The Folly in Aggressive NATO Expansion in the Post-Soviet Era

posted by William Sullivan at American Thinker 

The White House meeting between President Trump, Vice President Vance, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky certainly went off the rails, and it yielded a lot more than just “great television,” as President Trump suggestedat the end of the fiery exchange. 

The practical result was that the United States has paused all military aid to Ukraine as of this writing, which is an outcome that could have been avoided if Zelensky had a better grasp of the situation.

Trump offered something that he thought Zelensky would understand -- national security that might be less iron-clad than NATO membership, but it was national security that was nonetheless being offered, in the form of American economic interest in the region.  

Any future attack on Ukraine by Russia would be an attack against America’s economic and national security interests.  Certainly, the Russians could choose to attack while knowing that America will potentially retaliate militarily, but the risk calculation is certainly different than if America had no vested interest in Ukraine’s defense.

Obviously, Putin would also recognize exactly what Trump is doing.  However, these are terms which may be acceptable to him if coupled with an assurance that Ukraine does not enter NATO.

Among the few countries now standing between Russia and the military alliance of 32 Western nations is Ukraine, a large and economically vital country for both Russia and the West.  And most importantly, according to Hope for Ukraine, “the possibility of Ukraine joining NATO is seen by many in Moscow as a red line that cannot be crossed” because it will “bring Western military infrastructure closer to Russia’s borders.”

This is the quagmire in which Trump now finds himself, and the circumstances require a creative solution to allow Ukraine to maintain its sovereignty while also staving off the potential for World War III that the aggressive expansion of the unconditional alliance of NATO over the past three decades has arguably edged us closer toward.

To be perfectly clear, Russia is indeed the aggressor in this war that began in 2022, as they were in the invasion of Crimea in 2014.  Russia is also claiming a right to sovereignty based upon ethnic and political proclivities of the populations in disputed territories of eastern Ukraine that parallel arguments made by Hitler as he vied for annexation of the Sudetenland in 1939.

But what is also true is that the expansion of NATO after the fall of the Soviet Union was a thumb in the eye of Russia that increased its paranoia about Western encroachment after its tremendous loss of power and influence in the world.  

When the Soviet Union fell in 1991, the nations of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Slovakia, and Hungary were considered by Henry Kissinger to be “No Man’s Land” in the post-Cold War map, because it was expected that Germany and Russia would both be trying to exert their influence in these countries.  Back then, Russia had no concern over Ukraine or Belarus, because they were, as Russian President Boris Yeltsin described them, “blood brothers” to Russia.  The several former Soviet satellite states, like Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia, were considered more ethnically, culturally, and politically aligned with East than West, and though generally neutral, they were effectively a geographic buffer between Russia and the NATO nations to its distant West.

Viewed through the Russian lens, what occurred since 1991 could be understood as Cold War’s domino theory in reverse.  In 1999, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia joined the West’s military alliance.  In 2004, seven more former Soviet satellite states joined.  Since then, six more nations have joined, including Finland and Sweden in 2023 and 2024, respectively.  

In 1991, there was a massive geographic buffer between Russia and a 16-nation political military alliance.  Today, a few crucial nations are all that stands between a 32-nation political and military alliance and Russia’s doorstep.

That Kissinger referred to entire nations between East and West as “No Man’s Land” suggests that he still viewed the circumstances in 1994 as an ongoing cold war.  Not everyone viewed the post-Soviet world that way.  

For example, the very idea of Eastern European nations joining NATO is unnecessarily antagonistic, said George Kennan, a top American diplomat who is the original Cold Warrior and the author of the Long Telegram which predicted, with eerie precision, the political ambitions of the Soviet Union in 1945.    

In 1998, after Congress approved the first NATO expansion since Spain’s entry in 1982, Kennan made his final correct prediction, which he wasn’t happy to make.  It marked the “beginning of a new Cold War,” he told Thomas Friedman.  He predicted that the Russians would “gradually react quite adversely,” and that the decision would “make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves.”

“We have signed up,” he goes on, “to protect a whole series of countries, even though we neither have the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way.”

Our differences in the Cold War were with the communist Soviets, not the Russian people, he argued.  “And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.”  And Russia’s democracy was far more advanced than many of the countries we had just signed up to defend, argued Kennan.  

As he said goodbye to Friedman, one of the greatest architects of the hard-fought defeat of the Soviet Union told him that “this had been [his] life, and it pains [him] to see it so screwed up in the end.”

And here we are, 27 years later.  It would be hard to argue that George Kennan was wrong, and much easier to argue that he has proven to be every bit as correct in his final prediction as he was when he dictated his Long Telegram of 1945.

Trump is correct to offer an alternative to the continued expansion of NATO that arguably led us to this moment, and to seek a path to peace that doesn’t involve American taxpayers funding a perpetual war with money that we don’t have or, God forbid, American troops’ involvement in another European war.