Nato Expansion Quotes

Yes, NATO’s expansion to the borders of Russia is of great concern to them. But in Russia’s eyes, and of course I mean no disrespect, Juergen—but in Russia’s eyes, when it sees NATO, it sees America. America, first and foremost, and then its allies.

The Russians had long historical ties to Serbia, which we largely ignored. Trying to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO was truly overreaching. The roots of the Russian Empire trace back to Kiev in the ninth century, so that was an especially monumental provocation. Were the Europeans, much less the Americans, willing to send their sons and daughters to defend Ukraine or Georgia? Hardly. So NATO expansion was a political act, not a carefully considered military commitment, thus undermining the purpose of the alliance and recklessly ignoring what the Russians considered their own vital national interests. Similarly, Putin’s hatred of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (limiting the number and location of Russian and NATO nonnuclear military forces in Europe) was understandable.

Russian commentators welcomed this development, viewing it as a positive shift in the global correlation of power and as an appropriate response to America’s sponsorship of NATO’s expansion. Some even sounded gleeful that the Sino-Russian alliance would give America its deserved comeuppance. However, a coalition allying Russia with both China and Iran can develop only if the United States is shortsighted enough to antagonize China and Iran simultaneously.

Maastricht had three significant side-effects. One of them was the unforeseen boost it gave to NATO. Under the restrictive terms of the Treaty it was clear (as the French at least had intended) that the newly liberated countries of eastern Europe could not possibly join the European Union in the immediate future—neither their fragile legal and financial institutions nor their convalescent economies were remotely capable of operating under the strict fiscal and other regulations the Union’s members had now imposed upon all present and future signatories. Instead, it was suggested in the corridors of Brussels that Poland, Hungary and their neighbours might be offered early membership of NATO as a sort of compensation: an interim prize. The symbolic value of extending NATO in this way was obviously considerable, which is why it was immediately welcomed in the new candidate member-states. The practical benefits were less obvious (unlike the damage to relations with Moscow which was real and immediate). But because Washington had reasons of its own for favouring the expansion of the North Atlantic Defense community, a first group of central European nations was duly admitted to NATO a few years later.

One might pause here to wonder how it is that the United States claims to support democracy and freedom in the world when it so often backs dictators like the Shah and Somoza. As I tell my human rights class every year, the United States always supports democracy and freedom, except when it doesn’t, which is all the time…. As political analyst Stephen Gowans explains, the United States is simply not what it claims to be, and most likely never has been: The United States—which began as 13 former British colonies on the Atlantic coast of North America pursuing a “manifest destiny” of continental expansion, (the inspiration for Nazi Germany’s lebensraum policy); which fought a war with Spain for colonies; which promulgated the Monroe Doctrine asserting a sphere of influence in the Americas; which stole Panama to create a canal; whose special operations forces project US power in 81 countries; whose generals control the militaries of the combined NATO members in Europe and the military forces of South Korea; whose military command stations one hundred thousand troops on the territories of former imperialist rivals, manifestly has an empire. And yet this reality is denied, as assuredly as is the reality that the United States, built on the genocide of Native Americans and the slave labor of Africans, overtly white supremacist until the mid-1960s, and covertly white supremacist since, is unequivocally not a beacon of Enlightenment values, unless liberalism is defined as equality and liberty assigned exclusively to white men who own productive property. Indeed, so antithetical is the United States to the liberal values of the equality of all peoples and nations, freedom from exploitation and oppression, and the absence of discrimination on the bases of class, race, and sex, that it’s difficult to apprehend in what sense the United States has ever been liberal or has in any way had a legitimate claim to being the repository of the values of the Enlightenment.2

In the United States, the dominant analytic framework for explaining international relations today is realism. ... Those deploying this model to explain Russia’s behavior today...offer several prescriptions for how to defuse the current Russia-Ukraine crisis: Freeze NATO expansion and Russia will be content. Offer face-saving concessions that give Russia tangible gains and the threat of war will subside. Don’t arm Ukraine because that will fuel escalation and trigger a Russian invasion. If Putin thought like us, maybe some of these proposals might work. But Putin does not think like us. He has his own analytic framework, his own ideas and his own ideology — only some of which comport with Western rational realism.

The Ukraine war has its roots in the expansion of NATO to be closer to Russian borders.

The Ukraine war is really Russia fighting the expansion of NATO onto its borders.

clearly had a more limited objective. Putin wanted to protect Russia from “NATO expansion.” In fact, Kissinger believed, the West was as responsible as Russia for the Ukraine crisis, a position radically at odds with the conventional wisdom in Washington.

As the Soviets contemplated additional expansion following the “Great Patriotic War” and the U.S. military came to understand the putative allies of today would emerge as the enemies of tomorrow, the men possessing knowledge of the V-2 rockets and other Third Reich military technology programs became seen as crucial pieces in the incipient NATO versus Warsaw Pact standoff.               The result was the American-led “Operation Paperclip” on the Western side, which resulted in German scientists putting their expertise at the disposal of the U.S. and other NATO members. Operation Paperclip aimed not only to obtain the benefits of German scientific advances for the United States but also to deny them to the potentially hostile Soviets, as General Leslie Groves enunciated: “Heisenberg was one of the world's leading physicists, and, at the time of the German break-up, he was worth more to us than ten divisions of Germans. Had he fallen into the Russian hands, he would have proven invaluable to them (Naimark, 1995, 207).

Expansion will happen if the United States and Germany jointly encourage the other NATO allies to endorse the step and either negotiate effectively some accommodation with Russia, if it is willing to compromise (see chapter 4), or act assertively, in the correct conviction that the task of constructing Europe cannot be subordinated to Moscow’s objections. Combined American-German pressure will be especially needed to obtain the required unanimous agreement of all NATO members, but no NATO member will be able to deny it if America and Germany jointly press for it.

A peculiar illusion of global omnipotence emerged in the United States after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Relatively cautious policies adopted during the George H. W. Bush administration were amplified and extended during the presidencies of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama until they threatened to damage long-term American interests.

That Buchanan would receive a message from Russia with love was no accident. In the 1990s, he consistently voiced Moscow’s geopolitical line, warning that NATO expansion and intervention in the Balkans were colossal errors. Buchanan was not alone in his apprehensions—realist thinkers such as the diplomat George F. Kennan opposed NATO expansion as well—but Buchanan came at these questions from a distinctive place, not of foreign policy realism (which he claimed to espouse), but outright fervor for Christian nationalist Russia.

Moscow’s orbit and make it a Western bulwark on Russia’s doorstep. The key ingredients of this boneheaded policy were NATO and EU expansion, coupled with democracy promotion, which effectively means installing pro-Western leaders in countries like Ukraine—and maybe even Russia itself. Not surprisingly, Russia has fiercely resisted the West’s efforts to win over Ukraine, which is now engulfed in a civil war.