As I've argued recently there were many good arguments, from a US perspective, against NATO enlargement in the 1990s. But in today's debates abt it and claims of broken 'deals', what seldom gets put front and center is a pretty obvious and simple point: Why were all these ...
2/ countries so eager to join NATO - Hungary, Poland, Romania, the Baltics, et al.? Yes, the US had its own Great Power interests in pushing and/or accepting it. It's not charity. But why is it that virtually every country either bordering or adjacent to Russia wanted to or ...
3/ want to join? As I said, I've generally been on the ambivalent/skeptic side of most NATO enlargement debates. The US has good reasons not to extend what are in real ways security commitments with existential implications to every country that might be or feel threatened ...
4/ by Russia. But again, takes two to tango. Or at least it does in NATO enlargement. Why are all these countries so eager to get in? So you can say that this was bad policy from the US point of view. Or you can claim that some deal was broken - though the evidence for this ...
5/ is murky at best. Or you can say - and this is really the best argument in my mind - that it's unrealistic to think that Russia is every going to be okay with a massive Great Power military alliance pushed up against their borders. But all of this avoids what's ...
6/ really the central issue. Why do all these countries want in? The answer is obvious. They all feel threatened by Russian aggression/expansionism. The US is no babe in the woods certainly. But they clearly don't feel threatened by the US or NATO in the same way.
7/ And for all this we should look back to Russia, its behavior, its history, its political culture.
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