International security

Reconsidering NATO expansion: a counterfactual analysis of Russia and the West in the 1990s

The enlargement of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to include more than a dozen new members since 1991 remains a major irritant in Russia’s relations with the West. Russian President Vladimir Putin first raised complaints about NATO enlargement in an angry 2007 speech that shocked the annual Munich Security Conference,and later tied Russia’s annexation of Crimea to concerns about further NATO expansion. In September 2014 Russia announced it was amending its military doctrine in part because of NATO enlargement, and in October 2016 Putin called the deployment of NATO troops to Poland part of ‘a root change in the sphere of strategic stability’.

The debate over whether NATO enlargement threatened Russia’s security has a long history in the Western policy community as well, beginning with Cold War diplomat George F. Kennan’s February 1997 statement that it was ‘the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era’. The argument gained new traction in 2014 when John J. Mearsheimer published two prominent articles that termed NATO enlargement and Russia’s fear that it would extend to Ukraine the ‘taproot’ of the current crisis between Russia and the United States. he question’s relevance has been deepened by a lively debate in the Western literature about whether NATO enlargement violated implicit or explicit promises made to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev or Russian President Boris Yeltsin, as Russians have long claimed. Yet former US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul claims that in his eight years working for US President Barack Obama he never once heard Russian leaders complain about NATO enlargement.