Though it has often been presented since as a response to a ‘Russian threat’, NATO expansion was entirely premised on Russian weakness. As James Goldgeier put it in his 1999 book on NATO enlargement, Not Whether But When, ‘the possibility that Poland or the Czech Republic would actually need defending seemed remote’.{18} The USSR’s implosion and the ensuing traumas of transition instead allowed the West to move into the strategic vacuum left in the region. Clinton himself pointed to this logic in December 1994, declaring at the OSCE’s Budapest summit that ‘we must not allow the Iron Curtain to be replaced by a veil of indifference. We must not consign new democracies to a grey zone’.{19} That May, former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski had called for ‘the potentially destabilizing geopolitical no man’s land between Russia and the European Union’ to be ‘promptly fill[ed]’.{20} During the Cold War, the two sides had been separated across much of Europe’s breadth by unaffiliated or neutral countries, from Finland and Sweden through Austria and down to Yugoslavia. After 1991, no such buffer zone was necessary.
The fact that NATO expansion could be disconnected from any actual military risks no doubt smoothed its way among policymaking elites in Washington. There was, to be sure, opposition from prominent figures: George Kennan, the original architect of ‘containment’, called it a ‘fateful error’; Thomas Friedman, holding forth in the pages of the New York Times, worried it would imperil efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation.{21} There were concerns, too, that overly aggressive moves by the US to benefit from Russia’s weakness now might produce a backlash there later – that a punitive post-Soviet Versailles settlement might produce a revanchist Russian nationalism. Yet these considerations were overpowered by two other motivations. One was precisely the chance to wrest Eastern Europe out of Moscow’s orbit for good. Unlikely to come around again, it was simply too good an opportunity to pass up – especially since many of the new governments in Eastern Europe were themselves keen to join.
The other was a deep suspicion of Russia among Western policy-making elites, dating back through the Cold War all the way to 1917. The Bolshevik Revolution had created a breach in the international state system, a hole in the map that no amount of diplomacy or détente had been able to close. The fall of Communism, although it brought down the capitalist West’s systemic rival, didn’t fully close it either – leaving in place a fundamental mistrust of Moscow in Washington and other Western capitals. (This might be termed a ‘White legacy’, in contrast to the ‘Red bequests’ discussed earlier.) As long as Yeltsin was in power and willing to fall in with Western thinking, these doubts could be assuaged. But the moment things changed, the older ideological reflex would kick in once more, fuelling criticisms of Russia that the West never levelled at far more repressive regimes whose interests were more compatible with Western aims, such as those in Saudi Arabia or Egypt, say. NATO expansion was therefore to some extent an insurance policy against an outcome that, ironically, the expansion would ultimately help to create: the return to the world stage of an independent Russia, with interests distinct from those of the West.
In the early 1990s, though, such a prospect remained distant. The immediate strategic gains from NATO expansion were clear enough that a bipartisan consensus soon developed around the policy in the US. However, the Clinton administration also knew that too rapid an expansion would torpedo Yeltsin’s chances of re-election, so from 1993 to 1996 it pursued a two-track policy, offering Russia and other Eastern European states membership in a ‘Partnership for Peace’ that seemed to be an alternative to an expanded NATO. (Yeltsin was certainly taken in by the ruse: ‘This is a brilliant idea, it is a stroke of genius!’ he exclaimed to US secretary of state Warren Christopher, adding: ‘Tell Bill I am thrilled.’){22} Meanwhile the US prepared the ground for a first round of NATO enlargement – starting in 1994 with the NATO Enlargement Facilitation Act, designed to smooth the path of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to join the alliance.
This dual-track approach struck hard-line Cold Warriors as needless pandering to the Russians; Henry Kissinger apparently asked, ‘Whoever heard of a military alliance begging with a weakened adversary?’{23} But it was in any case abandoned soon enough. Once Yeltsin was safely re-installed in the Kremlin, in the summer of 1996 – in no small measure thanks to covert assistance from the West{24} – the US could be more blunt. Clinton’s deputy secretary of state (and former college roommate), Strobe Talbott, told Anatoly Chubais, chief of Yeltsin’s presidential administration, ‘that NATO enlargement was going to happen, and… that Russia had to make sure that it did not look like Moscow had lost’.{25}
In March 1999, when Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland formally joined the alliance, NATO immediately moved ahead with a second wave of expansion, establishing ‘Membership Action Plans’ for nine more countries, including the three Baltic states. Both of these developments took place at the height of the NATO intervention in Kosovo – conducted without UN Security Council authorization, since it was evident that Russia would veto it – underscoring still more deeply Russia’s irrelevance on the world stage. Primakov, then prime minister, was on his way to Washington when the bombing of Yugoslavia started, and ordered his plane to turn around in protest. It was a forceful symbolic gesture – but then, Russia’s means were too limited to do much else.
Washington’s ability to impose its will on the question of NATO enlargement, whatever Moscow’s objections, made plain the fundamental imbalance in power between the two countries. Hard enough in itself for Russia to accept, it was made still worse by the manner in which US diplomats wielded their authority. As early as 1993, Kozyrev – who could scarcely be accused of hostility to the West – was protesting to Talbott, ‘It’s bad enough having you people tell us what you’re going to do whether we like it or not. Don’t add insult to injury by also telling us that it’s in our interests to obey your orders.’ Talbott’s assistant at the time, Victoria Nuland – who later became infamous for her role, captured in an intercepted phone call, in choosing Ukraine’s post-Maidan government – apparently observed that this was ‘what happens when you try to get the Russians to eat their spinach’.{26} The condescension behind such words – the infantilization of what was, after all, a state with almost half the world’s nuclear weapons – would have been only too apparent to Washington’s Russian interlocutors.
The drive for NATO expansion also made it clear that there was no room for Russia within European institutions or Euro-Atlantic security arrangements. The Yeltsin government several times floated the idea of joining NATO, but Russian membership was never seriously considered. Despite its weakness in the 1990s, Russia was still too large and powerful a state to be easily fitted into the system as it was. According to Brzezinski, ‘the politically decisive fact is that Russia bulks too large, is too backward currently and too powerful potentially to be assimilated as simply yet another member of the European Union or NATO. It would dilute the Western character of the European community and the American preponderance within the alliance.’{27} As part of NATO or an expanded EU, for example, it would have been on a par with Germany or France in terms of its decision-making influence, capable of banding together with either to block US designs.