NATO Expansion: the Road to Cold War and War Itself

“If NATO nations are willing to donate aircraft to Ukraine and train pilots, why not let those same freshly trained pilots fly sorties from bases on NATO territory—and refuel, rearm and repair these jets there as well?”

– Washington Post oped, 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 that held regular off-the-record discussions of key issues. This was an important time when the leading subject for the study group was the question of expanding the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The group had rather high level membership from the National Security Council, the Departments of State and Defense, and the intelligence community, particularly CIA and INR, the intelligence arm of State. These individuals were for the most part supporters of the absurd idea that we had won the Cold War and there was a mood of triumphalism and exceptionalism that was obvious in their support for NATO expansion.

Some of the leading cheerleaders in this respect were Nicholas Burns, currently our ambassador to China, and the late Helmut Sonnenfeldt, the Counselor at State who worked closely with Henry A. Kissinger during the key events in the 1970s that led to arms control and detente. Brookings scholar Fiona Hill, who went on to serve in 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.

I was essentially an outlier at these meetings because of my strong opposition to any expansion of NATO, and I had strong support from a leading Sovietologist, Ray Garthoff, a former ambassador and the major actor in the negotiation of the SALT and ABM treaties.

Our opposition was based on the danger of expanding an alliance that formerly had a common perception of the threat into a wider organization that would be divided into its east and west wings, which is currently the case. But our major opposition was that Russia in the 1990s was a failing state in no position to argue against the expansion, but that Russia would not be failing forever or even for long. And that Russia-which is a national security state in so many ways—would never tolerate having NATO members in the east and surely would not tolerate NATO members on their entire border.

It should be understood that in 1990, when we were trying to negotiate the Soviet troop withdrawal from East Germany, we told the Soviets at the highest level that, if their troops left, we would never “leap frog” over East Germany to go into East Europe. Former secretary of state James Baker said that to the Soviet foreign minister, and President George H. W. Bush delivered 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 words “leap frog.” He even had his assistant look up the notes of his meetings with Shevardnadze to confirm the use of the words “leap frog.” Unfortunately, nothing was put into writing. Baker wanted to write a policy statement with the Soviets, but national security adviser Brent Scowcroft blocked that effort. The conventional wisdom was that Scowcroft was a moderate; he wasn’t—he was more of a hard-liner than was understood at the time, and so was President Bush who opposed Ronald Reagan’s disarmament policies.

Frankly, anyone who has spent any time working on the Soviet/Russia problem should understand the great Soviet/Russian fear of encirclement and their fears of war on their vulnerable borders. Nevertheless, a huge group of so-called specialists over the years enthusiastically supported going further, expanding NATO into former Soviet republics (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia), employing a so-called defensive weapons system in Romania, Poland, and the Czech Republic against Iran of all places, deploying German troops into the Baltics, and creating U.S. bases in Bulgaria, Poland, and Romania. Fortunately, we were spared the thought of a Camp Trump in Poland, but I don’t know who was responsible for that.

So here were are in the midst of two and a half years of war in Ukraine, which is not going well for Ukraine and really hasn’t give Russia a lot to brag about in view of its sadistic war crimes. But for politicians and pundits to chortle that Putin’s war was “unprovoked” is simply wrong. We clearly played a role in provoking this war and only the United States could provide the security guarantees to both Ukraine and to Russia that would end it. Meanwhile, our politicians and pundits argue that if Putin can’t be stopped in Ukraine, he will move on. Move on to where, which one 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 terrorism. I don’t believe Russia is in a position to attack a NATO country.

My next article will deal with the role that the United States could play if we had a president who could throw himself into such a difficult task as well as having a Department of State that understands the strategies and processes of such an endeavor. Sadly, we don’t have either one. The prospect of a Trump-Vance administration doesn’t offer any hope. Trump says that he doesn’t “give a shit” about NATO, and Vance says that he does not care in any way about Ukraine.

Unfortunately, the United States has no plan for Ukraine, let alone for ending the war, let alone negotiating the peace. We’re simply in a tit-for-tat spiral raising the ante as we go. The latest suggestion in a Washington Post oped from a former Naval officer is indicative of the kind of sleepwalking that we are engaged in that will possibly lead to wider war. He wants to “Let Ukraine fly its jets from ‘sanctuary bases’ on NATO territory. This cockamamie scheme is supposed to scare the Russians in the same way that the Russians scare us with threats of using tactical nuclear weapons. The author says not to worry about any of this because “strict rules of engagement” would be established. You can’t get more obtuse than that.

One final note regarding this tragic cycle of events that will create a permanent cold war and possibly a wider war in Europe. President Bill Clinton didn’t come up with the idea of NATO expansion, but he was responding to his opponent, Senator Bob Dole, who had said that he would use the lack of expansion to criticize Clinton for missing an opportunity. Neither Dole nor Clinton was thinking about U.S. interests and U.S. foreign policy; they were thinking about the ethnic votes in important states such as Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. So Clinton—the master of triangulation—expanded NATO to win an election, and now the upcoming election will introduce greater uncertainty into the entire European geostrategic picture.The only certainty is that Ukraine has no road to victory.

The post NATO Expansion: the Road to Cold War and War Itself appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Melvin Goodman.

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