As President Trump meets with Ukraine and European leaders over proposals to end the fighting in Ukraine, Compact magazine is …Continue reading →
As President Trump meets with Ukraine and European leaders over proposals to end the fighting in Ukraine, Compact magazine is featuring a blockbuster article on the real inside story of how the United States came to be involved in this still-perilous situation. As author Michael A. Reynolds of Princeton University powerfully reminds, the nation still stands “one step away from becoming a direct combatant against a rival nuclear power in war that involves neither territory nor principles that are vital.”
I posted on X.com on Saturday that Reynolds describes in exhaustive detail the “decades of US globalist arrogance and blunders” that produced this still unexploded bomb. In other words, he demolishes the conventional wisdom depicting the conflict as a wanton act of Russian aggression that must be resisted for the sake of peace and freedom worldwide. As a result, it’s well worth reading in full.
But given its length, I thought it would be useful to highlight (admittedly, at considerable length itself) one aspect that’s escaped even the notice of many folks like me, who have followed this tragic situation pretty closely.
Namely, the process of expanding the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) right up to Russia’s borders after the fall of the Soviet Union – which was the Atlantic alliance’s raison d’etre – was strongly opposed (though sometimes after the fact) by a truly amazing number of the most experienced veterans of the U.S. foreign policy establishment.
Ditto for publicly stated American and NATO aims to include Ukraine in the alliance – which date back at least to 2008. And both were opposed precisely for fear that they would spark the kind of violent and dangerous Russian response that’s been seen for the past three-and-a-half years.
It’s pretty widely known that NATO expansion was harshly criticized by George F. Kennan, who served in the US embassy in Moscow during the Stalin period and is widely regarded as the author of the containment strategy that was instrumental in America’s triumph in the Cold War.
In 1997, he called the expansion decisions that had been made to that point “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.” And as Reynolds reports, Kennan (who turned much more dovish as early as the 1950s) was joined in this public judgment by major Cold War hawks like senior Reagan administration officials Fred C. Ikle and Richard Pipes, who was also a prominent anti-communist historian at Harvard University, along with Paul H. Nitze (who, as I described in 1979, believed that the U,S. should prepare not only to deter nuclear attack by the Soviets, but to fight and win a nuclear war with Moscow as well).
Other NATO expansion critics included centrist Democrats like then Senators Bill Bradley and Sam Nunn, widely seen as the upper body’s leading authority on the military.
Nor should anyone forget the notable foreign policy mandarins who dissented internally from NATO expansion They included former Clinton administration Defense Secretary William Perry; Condoleezza Rice, who served as national security advisor and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for George W. Bush; and William Burns, who was George W. Bush’s ambassador to Moscow.
Burns’ views then are especially interesting since this veteran intelligence and national security official became CIA director under Joe Biden, who of course as president portrayed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as “a test for the ages” for America, Europe and the entire world – including NATO.
More than a decade before, however, Burns warned his then superior, Rice, that“Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite” from “the knuckle-draggers” in the Kremlin to “Putin’s sharpest liberal critics.”
And then there’s the case of Robert M. Gates, who headed the Pentagon under George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and the CIA under George H.W. Bush.
According to Reynolds, in his memoirs, Gates confessed “that he was not forthright with Bush 43. Inexplicably, he failed to share with the president his conviction that ‘the relationship with Russia had been badly mismanaged after Bush 41.’ At the heart of that mismanagement, Gates believed, lay NATO enlargement.”
Indeed, in his memoirs, Gates also specified that admitting Ukraine into NATO would be “an especially monumental provocation” to Russia.
Perhaps the definitive comment on NATO expansion’s opponents came ironically from Strobe Talbott – who in another irony was a close friend of NATO expansion enthusiast Bill Clinton and was appointed the State Department’s second in command during the Clinton years.
Talbott then went on to become president of the uber-establishmentarian and moderate Democratic Brookings Institution – so he’s no isolationist. Indeed, according to Reynolds, he was Clinton’s “point man on expanding NATO.”
And yet, in Talbott’s study of that administration’s Russia diplomacy, Reynolds quotes him as lamenting “that virtually everyone he knew with expertise on Russia and Eastern Europe opposed it.”
So what did many of the most prominent NATO expansion champions have in common? As Reynolds acerbically observes, they were typified by Baby Boom-generation presidents Clinton and Bush, who’d had no “consequential brushes with international security affairs” as well as aides they chose who were best known for their careerist climbing skills, like Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, or for their neoconservative dogmatism, like Bush 43 Vice President Richard B. Cheney.
Together, Reynolds concludes (borrowing from William Butler Yeats), they comprised “a bipartisan coalition in which the misguided were full of passionate intensity, while might‑have‑been wise men lacked all conviction.” Here’s hoping Mr. Trump can break this dangerous pattern.
