The Tale of Two Rivals: NATO expansion and Russia

According to declassified documents maintained by the National Security Archive at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., opposing the Western alliance was one of the few issues that united Russia's fractious political spectrum during the 1990s, amid intense political and economic instability. Boris Yeltsin Considered that the NATO eastward expansion was mistake and has serious implications on us, which he told to the US President Bill Clinton in Helsinki, where two met to sign a statement on arms control. Indeed, the declassified document displayed the pattern of promise the US negotiators conveyed to the Russian Counterpart as internal policy discussions opposing NATO expansion to Eastern Europe.

According to a State Department paper from 1990, "it is not in the best interests of NATO or the US that [Eastern European] states be granted full NATO membership and its security assurances while those governments were still emerging from Soviet influence as the Warsaw Pact crumbled." However, neither of these discussions ever became official policy, and none of the stated pledges were ever incorporated into the legally binding document with Russia. Another feature is that these comments were made in the background of the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. At that time, particularly in the Baltic Sea states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, which were all part of the Soviet Union from the 1940s to 1991, there was a greater push for political autonomy and a reconfiguration of the region's security framework. The three countries cited the United Nations Declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention and Interference in States' Internal Affairs, which calls for "political independence both internally and abroad."

The Warsaw Pact, an Eastern European military alliance, was terminated in 1991 after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Bill Clinton, the US president, pushed for the Partnership for Peace, which Russia entered in 1994. However, whether this constituted an option to NATO membership or a path to it was a point of contention. The "Founding Act" on mutual ties, cooperation, and security was signed by NATO and Russia in 1997, and the NATO-Russia Council was established in 2002, both with the aim of growing cooperation. Moscow was granted access to NATO headquarters in Brussels, as well as a permanent presence. However, since Russia's invasion on Ukraine in 2014, this trading has virtually ceased. While this was going on, NATO maintained a "open door" admission policy, defending all countries' right to select their partnerships. Keeping NATO within its Cold War frontiers was only viable for the West as long as Soviet forces remained in Eastern Europe.

Russia's apprehensions about NATO's prospective eastward expansion were widely documented. "No matter how nuanced," US ambassador James Collins said in a State Department cable in 1993, "if NATO adopts a policy that contemplates expansion into Central and Eastern Europe without keeping the door open to Russia, it would be universally regarded in Moscow as geared against Russia."

However, since 1990, NATO has expanded five times to include former Soviet republics and other former Warsaw Pact countries. NATO's strategic concept, which guides alliance policy, stated in 2010 that "NATO poses no threat to Russia" and that the two sides should form a "true strategic cooperation." The document was published two years after Russia's military involvement in Georgia, but before the country launched its first assault on Ukraine. It is built on a number of post-Cold War agreements that Putin now appears to seek to scrap. In 2008, NATO discussed the potential of Georgia entering the alliance, and in 2014, it increased cooperation with Ukraine. At the same time, many of the Cold War fail-safes have been dismantled, including arms control verification and communication connections.

During the Kosovo war in 1999, NATO launched an aerial bombardment offensive against Serbia. Serbia was a Russian ally at the time. Not long later, Vladimir Putin was elected president. He continues to point to the attack as proof of NATO aggressiveness, even in context of the present crisis. As he has pushed his armed forces towards Ukraine's borders, including most recently deploying some of them into separatist territories backed by Russia, the issue has come to the forefront. "If Ukraine joins NATO, it will pose a significant threat to Russia's security," Putin said on Monday in a televised address, describing Ukraine as a "launching pad" for a NATO strike on Russia. Given Russia's huge size, which reaches to the Pacific Ocean, NATO has discounted Putin's perception of encirclement. The overwhelming majority of Russians, on the other hand, live on the country's European side. According to JD Bindenagel, a former deputy US ambassador to Germany, NATO's fault was not so much in enlarging, but in failing to take carefully Russia's claim that it had been misled.

Notes-

1.       NATO - Topic: NATO-Russia relations: the facts: https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_111767.htm

2.     NATO: Why Russia has a problem with its eastward expansion | Europe | News and current affairs from around the continent | DW | 23.02.2022: https://www.dw.com/en/nato-why-russia-has-a-problem-with-its-eastward-expansion/a-60891681

3.      What’s NATO expansion, why it angers Putin & return of tensions in Europe - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSMIwOFJ8kk

4.     Opinion | This Is Putin’s War. But America and NATO Aren’t Innocent Bystanders. - The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/21/opinion/putin-ukraine-nato.html

5.     Enlarging NATO: A Questionable Idea Whose Time Has Come: https://www.brookings.edu/research/enlarging-nato-a-questionable-idea-whose-time-has-come/

6.     Expansion of NATO: Russia's Dilemma on JSTOR: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4414989

7.     Don't Isolate Us: A Russian View of NATO Expansion on JSTOR: https://www.jstor.org/stable/42896937

8.     CIAO: Strategic Analysis: NATO Eastward Expansion and Russian Security: https://ciaotest.cc.columbia.edu/olj/sa/sa_98meo02.html

9.     Explained: Why Russia has a problem with NATO’s eastward expansion - Frontline: https://frontline.thehindu.com/dispatches/explained-why-russia-has-a-problem-with-natos-eastward-expansion/article38437617.ece

10.  Did NATO ‘betray’ Russia by expanding to the East?: https://www.france24.com/en/russia/20220130-did-nato-betray-russia-by-expanding-to-the-east

11.    NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard | National Security Archive: https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017-12-12/nato-expansion-what-gorbachev-heard-western-leaders-early

12.   China joins Russia in opposing Nato expansion - BBC News: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-60257080

13.   Ukraine conflict: What is Nato and how has it responded to Russia's invasion? - BBC News: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-18023383

14.  NATO and Russia: A Defensive Expansion?: https://www.e-ir.info/2022/01/31/nato-and-russia-a-defensive-expansion/

15.   Why NATO and Ukraine are a flash point with Russia 30 years after the end of the Cold War | PBS NewsHour: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/why-nato-and-ukraine-are-a-flash-point-with-russia-30-after-the-end-of-the-cold-war

16.  How America’s NATO expansion obsession plays into the Russia-Ukraine crisis - Vox: https://www.vox.com/22900113/nato-ukraine-russia-crisis-clinton-expansion

17.   Ukraine crisis: What is Russia's problem with NATO? | Euronews: https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2022/02/10/what-is-russia-s-problem-with-nato-and-how-should-the-west-respond

Pic Courtsey-Eugene at unsplash.com

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