![]() ![]() “Nato has put its frontline forces on our borders,” Putin complained. The last reasonably friendly warning from Russia that the alliance needed to back off came in March 2007, when Putin addressed the annual Munich security conference. Moscow’s patience with Nato’s ever more intrusive behavior was wearing thin. That wave of expansion now had Nato perched on the border of the Russian Federation. Those countries not only had been part of the Soviet Union, but they had also been part of Russia’s empire during the Czarist era. He was right, but US and Nato leaders proceeded with new rounds of expansion, including the provocative step of adding the three Baltic republics. ![]() ”I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. “I think it is the beginning of a new cold war,” Kennan stated. George Kennan, the intellectual father of America’s containment policy during the cold war, perceptively warned in a May 1998 New York Times interview about what the Senate’s ratification of Nato’s first round of expansion would set in motion. They point out that they have disbanded the Warsaw Pact, their military alliance, and ask why the west should not do the same.” It was an excellent question, and neither the Clinton administration nor its successors provided even a remotely convincing answer. “Many Russians see Nato as a vestige of the cold war, inherently directed against their country. Strobe Talbott, deputy secretary of state, similarly described the Russian attitude. In her memoir, Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s secretary of state, concedes that “ Yeltsin and his countrymen were strongly opposed to enlargement, seeing it as a strategy for exploiting their vulnerability and moving Europe’s dividing line to the east, leaving them isolated.” ![]() ![]() It would be the first of several waves of membership expansion.Įven that first stage provoked Russian opposition and anger. The administration would soon propose inviting Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary to become members, and the US Senate approved adding those countries to the North Atlantic Treaty in 1998. What was not publicly known at the time was that Bill Clinton’s administration had already made the fateful decision the previous year to push for including some former Warsaw Pact countries in Nato. ![]()
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