Not Too Late to Go

In 1949, the United States and its European allies formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The purpose of NATO was to create a collective security arrangement to counterbalance the threat of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European puppet regimes. At the time, the USSR had bilateral defense agreements with the various countries in its sphere, with Soviet forces still directly occupying East Germany. In 1955, the USSR formed a similar treaty organization, the Warsaw Pact. For the next 35 years, East and West stared at each other over gun sights across the Fulda Gap, until the fall of the USSR, and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in 1991.

From 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, until 1991, when the USSR dissolved, a key Russian concern was the possibility of NATO's expansion into Eastern Europe. According to the National Security Archive at George Washington University, declassified documents show that the Soviets were repeatedly assured that NATO would not extend membership to the Eastern European nations.

U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous “not one inch eastward” assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials.

Despite the US Department of Defense suggesting in October 1990 to "leave the door ajar" for NATO expansion into Eastern Europe, the Bush Administration was disinclined to do so.

The view of the State Department was that NATO expansion was not on the agenda, because it was not in the interest of the U.S. to organize “an anti-Soviet coalition” that extended to the Soviet borders, not least because it might reverse the positive trends in the Soviet Union.

Yet NATO, in the fullness of time, did it anyway, accepting Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in 1999, as the first former Warsaw Pact nations to join. Since then, that expansion has continued, much to the Russians' dismay. Whatever one may say about Vladimir Putin (and one can say a lot, most of it bad), NATO expansion is one of his major complaints against the West in general, and the United States in particular. We lied to both the USSR and the Russian Federation, in Putin's view, and therefore cannot be trusted. Not that the Russians are ever inclined to trust foreigners, even in the best of circumstances.

Paranoid Xenophobes

The Russian government distrusts foreigners intensely. Not just the current government, but all past ones, too. From the Russian perspective, there's good reason not trust the heathen foreigners. Over the past 500 years or so, nearly every country that could whip up a halfway decent army has taken a crack at invading Russia. At various times, Russia has been invaded by Poland, Sweden, Japan, France, Germany, China, Great Britain, and the United States.

Moreover, Russia's geography makes it difficult to defend. Its sheer size makes it easier for the Russians to trade space for time in wartime, but most of European Russia is what we call “good tank country”. That’s great if you’re at the head of a panzer column driving towards Moscow, but less great if you’re in, you know, Moscow. So, for most of Russia’s modern history, one of their key foreign policy goals has been to control the geographic choke points that lead into Russia. Holding these choke points is key to keeping enemies out of Russian territory itself. Sadly, these choke points are in places like Eastern Europe, which has occasionally made life hard for people in Poland, Finland, Georgia, Romania, etc.

These two factors make the Russians leery of any powerful entity getting too close to Russia. Well, they’re particularly leery of that. More generally, they’re just insanely leery of foreigners in general, who they assume always have some nasty designs on Russia. Vladimir Putin is the poster boy for that sort of paranoid xenophobia.

The thing is, we know that. We know that there are some psychological buttons that we shouldn’t push, or even get the Russians suspicious enough to start pushing themselves. NATO expansion has been pushing those buttons like a lab monkey pressing the buzzer for his next hit of cocaine. When we say “NATO Expansion”, the Russians hear “Lebensraum im Osten”, which they don’t much like.

Whether you like George H.W. Bush or not, at least he and his state department knew that a peaceful dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, and ultimately the USSR itself, was dependent on reassuring the Russians that we would give them a buffer zone in Eastern Europe, even if that zone was no longer under Russian control. Thus, both the US and our NATO allies did everything they could to convince the Russians that an eastward expansion of NATO wouldn’t happen.

Convincing the Russians of this, then turning around eight years later and doing it anyway, was probably the worst foreign policy choice, vis a vis Russia, that we could possibly have made. And doing it at a time when the Russians were least capable of exerting any power to stop it…well, that made it look intentional. I’m not saying we lied to the Russians in the early 1990s. But I am saying the Russians are convinced that we did. And they are, as we’ve mentioned, paranoid xenophobes, so good luck trying to convince them otherwise.

A Better Option

NATO was formed as a collective security arrangement to defend Europe from Soviet aggression. With the dissolution of the USSR, the primary reason for NATO's creation was no longer valid. What, after all, was the purpose of an anti-Soviet defense pact in the absence of the USSR?

NATO, for its part, began casting about for a new mission. Early on, that mission consisted of things like bombing Serbia during the fratricidal (though I doubt they participants would see it that way) civil war that followed the collapse of Yugoslavia. Ultimately, NATO's new “mission” became general European security. But why was NATO needed for that?

In 1975, the European nations, the US, and the USSR signed the Helsinki Accords at the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). This agreement laid the foundation for general European cooperation on matters of security. While the early 1980s weren't kind to the CSCE because of heightened superpower tensions, it was given new life as the Warsaw Pact started falling apart in 1989. In 1990, the major nations involved in CSCE, including the US and USSR, signed the Charter of Paris for a New Europe, which replaced the CSCE with a new standing institution, the Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe (OSCE).

This was the point at which a fateful, and ultimately beneficial, decision could have been made. The fundamental reason for NATO's creation was no longer valid. The USSR, and later the Russian Federation and the former Soviet Republics, signed onto the OSCE. The basis for general cooperation on security, conflict resolution, and crisis management in Europe now existed.

At this point, the rational foreign policy move would've been to disband NATO, and pass European security matters to the OSCE, and perhaps a new European collective security organization. NATO expansion would've been taken off the table for all time. Quite apart from anything else, Vladimir Putin wouldn't be able to whine about it to Tucker Carlson if we had.

There were, in my view, two primary reasons why this didn't happen.

First, it enabled the Europeans to continue to rest under the security umbrella of the United States, and largely at America's cost. One of the key complaints about NATO, from the US perspective, has always been that the European countries routinely addressed matters of European security less seriously than the Americans did. As long as the USSR was a threat, America provided the bulk of military power in Europe, while the Europeans were spending money on butter, instead of guns. The Europeans were loath to spend anywhere near the same percentage of GDP as America did for defense. And, after all, why should they, when America was willing to take up that slack? Any European security arrangement that didn't directly involve the United States would impose an additional and unwanted burden of military spending on European states. They didn't want that.

Of course, we didn't either, which is the second factor. NATO gives the United States an extraordinary input into, and indeed, in some important ways, veto power over European security matters. Moreover, NATO can, as it did when we invoked Article 5 of the treaty after the 9/11 attacks, allow us to...encourage other NATO countries to support us in other endeavors. Threats to reduce American commitment to NATO, or demand other NATO states to play a more active part in their own defense, is also a useful policy cudgel with which to occasionally thwack them diplomatically.

Still, the better solution would've been for the US to withdraw from NATO, while remaining in the OSCE. The Europeans could've been encouraged to create a European collective security organization to replace NATO, but without direct US participation. Membership could conceivably been extended to both the Eastern European nations, and, if not all the former USSR member states, at least to the Russian Federation. But that would've been a matter for Europe to decide, not for the United States.

I don't kid myself into thinking the Russians would have a ton of faith in other European countries, but I suspect that it would've at least been less threatening than a NATO that the Russians perceive as an American tool. And at the point a decade later when Vladimir Putin first took power, it might've been more constructive to have him inside the tent urinating out of it, than outside of it urinating in. It could even, conceivably, have set him on a less bellicose course of action in the 2010s and 2020s, if he felt that Russian security concerns were adequately addressed. It would have, at the very least, removed the bogeyman of America's direct involvement in European, and by extension, Russian security.

Had we done this in 1992 or 1993, who knows how the next 30 years of Russian relations might have unfolded? It certainly would have been the best time to do it.

The Second Best Option

Now would also be a good time to leave NATO, and let the European nations create their own security arrangements.

First, with a combined GDP of $19.4 trillion, there's simply no reason why the European Union cannot defend itself. Since that is so, there's no reason for the United States to continue doing it. The Europeans could afford to fund their military establishments adequately, they simply choose not to. This is not only because they rely on the American security umbrella (though they do), but also because they simply don't want to maintain a robust defense establishment. They largely feel that they have societally evolved beyond warfare, and, in any event, face no serious threats from abroad. Perhaps they're right about this. If so, they don't need us. If not, then that's a lesson they need to learn.

To be sure, leaving NATO doesn't mean that we'll return to some sort of 1930s isolationism. In extremis, treaty or no, the United States will come to Europe's defense if required. It's in our interest to do so. But there's no reason to remain formally bound to Europe via a collective security agreement to defend against an enemy that no longer exists. And frankly, based on what we've seen in Ukraine, Russian military action against other European states is likely to be as successful as Japan's attack on Midway.

More importantly, America's largest security threat is no longer in Europe, but in Asia. China, despite its coming demographic collapse, is our primary strategic opponent, and the most likely country to be the cause of trouble in the world. This will remain true for the next several years. Our strategic focus should be in the East, and we should be bolstering our military cooperation with Japan, Australia, the Philippines, and, despite their current, um, drama, South Korea. A more rational policy would be to recreate something like the Vietnam-era SEATO treaty organization to provide for the collective defense of Asia against possible Chinese agression.

NATO is a legacy of the post-WWII international settlement, which I wrote about previously. That settlement no longer reflects the foreign policy or defense environment of today. Whatever emotional attachment one has towards NATO (and I served at HQ Allied Forces Central Europe for three years, so I certainly have some), membership there no longer accurately reflects the security challenges of the modern day.

The Europeans have both the technology, money, and manpower to provide for their own security. We should let them do so, in order to turn our attention to the threats of 2025, instead of 1949.