Meeting at a point that coincides with a quarter century of the end of the Cold War, and specifically in the context of the crisis in Ukraine where over 3,000 people have been killed according to the UN, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation summit last week could ill-afford to ignore sane voices from within it. The general understanding between the administration of George H.W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1989-1990 was that the Soviets would not use force and the West would not take advantage of developments around Soviet Union’s collapse. Whereas the disbanding of the Warsaw Pact was a logical outcome of the emergence of new democracies in the region, it is hard to resist the conclusion that the western military alliance was unwilling to draw the right lessons from history. George F. Kennan, the U.S. Ambassador to Moscow in the 1950s and principal architect of the Cold War strategy of containing the spread of communism by all means short of war, was prophetic. NATO expansion “may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking” ( The New York Times , February 5, 1997).
That such an agreement has been steadily negated is borne out by the expansion of the military alliance, which comprised 16 member-states during the Cold War to the current 28 countries. Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic — the so-called “Visegrad 3” — acceded to NATO in 1999. Five more states of the former Eastern Europe followed suit in 2004, while Albania and Croatia joined in 2009. The bid for membership by Ukraine, besides Georgia, is at the heart of the ongoing bloody conflict. Significantly, member-states failed to agree last week to any increase in military expenditure beyond a freeze on further cuts to defence budgets. This is some evidence of the widening divergence of perspectives on the alliance’s priorities in the aftermath of the financial and economic crises. German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cautious stance, notwithstanding Moscow’s belligerence, if anything underscores the limits to NATO’s muscle-flexing and the pragmatic gains from the pursuit of political and diplomatic options. Growing scepticism over the imposition of fresh economic sanctions on Moscow further amplifies NATO’s inability to formulate any effective response, considering that military intervention has almost been ruled out. Washington and London could do more to counter the hawks at home to contain the fluid situation in Ukraine. NATO would do well to reflect on its relevance in a smaller world.
