop an alternate
plan for European security, one that re-
lied less on NATO, i.e., less on the US.
He appointed Richard Holbrooke—his
State Department colleague and a mas-
ter at bureaucratic politics—to chair an
interagency panel on NATO enlarge-
ment, all but ensuring that its report
to Clinton would highlight all the ar-
guments in favor and downplay those
opposed.
However, even some of the policy’s
most ardent advocates thought that
enlargement had its limits—and one of
those limits was Ukraine. As enlarge-
ment unfolded—beginning in 1999
with the Czech Republic, Poland, and
Hungary—Ukraine seemed like a log-
ical candidate for membership in the
near future. But as Sarotte puts it, even
Holbrooke “refrained from his usual
role of bulldozing away all opposition,saying, ‘Ukraine is the most delicate
issue.’”
Christopher mused at a conference
of NATO foreign ministers that if the
alliance kept up its pace of expansion,
it would be “hard to see how Ukraine
can accept being the buffer between
NATO, Europe and Russia”—and for
that reason he favored slowing the pro-
cess down. To nearly all the ministers,
offering NATO’s Article 5 guarantees
to a large country with still- extensive
ties to Russia—geographical, histori-
cal, cultural, and economic—would be
too provocative. Ukraine seemed, in
Sarotte’s words, “a bridge too far for
membership, and it was thought best to
leave it in a separate category for the
time being”—though nobody took the
trouble to devise a “separate category,”
so the issue was kicked, like an explo-
sive can, down the road.
George W. Bush picked up the can
in April 2008 at a NATO conference in
Bucharest. It was his final year as presi-
dent. He wanted, as one of his aides put
it, “to lay down a marker” for his legacy
as an advocate of promoting democracy
throughout the world. The invasion of
Iraq, which he’d believed would spark
a wildfire of freedom across the Middle
East, wasn’t working out so well, but
he was impressed by the Orange Rev-
olution in Ukraine and the country’s
election of opposition leader Viktor
Yushchenko as president. NATO was
already set to announce Albania and
Croatia as new members at the sum-
mit. In a surprise move, Bush urged
letting Ukraine, as well as the former
Soviet republic of Georgia, embark on
a “Membership Action Plan,” with the
aim of accepting their full ascension at
some point.
His idea was instantly, in some cases
angrily, opposed by the other NATO
leaders, especially German chancel-
lor Angela Merkel, who thought—like
several US officials in the previous two
administrations—that such a move
was, first, impractical, since Ukraine
couldn’t meet many of NATO’s require-
ments (among them a firm anticorrup-
tion policy), and, second, needlessly
provocative to Russia.^5 Yet by the end
of the summit, Bush prevailed. The
official communiqué read, “NATO
welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s
Euro- Atlantic aspirations for mem-
bership in NATO,” then added—more
definitively than anyone could have
predicted—“We agreed today that
these countries will become mem-
bers of NATO.” It may have been no
co incidence that four months later,
ethnic- Russian militants in Georgia
launched a separatist war, expelled
Georgian nationals from South Ossetia
and Abkhazia, and “requested” Rus-
sian military aid, including the instal-
lation of permanent bases.
It was certainly no coincidence that
in 2014, when Ukrainian protesters
chased out their Moscow- backed pres-
ident, Viktor Yanukovych, and elected
a new government that made moves to
join the European Union, Russia re-
acted to the Western push by annex-
ing Crimea (which Khrushchev had
given to Ukraine as a symbolic gift
in 1954) and sending special forces,
wearing unmarked uniforms, to helppro- Russia separatists fight Ukrainian
army troops in the eastern provinces
of Donetsk and Luhansk. (In the eight
years since, more than 14,000 people
have died in that war, including at least
500 Russians.)The warnings of two decades earlier by
Kennan, Perry, and others that after the
Russian economy revived to some de-
gree, an ultranationalist might come to
power and act on the resentments over
the expansion of NATO were vindicated
by the emergence of Vladimir Putin. A
former KGB officer who watched the
Berlin Wall come down, and a prime
minister of Yeltsin’s who watched the
Kremlin accede to the Westernization
of Eastern Europe, Putin was deter-
mined to regain Russia’s old empire, or
at least not to let another chunk of it,
especially Ukraine, slip away.
Putin, who famously pronounced the
implosion of the Soviet Union to be
“the greatest geopolitical catastrophe”
of the twentieth century, also once
told President George W. Bush that
Ukraine was “not a real country.” On
February 21 of this year, in an angry,
rambling, hour- long televised speech,
which climaxed with his recognition
of Donetsk and Luhansk as indepen-
dent republics (shades of South Ossetia
and Abkhazia), Putin not only railed
against NATO expansion but asserted
that Ukraine was not a legitimate sov-
ereign state, claiming (in a false read-
ing of history) that it was a creation of
Bolshevik Russia and must now return
to the fold or at least assume the sta-
tus of neutrality in the renewed era of
East–West rivalry. The demand would
have been unacceptable enough after
thirty years of Ukraine’s democratic in-
dependence; it was outrageous—“neu-
trality” could only be a euphemism
for surrender—with 190,000 Russian
troops poised on its border, and Putin
must have known it.
Is NATO enlargement to blame for
Putin’s revanchism, or has it served
as a pretext for fulfilling his obsessive
nostalgia for empire? Probably a bit of
both. His resentment over Russia’s loss
of empire following its cold war defeat
has some valid basis. But that doesn’t
give him, or the leader of any coun-
try, the right to reverse that loss by fiat
and force. Three American presidents
pushed NATO enlargement too eagerly,
with too many insincere assurances that
the latest step was the last one. NATO’s
declaration at Bucharest that Ukraine
and Georgia “will” be brought into the
alliance at some point was a profound
error, as most member states realized
at the time, not least because there was
no real intention to bring them in any-
time soon, and saying otherwise merely
handed Moscow a gratuitous provo-
cation and filled Kyiv and Tbilisi with
false hopes. Still, the former captive na-
tions of the Soviet empire were—and
in the case of Ukraine and Georgia,
still are—genuinely eager to ally with
the West after suffering the oppression
of the East for so long.
In any case, a Russian leader more
reasonable than Putin would not have
demanded a legal document guaran-
teeing that Ukraine would never join
NATO. Knowing that no such docu-
ment could exist as a practical matter,
he would have discerned the many
reasons that membership wouldn’t
be offered, probably in his lifetime or
beyond. Biden in fact publicly said asmuch. He also offered Putin transpar-
ency in military exercises in the region;
onsite inspections of the US missile-
defense launchers in Poland and Ro-
mania, to verify that they couldn’t fire
offensive cruise missiles (as Putin has
charged they could); and a conference
to reconsider twenty- first- century Eu-
ropean security, with special attention
to legitimate Russian interests. A less
grandiose leader—especially one with
an interest in building a more inclusive
society and a more productive econ-
omy (neither of which has been a goal
of Putin’s in his twenty- two years of
rule)—might have seen the political
advantages to be gained from these
“confidence- building measures” and
recognitions of his grievances.
Two questions remain to be asked.
First, if NATO had not enlarged, if the
nations of Central and Eastern Europe
had been left to manage their own se-
curity, would Putin have let them live
in peace? If Estonia, Latvia, and Lith-
uania had not joined NATO, would
they still be independent states? From
the vantage of 2022, both notions seem
doubtful.
Second, was there a plausible alter-
native to NATO enlargement? Was
there some way to satisfy the security
needs of Central and Eastern Europe
without threatening Russian interests,
as Moscow defined them? Sarotte ar-
gues that there was. Toward the end of
President Clinton’s first year in office, a
group of his advisers—notably General
John Shalikashvili, the chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff—formulated an
idea called the Partnership for Peace
(PfP). It would appeal to the same
newly independent nations (others too,
if they liked), help them integrate with
the West through free markets and
democratic institutions, and build up
their defenses without drawing a new
militarized line through Europe and
thus without alienating Russia.
Clinton was keen on the idea. Yeltsin
praised it as “brilliant” and wanted
Russia to join too. For the year or so
that it lasted, the PfP worked “surpris-
ingly well,” Sarotte observes. But in the
end, the NATO juggernaut proved too
captivating. WałĊsa feared the West
was losing the opportunity to “cage the
bear.” Havel wouldn’t sign on to the
PfP until Clinton assured him that it
was “a first step leading to full NATO
membership.”
Sarotte also spells out domestic pres-
sures in the US and Russia. Clinton’s
scandals and impeachment trial dis-
tracted him from international affairs,
leaving the enlargement enthusiasts
around him to control policy. Yelt s i n’s
1993 shelling of the Russian parliament
building—the only way he could see to
keep a coalition of hard- line Commu-
nists and outright fascists from gaining
control of the government—revealed
that the Russian Federation’s demo-
cratic reforms were even more fragile
than they appeared. And his invasion
of Chechnya the following year made
the former Warsaw Pact members all
the more eager for NATO’s protection.
The transformative events of the past
two decades—the expansion of NATO,
the failure of Russian reform, and the
rise of empire nostalgia in Moscow’s
ruling circles, climaxing with the an-
nexations and finally the brutal in-
vasion of Ukraine: none of them was
inevitable. But especially with the rise
of someone like Putin, they would have
been hard to prevent. Q(^3) Strobe Talbot, “Why NATO Should
Grow,” The New York Review, August
10, 1995.
(^4) R. T. Davies, “Should NATO Grow? A
Dissent,” The New York Review, Septem-
ber 21, 1995. Davies’s letter to the editor
also included the text of the letter from
the eighteen former officials.
(^5) See Steven Erlanger and Steven Lee
Myers, “NATO Allies Oppose Bush on
Georgia and Ukraine,” The New York
Times, April 3, 2008.
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