Volume 7, No. 10, October 2025
Editor: Rashed Rahman
An undisputed fact is that, except for East German membership, Russia has persistently objected to this NATO expansion. Its argument has consistently been that eastward NATO expansion poses a threat to Russian national security. Russia also claims that it violates the agreement with and assurances given to Gorbachev as part of ending the Cold War and dissolving the Warsaw Pact.18 In 1994, President Boris Yeltsin furiously and openly objected to NATO expansion in his summit with Clinton.19 That episode long precedes the rise of Vladimir Putin, who has been tarred by Western media as a bogeyman, and shows that the consequences of NATO expansion cannot be laid at Putin’s doorstep. Yeltsin was the partner for peace, yet already the US and Europe had reneged on the understanding struck with Gorbachev that ended the Cold War.20
From a strategic perspective, Map 3 (See Pakistan Monthly Review, September 2025, Part I, accessible in the Archives) reveals a three-stage process. Stage 1 was the 1999 incorporation of major Central European former Warsaw Pact countries (Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland). Stage 2 was the 2004 incorporation of the former Baltic republics (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), which marked a ratcheting up of the process by including elements of the former Soviet Union that bordered Russia. It also created a NATO ‘iron curtain’ running from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Stage 3, which remains unfinished, concerns the intensified dialogues with Ukraine and Georgia, which aimed to incorporate those former Soviet Republics into NATO. This would massively expand NATO’s penetration of the former Soviet Union and widen its encirclement of Russia. (A Stage 4, subsequent to the onset of the Ukrainian-Russian War, was the incorporation of Finland and Sweden into NATO in 2023 and 2024, respectively). Furthermore, Ukraine juts like a spear into the heart of Russia. At its closest point, its border is just 300 miles from Moscow. Consequently, incorporation of Ukraine into NATO would strip Russia of its historically critical land buffer, and NATO short- and medium-range missiles could threaten the Russian heartland. All those fears have been proven true by the current conflict. For those reasons, the threat posed by Stage 3 has proven the straw that broke the camel’s back. Thus Russia responded with military force to prevent further expansion. In 2008, Russia intervened with force to stop a US-encouraged attempt by Georgia to reoccupy South Ossetia and, in 2014, it intervened in Ukraine. The Georgia conflict has gone silent, but in Ukraine it has tragically deepened because of far worse internal fractures and US internal interventions.21
The expansion of NATO raises several questions, the first of which is: Did expansion breach the agreement made with Gorbachev? No formal treaty detailing a promise not to expand NATO beyond East Germany was ever signed. That said, there is evidence that promises were made to Gorbachev that there would be no further expansion. The most compelling evidence is that of US Ambassador Jack Matlock Jr., who was the last US ambassador to the Soviet Union. He reports that at the 1989 Malta Summit – which ended the Cold War – George H W Bush gave unambiguous promises that there would be no NATO expansion.22 Swiss journalist Guy Mettan also documents how non-expansion security guarantees were given by US Secretary of State James Baker, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and French President François Mitterrand.23
Even counterfactually, assuming there was no promise of non-expansion, there remains the fundamental question of why NATO was expanded. NATO was founded as a ‘defensive’ alliance, which is its charter mission. It is easy to understand why Poland, Romania and the former Baltic republics would want to join NATO to secure defensive protection. However, the proper question, which is never asked, is: Why did the US or the UK want them to join? The new member countries brought modest military capabilities and bucketloads of conflict risk. In other words, they were a net negative security addition to existing NATO members, measured in terms of NATO’s original stated purpose as a defensive alliance.
In a similar vein, there was no ‘balance of power’ rationale for expanding NATO, as the Warsaw Pact was formally dissolved on February 25, 1991. Balance of power considerations have historically motivated the structure of continental European alliances, and the balance had indisputably and comprehensively shifted in favor of NATO. According to that criterion, expanding NATO was unambiguously aggressive.24
Finally, there is the simple question of: how is US national security enhanced by having its military on Russia’s border, 6,000 miles away from the eastern US, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean? The answer is it is not. That shows the motive for NATO expansion was never about US national security, but rather US global hegemony. Asking the right question makes crystal clear NATO expansion was an aggressive move against Russia.
A third question is: Was NATO expansion a kind of bumbling error with unanticipated consequences? The answer is that it was not, and that answer is also crystal clear. Russia openly expressed its hostility to NATO expansion, as evident in the 1994 blow-up between Clinton and Yeltsin in Budapest, when Yeltsin furiously objected to plans to expand NATO.25 Likewise, in 2007, Putin openly and vehemently objected to NATO expansion at the Munich security conference.26
The issue of NATO expansion was also debated in the US, and critics openly stated that a major consequence would be conflict with Russia. The most famous of these critics was George Kennan, founder of the ‘Containment Doctrine’ that guided US Cold War strategy. In a 1997 New York Times op-ed titled “A Fateful Error”, Kennan wrote that NATO expansion was a mistake that would lead to conflict.27 Awareness of these consequences is evident from the scale and standing of the opposition to NATO expansion. This is visible in a 1997 letter to Clinton that was signed by 50 leading US senior politicians, national security and foreign policy experts, and former high-ranking military and intelligence officers. Signatories included Senator Bill Bradley, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, defence expert and former State Department official Paul Nitze, Senator Sam Nunn, and former CIA director Stansfield Turner.28 The letter described NATO expansion as “a policy error of historic proportions” that would lead Russia “to question the entire post-Cold War settlement.” Yet expansion proceeded, with the first batch of new members being admitted in 1999.
The proposed expansion of NATO to include Ukraine was also discussed, and its consequences were also foreseeable and foreseen. The clearest statement of those consequences is in a confidential February 2008 letter (made available via Wikileaks) in which US Ambassador to Russia William Burns (later to become CIA chief) warned that it would unambiguously cross Russia’s national security red lines.29
The second external driver of conflict is US internal intervention in Ukraine. Much of the evidence for that intervention concerns Victoria Nuland, who in 2014 was US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs and is deeply embedded in the US neoconservative movement. Moreover, she has continuously held important positions in the George W Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden administrations, revealing the bipartisan character of US policy on Ukraine. In the second Bush administration, she was US ambassador to NATO from 2005 to 2008. In December 2013, Nuland revealed that the US had spent $5 billion on aid to Ukraine, classified as “democracy building”. During the 2014 Maidan coup, she made several public appearances in Kiev supporting the coup activists, and a telephone call between her and US ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt was recorded. The call suggested the US was actively intervening in Ukrainian political developments, including actively seeking to obstruct European Union peace efforts, with Nuland declaring “F––k the EU.”30
Five billion dollars was (and is) an extraordinarily large amount of money in a poor country like Ukraine that was also short of foreign currency.31 US ‘democracy-building’ money is funnelled through government agencies such as the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Endowment for Democracy, both of which have been widely accused of meddling and political interference abroad.32 USAID has a legal mandate to ensure its economic support is consistent with US geopolitical interests. It has a long history of cooperation with the CIA and works closely with the US State Department with an obligation to promote US foreign policy interests. Consequently, such money tends to be channelled to actors aligned with US geopolitical interests – which, in the case of Ukraine, meant weakening sympathies and links with Russia.
After the Maidan coup, the US stepped up its weapons deliveries to Ukraine. The Washington-based Stimson Center reported that Ukraine received over $2.7 billion in military assistance between 2014 and 2021. Between 2016 and 2020, Ukraine was the seventh-largest recipient of US military assistance, and the largest European recipient. That assistance had the US stepping directly into Ukraine’s civil war on behalf of the nationalist government that resulted from the Maidan coup. This assistance was also instrumental in prompting Russia to intervene in Ukraine in February 2022.33
Eastward expansion of NATO and internal intervention in former Soviet Republics (especially Ukraine) are the ‘means’ whereby the US has exploited fractures in the post-Soviet order and provoked conflict. The next piece of the puzzle is ‘why’ the US chose to go in that direction. The answer lies in US politics, the triumph of the neocon movement, and the power of the military-industrial complex.
The third external driver of US intervention in Ukraine is neoconservatism, a US political doctrine that rose to ascendancy in the 1990s. It holds that never again shall there be a foreign power, such as the former Soviet Union, that can challenge US global hegemony. The doctrine gives the US the right to impose its will anywhere in the world, with the result that the US has over 750 bases in more than 80 countries, ringing both Russia and China.34
The neocon objective is US global hegemony. That objective has driven both eastward expansion of NATO and interference in former Soviet Republics aimed at fostering anti-Russian sentiment and provoking conflict with Russia. The neocon doctrine initially seeded itself among hardliner Republicans like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, and was then adopted in the 1990s by Democrats under the leadership of Clinton. Consequently, it became a bipartisan US consensus. Moreover, the Democrats added insidious cover by claiming the US motivation is promotion of democracy and human rights, which provides a fig-leaf cover for the goal of US global hegemony.35
Notes:
(To be continued)