by Benn Steil
“Are we really going to be able to convince the East Europeans that we are protecting them from their historical threats,” asked Democratic senator Sam Nunn, “while we convince the Russians that NATO enlargement has nothing to do with Russia as a potential military threat?” Going forward with such a plan, he argued, was likely to produce a more nationalistic and dangerous Russia.
“An expanded NATO that excludes Russia will not serve to contain Russia’s retrograde, expansionist tendencies,” Talbott warned Secretary of State Warren Christopher. “Quite the contrary, it will further provoke them.” He was concerned not only about a Russian backlash but a Ukrainian response to such a backlash. Hard-liners in Kiev, he argued, would insist that being left out of NATO meant they needed a nuclear deterrent.32
Bill Clinton, unlike his critics and many of his advisers, was at ease pursuing a major diplomatic and security initiative riddled with contradiction. Sure, countries wanted NATO membership to deter Russia, but both Russia and NATO could change. Russia might someday even join NATO, he told Talbott, notwithstanding that being “blue-sky stuff” at the moment. Truman, he said, never had a “grand strategy” to deal with Stalin. He had “powerful instincts about what had to be done” and “just made it up as [he] went along.”33 Clinton felt he could do the same.
Yet whereas it is true that the Marshall Plan and NATO were not part of Truman’s initial blueprint for dealing with Stalin, they were also not improvisations. His State Department recognized how the Soviet Union saw its interests, and what the likely costs of challenging them were. Clinton, in contrast, felt he could have it both ways. He would extend security guarantees to eastern Europe in return for a western orientation while keeping Russia in a state of false consciousness over why the guarantees were needed.
Clinton wanted to endow a “new NATO” with a new raison d’être. His advisers spoke of “squar[ing] the circle” between eastern Europe’s security concerns and not alienating Russia. But it is the old, original NATO that brought in the applicants.34 Whatever an American president might believe, or wish for, NATO was, at its core, an anti-Russian alliance. Clinton did not see, or did not want to see, its expansion as a tool of Kennanite containment. He was committed to encouraging Russia down the path of democratic reform and association with the West.35 Aspiring members, however, did not hanker to join in “peacekeeping,” or “stopping ethnic conflicts beyond the alliance’s borders,” or battling far-off “new threats.”36 They wanted to come in to keep the Russians out. Most everything else the Americans might want NATO to do was, to them, a cost of joining and not a benefit. President Clinton surely understood this; but candidate Clinton also understood that twenty million Americans of East European descent were living in fourteen states accounting for 36 percent of the electoral college. His advisers reminded him.37
For their part, congressional Republicans, whose support would be critical to expanding NATO, were unabashed in stating that its logic was Russian containment. “The countries of Eastern Europe know only too well what Russia is capable of,” said the party’s 1994 Contract with America election pledge. “Observing its new boundaries . . . goes against [Russia’s] centuries old imperial tradition and the belief of many within its military and government.”38 This argument, in contrast to Clinton’s narrative, had the advantage of being coherent and historically accurate. Yet given that NATO would, in the coming quarter century, invest little in reinforcing its eastern border, expansion’s containment value to the United States may have been outweighed by the provocation costs.
Though U.S. foreign policy is set largely by the executive branch, and not the legislature, the Russians understood that the president and his successors retained the option to use NATO against Russia and its interests. Former State Department official Ron Asmus, an early advocate of NATO expansion, was nonetheless disparaging of Russian officials who rejected uncollateralized American pledges of goodwill toward their country. Such rejection was forthright in the case of Clinton’s Partnership for Peace (PfP) initiative, which the president touted as a means to promote cooperation among NATO, eastern Europe, and Russia. Russian Colonel General Leonid Ivashov dismissed it as “a covert program to expand NATO . . . right up to Russia’s borders,” a reaction Asmus ascribes to his being “notoriously hard line.” Yet this fact hardly stands in for showing that Ivashov was wrong. It is, after all, what happened. And State Department planners had been calling for “a phased strategy of [NATO] enlargement” a year before his comments.
Asmus’ account, notwithstanding the hopes he and his colleagues had for better U.S.-Russia relations, makes clear that PfP had been sold to the East Europeans as a way station to NATO—a NATO from which Russia would be excluded. “While the Partnership is not NATO membership,” Clinton said at a press conference in Prague on January 12, 1994, “neither is it a permanent holding room. It changes the entire dialogue so that now the question is no longer whether NATO will take in new members, but when and how.” But once NATO began growing, what sort of dynamic would set in? Each inch of eastward expansion was bound to increase Russian distrust of the West, which would in turn produce more urgency for former Soviet republics further east to join. The only logical end point was Russia’s borders.
BORIS YELTSIN, LIKE GORBACHEV BEFORE him, was brought down, in significant part, by widespread popular and official fears of a security vacuum—political and economic. Neither leader could halt NATO expansion, but each battled to keep his country’s frontiers from shrinking further. Yeltsin sent the Russian army into the breakaway republic of Chechnya in 1994. He withdrew the troops in 1996, only to send them back in again in 1999. His authority fatally weakened, he resigned in December of that year, handing the presidency to his prime minister.
As prime minister, Vladimir Putin had been riding high in public opinion polls on the back of his intensified crackdown in Chechnya. The former KGB officer in East Germany, who had been on the front lines of Moscow’s covert efforts against NATO, would later describe the collapse of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [twentieth] century.”39 Much of his long tenure as president would be devoted to, if not restoring the Soviet Union, restoring elements of its economic space and security frontier in the face of NATO and EU expansion. His emergence was at least as much a reflection of Russia’s antiwestern turn as it was a cause. As a former intelligence officer, he had the wherewithal to co-opt and control the new class of business oligarchs (some of whom came from the intelligence services) and to prevent the old Soviet empire’s constituent parts and satellites from undermining the interests of the Russian state.40
To Putin and the new Russian leadership, the behavior of NATO and its members in the wake of Albright’s speech affirmed what they had believed since German unification: that NATO would remain a threat to Russian interests, and that whether a country was inside or outside of NATO affected those interests.
Days after the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland joined NATO in March 1999, the alliance began a three-month bombing campaign against Serbia—a Slavic Orthodox state like Russia. The attacks appalled ordinary Russians. Albright had pronounced that NATO was “a defensive alliance that harbors no territorial ambitions.” Yet the attacks were not in defense of a NATO member, but in support of Muslim separatists in the Serbian province of Kosovo. NATO had played defense during the Cold War, but had shifted to offense simultaneous with expansion into the former Warsaw Pact. “A dangerous precedent was created,” Gorbachev observed, “of military action undertaken against a sovereign country without authorization by the UN Security Council, in violation of the UN Charter and international law.”41 Putin would soon exploit the precedent in carrying out his own liberations.
NATO’s actions in the former Yugoslavia—in Bosnia in 1995 as well as in Serbia in 1999—were undertaken with noble aims: to stop the slaughter of innocents. NATO expansion into the former Warsaw Pact, however, added to these attacks a toxic element for U.S.-Russia relations. The new easter
n members were not capable of affecting the outcomes, yet as part of the alliance they were now bound to Western policies that challenged Russian interests. As NATO expanded further eastward, nations on Russia’s borders would also become tied to such policies. NATO members would moreover take unilateral actions hostile to Russia, actions they would never have taken outside the alliance.
In 2012, Syria shot down a Turkish jet over its territory. An angry president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan insisted that “a short-term border violation [could] never be a pretext for an attack.” Yet three years later, Turkey shot down a Russian fighter jet that had crossed into its airspace from Syria, where it was bombing opponents of the Assad regime. Turkey could claim to have acted in self-defense and without territorial ambitions, but it also acted knowing that it could call on NATO protection, under the collective defense principle of Article 5, in the event of Russian military retaliation. “Turkish airspace . . . is NATO airspace,” the Turkish Foreign Ministry told Russia after the attack. Russia took notice. “Turkey has not set itself up” as the actor, “but the North Atlantic alliance as a whole,” observed Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. “This is extremely irresponsible.”42
In a 1997 statement before a NATO gathering in Brussels, Albright argued that the purpose of NATO expansion was “to do for Europe’s east what NATO did fifty years ago for Europe’s west: to integrate new democracies, eliminate old hatreds, provide confidence in economic recovery, and deter conflict.”43 But this was the purpose of the Marshall Plan, and not NATO. And if the aim were now to repeat such accomplishments in the East, NATO, a military organization built to defend its members against the Soviet Union, was an awkward vehicle to achieve it. It could possibly “deter conflict,” but it might also encourage conflict with a distrustful and better-armed Russia.
“If we are talking about the importance of improving the economies and democratization of countries like Hungary and Poland,” Senator Paul Wellstone (D-MN) put to Albright at hearings that year, “there is the European Union. I do not know how a military alliance really meets these concerns.” Conflating NATO expansion and the Marshall Plan suggested a mismatch between means and ends. Senator Paul Sarbanes (D-MD) added that he could not understand “Albright’s suggestion that the 50th anniversary of . . . the Marshall Plan is relevant” to the timing of NATO expansion. “Well,” Albright clarified, “we have been celebrating the 50th anniversary of everything.”44
If historical anniversaries were important for NATO expansion, waiting two years for the eightieth anniversary of the Versailles Treaty would have been more apposite. The treaty heaped humiliations on Germany after World War I, with no clear end in sight, and created the economic and political conditions that led to World War II. Having improbably abandoned communism for democracy and capitalism in a near-bloodless revolution, Russians were, ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, feeling similarly humiliated and threatened by an unexpected Western military advance toward their borders.45
The European Union, in contrast to NATO, did have the capacity to provide a “Marshall Plan” for the East but was unwilling. The EU’s focus was on deepening economic and political integration within its existing boundaries. Membership for former Warsaw Pact nations would not come for another seven years. Richard Holbrooke, the Clinton administration’s most aggressive advocate of NATO enlargement, believed that “EU membership was more important” for eastern Europe than NATO membership. But once it became clear to him that it was not going to happen anytime soon, he pronounced it “irresponsible and potentially dangerous to leave these countries outside the ‘West.’ ”46 He concluded that “NATO enlargement had to fill the void.”47 Or, as Albright put it, “If NATO enlargement can proceed more quickly” than EU enlargement, “why wait until, say, tomato farmers in Central Europe start using the right kinds of pesticides” for EU membership?48 That it might not be prudent to fill a political and economic void with a military pact did not concern them.
George Marshall and Dean Acheson would never have backed NATO in place of a political and economic strategy. Western European integration was their aim, and the Truman administration only added a military element after the Prague coup showed that Moscow would subvert governments that could not defend themselves. In 1997, however, the Clinton administration insisted that Russia was threatening no one, and did not need to be contained. “This NATO,” newly expanded to the East, Albright said, “is not directed against Russia. It is not us versus them or them versus us. We are all on the same side.” An influential RAND Corporation study published that same year, coauthored by Asmus, controversially estimated only modest NATO expansion costs on the grounds that the alliance had no enemy; the “premise [was] avoiding confrontation with Russia, not preparing for a new Russian threat.”49
Many of NATO expansion’s most prominent advocates, however, could not abide this thinking. Clinton officials “keep talking about the absence of dividing lines,” observed Henry Kissinger at the time. But “with all due respect, this is nonsense. If you have an alliance, you have a dividing line.”50 And Russia was on the other side of the line, just as it was in 1949. The difference was that the Marshall planners and NATO founders acknowledged that a line was being drawn, and were willing to bear the necessary costs to defend it. The Clinton administration, in contrast, was denying the line’s existence. The United States could “have [its] cake and eat it too,” Holbrooke said. Writing in 1998, he argued that “years from now . . . people will look back at the debate and wonder what all the fuss was about. They will notice that nothing has changed in Russia’s relationship with the West.”51
IN 2000, JUST TWO YEARS later, an official Russian “Foreign policy Concept” (FPC) paper approved by President Putin contradicted Holbrooke, declaring that “NATO’s present-day political and military guidelines do not coincide with security interests of the Russian Federation and occasionally contradict them.” It pointed specifically to NATO’s “use-of-force operations outside [of area] without the sanction of the UN Security Council”—a reference to NATO’s bombing of Serbia, which began hours after Holbrooke announced that negotiations with its leadership over Kosovo had failed. Such out-of-area action, it must be noted, had always been envisioned by the architects of NATO expansion. In Asmus’ words seven years earlier, “NATO must go out of area or out of business”—the presumption being that the latter had to be prevented by finding enemies. The FPC concluded that “Russia retains its negative attitude towards the expansion of NATO.”52
Asmus’ 1997 estimate of NATO expansion costs, based on the belief that Russia would not seriously oppose it, naturally turned out to be way too low. Eleven years later, in 2008, he explained in Foreign Affairs that “the West’s broader hopes of establishing deeper relations with a more democratic and cooperative Moscow never materialized. . . . Moscow has [instead] become more authoritarian and adversarial.” He continued to support NATO expansion to Russia’s borders but, retreating from his 1997 paper, now recognized that “antidemocratic forces in Russia”—presumably the Putin government—“will oppose such a move.” This conclusion was a tepid acknowledgment that NATO and Russia had indeed become enemies, though he postulated, remarkably, that U.S. policy toward Ukraine would help ameliorate this problem. “Consolidating a pro-Western, democratic Ukraine,” he asserted, will “indirectly encourage democratization in Russia.” By 2016, that pretense was demolished. RAND published a study that year backing billions of dollars in additional annual NATO spending aimed at “Reinforcing Deterrence on NATO’s Eastern Flank”—a direct response to “Russia’s . . . aggression against Ukraine.”53 Yet there was no sign that the United States was willing to bear such spending, once again highlighting a critical difference between NATO’s founders and its expanders.
But many in the Clinton administration believed that NATO enlargement was necessary less to protect eastern Europe than to promote and entrench democracy there (even in Russia, which would remain outside it).54 “The deepest aim of NATO enla
rgement,” Russia expert Stephen Sestanovich writes, “may well have been to consolidate the victory of Western ideas.”55 Yet there is no evidence that it did, nor have the mechanics by which it was supposed to accomplish this feat ever been revealed. Remaining outside NATO has had no detrimental effect on democracy or Western ideas in Sweden or Finland. Meanwhile, Turkey, no liberal democracy when it joined NATO in 1952, became less of one under Erdoğan’s leadership. Poland regressed under the Law and Justice (PiS) government after 2015. And membership imposed no constraint on Hungary when its prime minister, Viktor Orbán, declared in 2014 that “the era of liberal democracies is over.” Orbán did “not think that [Hungary’s] European Union membership,” or by extension its NATO membership, “precludes [it] from building an illiberal new state based on national foundations”—which is what he now wished for his country. Moreover, he said, “what is happening right now regarding Russia’s relations to the West is really bad for Hungary.”56
This conclusion is, of course, precisely the one Moscow wanted the Hungarian government to draw. Whereas western supporters of enlargement, like Asmus, argued that Russia had a vested interest in supporting “democratic stability on [its] western border,”57 Moscow pursued a different strategy: “encouraging authoritarian tendencies or political unreliability in its neighbours.” Particularly in Georgia and Ukraine, Moscow’s ambition was to keep the regimes “institutionally weak, unpalatable to the West and dependent on Russia.”58
Whereas Orbán’s comments were condemned by many of Hungary’s neighbors, Orbán succeeded in clarifying that NATO was a military alliance whose political impact was mainly on relations between Russia and the countries that joined, or might wish to join. It was not an organization with either the will or capacity to make or keep countries democratic.