23 March 2022, NIICE Commentary 7721
Dr. Ramesh Kumar & Sriyansh Mohanty
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is an act of aggression that will escalate already perilous tensions between NATO and Russia. The new Cold War between the West and Russia has heated up. Vladimir Putin is mostly to blame for these recent advancements, but NATO’s boastful, tone-deaf attitude towards Russia over the last fraction deserves a substantial portion of the blame as well. For more than a quarter-century, international relations scholars committed to realism and restraint-based US foreign policy have warned that expanding the world’s most powerful military alliance toward another major state would not end well. The war in Ukraine is conclusive evidence that it did not end well.
It’s important to realise that expanding NATO eastward would have been extremely difficult without being perceived as hostile by Russia. Even the most basic plans would bring the alliance to Russia’s boundaries. Some of the more ambitious scenarios would have the alliance encircling the Russian Federation. These are some significant points from the book “Beyond NATO: Staying out of Europe’s Wars,’ written at a period when expansion suggestions were merely speculative at New York and Washington foreign policy seminars. The main argument was that it would be an unnecessary provocation of Russia. Bill Clinton’s administration had already made the disastrous choice the previous year to press for the inclusion of several former Warsaw Pact countries in NATO, which was not widely known at the time. Soon after, the administration proposed asking Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which the US Senate approved in 1998. It was thought to be the first of multiple membership expansion waves.
Even the first stage sparked Russian outrage and criticism. “[Russian President Boris] Yeltsin and his countrymen were vehemently opposed to enlargement, seeing it as a tactic for exploiting their fragility and moving Europe’s dividing line to the east, leaving them isolated,” writes Clinton’s secretary of state Madeleine Albright in her memoir. It’s important to grasp the Russian mindset in this situation. Many Russians regard NATO as a relic of the Cold War, which is fundamentally hostile to their country. They point out that the Warsaw Pact, their military partnership, has been disbanded, and they wonder why the west hasn’t done the same. It was a great question, and neither the Clinton administration nor its successors could come up with a remotely convincing explanation.
In a May 1998 New York Times interview, George Kennan, the intellectual father of America’s containment policy during the Cold War, foresaw the consequences of the Senate’s acceptance of NATO’s first round of enlargement. “I believe we are at the start of a new cold war,” Kennan said. It’s impossible not to assume that the Russians developed an aggressive perception over time and that this influenced their policy. The expansion was a serious mistake. There was no reason for this at all. There was no one else who was in danger. Even though Kennan was correct in his assessment, USA and NATO officials went through with subsequent rounds of expansions, including the controversial addition of the three Baltic nations. Those countries were not only a part of the Soviet Union but also of Russia’s empire during the Czarist time. NATO was now perched on the Russian Federation’s border as a result of that wave of expansion.
Moscow’s patience with NATO’s ever-increasing encroachment was running out. When Putin spoke at the annual Munich security conference in March 2007, he gave a rather benign admonition to the alliance that it is needed for them to back off. “NATO’s frontline forces have been stationed on our borders,” Putin lamented. The expansion of NATO “represents a severe provocation that undermines mutual trust.” And it’s quite definitive for Russians to wonder who this expansion is aimed at. Putin further went on to question the promises the western allies made after the Warsaw Pact was disbanded. Robert M Gates, who served as Secretary of Defense in both George W Bush and Barack Obama’s administrations, wrote in his book, “Duty”, that “the relationship with Russia had been terribly mismanaged after [George HW] Bush left office in 1993.” “US agreements with the Romanian and Bulgarian governments to move soldiers through bases in those countries constituted an unnecessary provocation,” according to the report. “Trying to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO was clearly setting a dangerous precedent,” Gates said, implying a rebuke to the younger Bush. “Thoughtlessly ignoring what the Russians believed their important national interests” was the case with this move. Western (particularly the US) leaders, on the other hand, continued to blow past red warning light after red warning light. The Obama administration’s stunningly arrogant interference in Ukraine’s domestic political affairs in 2013 and 2014 to assist demonstrators in overthrowing Ukraine’s elected, pro-Russia president was the single most audacious provocation, and it heightened tensions. Moscow retaliated by grabbing and annexing Crimea, kicking off a new cold war with a vengeance.
Joe Biden administration’s response to Russia’s quest for meaningful western concessions and security guarantees was tepid and evasive. Putin then clearly decided to escalate matters. Washington’s attempt to make Ukraine a NATO political and military pawn (even absent the country’s formal membership in the alliance) may end up costing the Ukrainian people dearly. History will demonstrate that Washington’s treatment of Russia in the decades after the Soviet Union’s dissolution was a monumental policy error. It was all but inevitable that NATO expansion would result in a dramatic, if not violent, a rupture in relations with Moscow. Perceptive experts predicted the impending repercussions, but no one listened. We are now paying the price for the naivety and arrogance of the US foreign policy establishment.
Dr. Ramesh Kumar is an Associate Professor in Central University of Haryana, India and Sriyansh Mohanty is a Student at Central University of Haryana, India.
