Olivier Matthys via Creative Commons
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg ahead of the NATO heads of state summit in Madrid beginning on June 28.
As NATO holds its summit in Madrid—which began on June 28 and will wrap up on June 30—the war in Ukraine is taking center stage.
During a pre-summit talk with Politico on June 22, NATO’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg bragged about how well-prepared NATO was for this fight because “this was an invasion that was predicted, foreseen by our intelligence services.” While Stoltenberg was referring to the Western intelligence predictions leading up to Russia’s February 24 invasion of Ukraine, he could well have been talking about predictions that went back not just months but decades.
Thirty years of warnings and predictions turned out to be all too accurate. But they all went unheeded by an institution that measured its success only in terms of its own endless expansion instead of by the security that it promised but repeatedly failed to deliver.
Stoltenberg could have looked all the way back to when the U.S.S.R. was in the process of dissolving and highlighted a 1990 U.S. State Department memo that warned that creating an “anti-Soviet coalition” of NATO countries along the U.S.S.R’s border “would be perceived very negatively by the Soviets.”
Or he could have reflected on the consequences of all of the broken promises by Western officials that NATO would not expand eastward. Declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British, and French documents posted by the National Security Archive reveal multiple assurances by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German reunification in 1990 and 1991.
NATO’s secretary general could have recalled the 1997 letter by fifty prominent foreign policy experts, calling President Bill Clinton’s plans to enlarge NATO a policy error of “historic proportions” that would “unsettle European stability.” But Clinton had already made a commitment to invite Poland into NATO, reportedly out of concern that he would lose critical Polish-American votes in the Midwest in the 1996 election.
Stoltenberg could have remembered the prediction made by George Kennan, the intellectual father of United States containment policy during the Cold War, when NATO moved ahead and incorporated Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary in 1999. In a New York Times interview, Kennan called NATO expansion a “tragic mistake” that marked the beginning of a new Cold War, and warned that the Russians would “gradually react quite adversely.”
After seven more Eastern European countries joined NATO in 2004, including the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which had actually all been part of the former Soviet Union, hostility increased. Stoltenberg could have just considered the words of Vladimir Putin himself, who said on many occasions that NATO enlargement represented “a serious provocation.” In 2007, at the Munich Security Conference, Putin asked, “What happened to the assurances our Western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact?”
But it wasn’t until the 2008 NATO Summit when NATO ignored Russia’s vehement opposition and promised that Ukraine would join NATO that alarm bells went off.
William Burns, then-U.S. ambassador to Moscow, sent an urgent memo to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin),” he wrote. “In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”
Instead of comprehending the danger of crossing “the brightest of all redlines,” President George W. Bush persisted and pushed through internal opposition within NATO to proclaim, in 2008, that Ukraine would indeed be granted membership, but at an unspecified date. Stoltenberg could have traced the present conflict back to the NATO Summit, which took place long before the 2014 Euromaidan protests, Russia’s seizure of Crimea, and the failure of the Minsk Agreements to end the civil war in the Donbas region.
This was indeed a war foretold. Thirty years of warnings and predictions turned out to be all too accurate. But they all went unheeded by an institution that measured its success only in terms of its own endless expansion instead of by the security that it promised but repeatedly failed to deliver—most of all to the victims of its own aggression in Serbia, Afghanistan, and Libya.
Now Russia has launched a brutal, illegal war that has uprooted millions of innocent Ukrainians from their homes, killed and injured thousands of civilians, and is taking the lives of more than 100 Ukrainian soldiers every day. NATO is determined to continue sending massive amounts of weapons to fuel the war, while millions around the world suffer from the growing economic fallout of the conflict.
We can’t go back and undo Russia’s catastrophic decision to invade Ukraine nor NATO’s historic blunders. But Western leaders can make wiser strategic decisions going forward, including a commitment to allow Ukraine to become a neutral, non-NATO state—something that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy himself agreed to in principle early on in the war.
And, instead of exploiting this crisis to expand even further, NATO should suspend all new or pending membership applications until the current crisis has been resolved. That is what a genuine mutual security organization would do, in sharp contrast to the opportunistic behavior of this aggressive military alliance.
But we’ll make our own prediction based on NATO’s past behavior: Instead of calling for compromises on all sides to end the bloodshed, this dangerous alliance will promise an endless supply of weapons to help Ukraine “win” an unwinnable war, and it will continue to seek out and seize every chance to engorge itself at the expense of human life and global security.
While the world determines how to hold Russia accountable for the horrors committed in Ukraine, the members of NATO should do some honest self-reflection and recognize that the only permanent solution to the hostility generated by this exclusive, divisive alliance is to dismantle NATO—without threatening Russia or blindly following the United States in its insatiable, anachronistic, and hegemonic ambitions.