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Introduction

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine brought the issue of NATO enlargement back to the centre of public debate. Based on Article 10 of the Washington Treaty, the ‘open door policy’ provides for the possibility of inviting a country to join NATO, after a proposal from the applicant. The decision is taken by the North Atlantic Council based on the consensus of all Allies. No third country has a say in these deliberations. 

Since 1949, NATO membership has increased from 12 to 30 countries through eight enlargement processes. Among the most debated are the fourth and fifth enlargements – 1999 and 2004 -, which saw many former Soviet bloc and Warsaw Pact countries join NATO. According to some, the accession of these countries to the Atlantic Alliance would be seen by Russia as a threat to its security. Lending credence to this thesis is the theory that the allied powers promised Moscow that NATO would not expand eastwards. 

The application for membership by Ukraine and Georgia is said by some to be one of the main reasons for Moscow’s aggression against these two countries. The academic debate on the issue is still alive and not a few argue that NATO enlargement was a strategic mistake. But is this really the case?

The Myth of NATO’s ‘Broken Promise’ to Russia

First, it is necessary to dispel the myth of the ‘broken promise’ of NATO to the Soviet Union and ‘subsequently’ to Russia. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the German and Soviet leaders found themselves confronted with some rather complex issues, such as the withdrawal of the Red Army soldiers present in East Germany, the timing and way the USSR was to leave the East German part politically free and allow it to be incorporated by the West German part. 

Within the framework of the negotiations between the parties, the unified Germany managed to obtain full sovereignty and the possibility of choosing its own foreign and security policy. Based on the principles of international law that provide for the freedom of every sovereign state to choose its alliances, including those expressed in the Helsinki Final Act of 1975 – also signed by Moscow – the unified Germany decided to join Atlantic Alliance in its entirety. 

According to the Russian narrative, the Kremlin accepted these conditions in return for NATO’s assurance that it would not expand ‘one-inch eastwards’, echoing the words of US Secretary of State James Baker on 9 February 1990. It can be seen from the recording of the conversation between Baker and Supreme Soviet Chairman Mikhail Gorbachev, Baker’s main aim was to allay the Soviets’ fears of a unified and strong Germany close to the Warsaw Pact border by offering guarantees regarding the absence of Alliance command structures and allied troops in the territory of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). The concession essentially meant that the western half of unified Germany would be part of the Alliance infrastructure, while the eastern half would not.

The German Knot

Baker’s words, however, created a problem for NATO: the Alliance’s failure to ‘expand’ into the territory of the former East Germany would make it impossible to apply NATO’s security guarantees – especially with reference to Article 5 – to the whole of Germany (Sarotte, 2014). Therefore, US President George H. W. Bush proposed a special status for the GDR to German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. These conditions were then included and implemented in Articles 4 and 5 of the Two Plus Four Treaty, the act that established the final unification of Germany. The treaty imposed important restrictions on the deployment of foreign NATO troops and nuclear weapons on East German territory. 

It is important to remember that the Warsaw Pact was still in place; therefore, NATO expansion into Central and Eastern Europe was not foreseeable. Declassified documents would show that some German, British and US officials allegedly stated an unwillingness to invite the former Warsaw Pact countries into NATO and thus stop the enlargement of the Alliance to Germany: however, these considerations never turned into high-level discussions, never involved ministers or heads of state, let alone agreements. In the high-level negotiations and the treaty there is no reference to NATO enlargement in those areas (Shifrinson, 2016).

Gorbachev himself later stated that the references to NATO enlargement in the discussions on German reunification only concerned the Allied presence in East Germany. Eduard Shevarnadze, Foreign Minister of the USSR at that time, also clarified that NATO never made such a commitment and that the issue never came up during the negotiations on German reunification (Kramer, 2009).

The dissolution of the Soviet Union

The end of the Warsaw Pact and the subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 led to a disruption of European security policy: a vacuum was created in Central and Eastern Europe. Difficulties in the 1990s of the fledgling Russian Federation are not the subject of this article; however, it must be emphasised that Moscow’s problems are not related to the US ‘victory’ in the Cold War, nor are they related to the survival of the Atlantic Alliance. The inability to advance democracy, to create a stable economy and effective legislative and legal institutions, can be considered to all intents and purposes the main causes of the Russian crises in those years, a prodrome of Putin’s assertive and revanchist regime. 

In truth, the West had tried to offer a ‘hand of friendship’ to Russia through the establishment of the North Atlantic Cooperation Council, a forum for dialogue and cooperation between NATO and former Warsaw Pact countries. The process continued with the establishment of the Partnership for Peace: a NATO programme of practical cooperation and collaboration, signed by Russia and dozens of other former Soviet and Warsaw Pact countries in 1994. 

However, the return to nationalist and revanchist dynamics in Russia, combined with greater integration with the West, has led many of the former Soviet bloc countries to aspire to join NATO and the European Community. Westerners, especially the United States, at a time when the promotion of liberal and democratic values had taken on almost dogmatic dimensions, accepted the requests of Eastern European countries without any problems. However, it is worth pointing out that the opening of NATO to the East was mainly desired by these countries. There were in fact no plans to expand the Alliance with the aim of encircling Russia.

The ‘spirit of the treaty’

During Boris Yeltsin’s presidency, Russia followed the trend of many former Soviet bloc countries, improving relations with NATO members and ‘westernising’ the country. In fact, Russia began a path to privatise its economy, opening up to bilateral economic agreements with NATO states, most notably the United States (Horelick, 1995). Despite improved relations with Washington and other allied capitals, NATO enlargement aroused mixed opinions in Moscow (Ball, 1998).

In 1993, Yeltsin stated that Russia would not oppose Poland’s entry into NATO, not perceiving it as a security threat. However, political pressure within the country led Yeltsin to retract and claim that the enlargement of the Atlantic Alliance violated the ‘spirit’ of the 1990 agreement. Years later, Russian Foreign Minister Primakov, stated that Russia does not oppose NATO enlargement in principle, but opposes the expansion of the Alliance’s military infrastructure (Gorskii, 2001).

The NATO-Russia Founding Act

At the same time, Russia and NATO were engaged in negotiations that culminated in the NATO-Russia Founding Act, signed on 27 May 1997, about two months before the summit in Madrid that saw the accession of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to the Atlantic Alliance. The negotiations put the issue of enlargement on the table. In the bilateral talks in Helsinki in March 1997, Clinton refused to accept Yeltsin’s demands for binding restrictions on the accession of new members to NATO (Asmus, 2004).

Yeltsin’s attempt to grant Russia veto power in NATO decisions also failed. Despite the NATO-Russia Founding Act, which sanctioned a partnership between the Alliance and Moscow and the absence of hostilities on both sides, as well as the recognition of the right of each sovereign state to decide on its own alliances, Russia included NATO enlargement as a threat to national security in its National Security Blueprint at the end of the year (Mehrotra, 1998). 

The progress, albeit limited, between NATO and Russia under Yeltsin would see a slowdown when he was succeeded by Vladimir Putin, whose views on NATO had been negatively reinforced since the beginning of his presidency. Even the creation of the NATO-Russia Council in 2002 cannot be considered a success. Although there is no shortage of episodes in which Putin has been ambiguous, not contesting the accession of other countries to the Atlantic Alliance in 2004 – or the more recent request of Finland and Sweden – NATO enlargement became a central theme in the Russian narrative against the West. Putin used it as one of the main justifications for Russia’s actions in Ukraine in 2014 and for the following invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

A stronger or weaker Alliance?

The addition of some new members probably made the Atlantic Alliance, at least initially, weaker. Beyond the political fragmentation within the Alliance brought by the new members, enlargement has decisively posed challenges for the integration of forces. Michta stated in 2009 that enlargement had in fact ‘called into question the practical military utility of the organisation as conceived’ (Michta, 2009). The Russians also knew that enlargement would lead to a reduction of the Alliance’s combined military potential (Zagorskii, 2017).

The integration of a large country like Poland, which could be perceived as a threat to Russia, turned out to be a major challenge for NATO, due to its Soviet-style systems and doctrines (Simon, 2004). Until Poland’s entry into the European Union, which led to an improvement in the country’s economy, Warsaw’s economic difficulties limited any reform of the military system. Even after that, the purchase of equipment and armaments did not lead to a qualitative leap in the Polish armed forces, with Warsaw rather hoping for NATO intervention in the event of a crisis (Paszewski, 2016).

In May 2008, shortly before the outbreak of the war between Russia and Georgia, Poland defined the mission of its armed forces primarily in terms of international peacekeeping, peace enforcement and ‘out-of-area’ operations, such as those in which it participated in Afghanistan and Iraq and other NATO and EU missions (Paszewski 2016). In short, Poland’s entry into NATO did not create any new military threat to the Russians.

The Baltic region: more of a problem for NATO than for Russia

The Baltic issue has already been discussed in a previous article (Generoso, 2022); however it is fair to point out that the armed forces of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have never been large enough to pose an offensive threat to Russia. Although Moscow has an enclave, Kaliningrad, surrounded by NATO after the Baltic states joined the Alliance, this isolation is more of a problem for NATO than for Russia. Kaliningrad has long been heavily militarised. 

In a hypothetical future war with Russia, NATO would find it difficult to reinforce and defend the Baltic states. First of all, by land, Atlantic Alliance could only reach the region through the Suwalki Gap, a 104-kilometre-long corridor on the Polish-Lithuanian border, flanked on one side by Kaliningrad and on the other by Belarus, Russia’s close ally. Russia has often organised large military exercises with Belarus, and Kaliningrad is a perfect bastion to implement an anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) missile defence strategy, effectively cutting the Baltic countries off from NATO by air and sea, barring major allied losses. A RAND Corporation study concluded that NATO forces would not be able to deploy quickly enough even to defend the Baltic states from a surprise Russian attack. NATO enlargement in the Baltic states has made life more difficult for the Atlantic Alliance than for Russia.

Rounding up Russia? Not exactly

While we can say with some certainty that the new NATO members that bordered Russia directly were inclined to join because of the sense of protection against Moscow that the Alliance provided, NATO’s decision to enlarge, mainly driven by the Clinton administration, was largely driven by other concerns. 

First, Washington did not look favourably on a European security system independent of the US umbrella. Second, the US feared that Europe could be destabilised by the spread of ethnic conflicts from the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia and hoped that NATO enlargement would halt their advance. Third, they wanted to prevent the return of authoritarianism in Central and Eastern Europe by exploiting the harsh conditions of NATO membership and steering those states towards liberal democracy.

Finally, NATO membership could be the decisive step for these states towards joining the European Union, an organisation attractive for the economic benefits it would bring. NATO enlargement, therefore, was not aimed at containing Russia, but rather at expanding the liberal-democratic world order in Europe (Marten, 2020).

Russia and the West: NATO enlargement is not the problem

Russia’s opposition to NATO enlargement could be interpreted as the revival of a Russian imperialist policy towards Central and Eastern Europe (Zelikow, 1994). However, this definition is reductive. Several elements contributed to stiffening Russia’s stance towards the Alliance’s eastward expansion. These include the loss of superpower status, the willingness of the former USSR republics, especially the Baltic states and Ukraine, to join the Alliance, and domestic politics (Generoso, 2022). However, most of the security-related problems that have downgraded relations between Russia and NATO member states have nothing to do with NATO enlargement. 

Instead, the mistrust between Russia and the West arose from other problems. The first was the operational expansion of the US and NATO, including out-of-area operations, sometimes without the authorisation of the UN Security Council. This also included the confrontation between the US and Russia over arms control. Operational activities could not have directly threatened Russia; the US and NATO would never dare launch air or missile attacks against Russia unless open warfare was already underway. Rather, they showed that Russia had lost its status as a great power, no longer being able to influence US and Western security decisions, not even through its veto power at the United Nations. Russia stopped being a great power and the West stopped treating it as such (Marten, 2020). 

The second problem was Russia’s aversion to participating in the US-led European security architecture, which established the sovereignty of the new states and the West’s interest in supporting them to develop as liberal democracies. Moscow, on the other hand, has always maintained that it must be recognised as having a special role in what it calls the ‘near abroad’, i.e., those states in its immediate vicinity that had been part of the Soviet Union. Russia considers it necessary to recognise it as a sphere of influence, but the United States and Europe have refused to grant it one (Generoso, 2022).

Conclusion

There is no doubt that Russia has reacted negatively to NATO enlargement. Despite some ambiguous positions of its leaders, in general opposition to the enlargement process has been constant. However, we cannot say that NATO enlargement was in itself the main cause of Russia’s concerns or fears towards the West. Russian academics knew that enlargement would make NATO more difficult to defend. If, on the other hand, one wants to argue that NATO enlargement caused the rupture of relations between Russia and the West, one has to argue that there are many other factors that led to this outcome, even more. 

NATO enlargement has been a pretext to attack the West, fuel Russian concerns about loss of influence, and a tool to justify Russia’s aggressive actions. There is no evidence that if NATO enlargement had been avoided, delayed or modified, Russia would have had a different relationship with the West (Marten, 2018). In conclusion, Russian actions have realised Moscow’s ‘nightmare’, making the NATO alliance stronger in recent years, after enlargement had initially weakened it. It was the Kremlin’s decisions, not NATO enlargement, that generated the hostilities between Russia and the West.

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Autore dell’articolo*: Francesco Generoso, esperto di difesa e geopolitica del think tank Trinità dei Monti. Dottore in Relazioni Internazionali all’Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”.

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