The Heart of the Heart of the Question
Which is the more pressing concern: advancing the cause of democracy in the face of opposition, or gaining control of the Earth’s climate?
NATO enlargement has been the policy of the United States since Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992. The course of action he adopted was embraced and extended by successors George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
Was it a good idea?
Anne Applebaum thinks so. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist has been among NATO expansion’s most ardent advocates since becoming a correspondent for The Economist in 1988 and moving to Warsaw. In a panel podcast last week for The Atlantic, where she is now a contributing writer, she said,
I think that the expansion of NATO was the most successful, if not the only successful, piece of American foreign policy of the past thirty years. It created a zone of safety and security for sixty million people in part of the world that has been the source of two world wars…. We would be having this fight in East Germany now if we had not done it.
I have been on the other side of that argument for nearly twenty years, a thin voice in the back of a relatively small chorus of dissenters that included, in 1994, Defense Secretary Les Aspin, his deputy William Perry, and most senior American military commanders at the time; in 1996, diplomat George Kennan and a group of distinguished foreign policy experts; and, that same year, Brent Scowcroft, a lone authority from the administration of George H, W, Bush.
In 2018, in Because They Could The Hard-Russia Scandal (and NATO Expansion) after Twenty-five Years, I wrote, “No aspect looms larger in these 25 years [of US-Russia relations] than the story of NATO enlargement.”