NATO Enlargement:
The Embiggening

You may have heard on the news about NATO enlargement as one of the key reasons for Russia’s invasion in Ukraine. The claim goes “Russia and Putin, felt threatened by NATO’s enlargement and decided to prevent its neighbors, Ukraine and Georgia, from joining NATO, invading Georgia in 2008, and Ukraine in 2014 and 2022”. This is a claim that is frequently touted by prominent scholars and political commentators not only in Russia but in the US and western Europe. 

But, we all know Russia frequently lies about its public justifications for its actions, such as the phoned in “Ukrainians are Nazis” which is a claim Russians used to launch its invasion against Ukraine. So how seriously should we consider Russia’s grievances against NATO enlargement? Do the Russians truly feel threatened by NATO’s expansion, and was Russian fear of NATO the TRUE motivation behind its invasions into Georgia and Ukraine?

Putin certainly repeated this claim publicly since he brought it up in his 2007 Munich speech as a tirade against what he characterized as an aggressive and threatening expansion of US hegemony in Europe. He doesn’t refer to NATO by its name in the speech, but many assume that was what he had in mind. Since 2007, Russia began to explicitly name NATO, and its expansion, as a threat to Russian security. But first, let’s go over what NATO is, what it does, and why it exists in the first place.

NATO, pronounced NA-TTO, is a side dish made from fermented soybeans and is considered a Japanese and Korean delicacy. Just kidding; NATO stands for North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It was founded in 1949, with US leadership, when the founding members signed the Washington Treaty.

The Americans wanted to achieve two main things with NATO. The first goal was to protect Western Europe from the Soviet Union.  In the following years after the end of World War 2, there were real concerns that the Soviets, who had gobbled up large parts of Eastern Europe during and after the war, would continue its push into western Europe. The NATO alliance was seen as the answer to preventing Soviet adventurism. NATO was defensive in nature, which is enshrined in article 5 of the Washington treaty, which says “The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all”. Keep in mind that article 5 can only be invoked when a member is attacked. NATO’s defensive function is more well known than its second function: preventing war among the Western European states themselves. 

Now on to the second goal for the Americans. For the Americans, western Europeans seemed to be a… bunch of rowdy rascals who were extremely racist and murderous against each other, fighting countless number of wars in the previous centuries massacring each other by the hundreds of thousands and eventually in the tens of millions. Specifically, the Americans saw the UK, France, and Germany as regional rivals who were constantly trying to one up each other for the supremacy of western Europe. The Americans could not afford division, let alone conflict in western Europe, when the Soviet threat loomed large. So, they decided to create NATO not only as a defensive military alliance, but as the foundation for a “security community”. How is a “security community” different from a military alliance? 

A traditional military alliance is focused usually just on security concerns based on the geopolitical issues in the region. NATO does that, but it also does other things such as encouraging economic collaboration and the advancement of liberal democratic values in governmental institutions among its members. These additional provisions are a radical departure from traditional concepts of military alliances. Think of it like this. Traditional military alliances allow two very different societies such as a liberal democratic state and an authoritarian or autocratic state, to form military alliances against a common enemy, just like the US and Soviet Union did in the latter part of WW2. These two heterogeneous societies do not seem to have a lot in common. In fact, they only work together against a more pressing threat temporarily, because their values and ways of life are so different. This means alliances can change quite quickly and frequently (for those familiar with European political history you know just how quickly alliances change). But, when you have societies that agree on the more fundamental values, share a similar worldview, an alliance between like minded societies would be more resilient and steady. At least, that is the reasoning behind NATO.

A more theoretical way to describe this is that NATO was designed to avoid the problems of a security dilemma (Herbert Butterfield, John Hertz, Robert Jervis). A criminally simple explanation of the security dilemma would go something like this: a nation setting up defensive actions may be considered offensive in nature to another nation, which in turns prompts the threatened nation to set up their own defensive actions, prompting escalations through an arms race or war between these two nations. This is the security dilemma in a very simple nutshell. This concept deserves a dedicated video on it so I will leave it as for now.

So, NATO was designed to avoid the security dilemma primarily between UK, France, and Germany. Western European states had to quickly build up military capabilities to defend themselves from the Soviet Union, but also not threaten each other in the process. So, was NATO able to do what it set out to do? The verdict was a resounding YES. Through mechanisms such as transparency in military planning, budgeting, military training, as well as holding all members to a common political and moral standard, which can be described as liberal democratic principles, NATO was able to create a cohesive and unified security community. Within a few decades after its founding, it became impossible to imagine a war between France and Germany. The relationship between France and Germany became so inspiring, that it was the impetus for the creation of the European Union, a government that governs European governments. NATO was truly one of the alliances of all time. NATO was so successful (I'm not going to go into detail about Greece and Turkey because that is more of an exception to the rule) that when the Soviet Union began to collapse in 1989 with the falling of the Berlin Wall, NATO was like “Hey, NATO was a huge success. Not only were we able to grow our military capabilities to defend ourselves from the Soviets, but we were also able to foster a sense of unity and security for all western Europe in a way that seemed impossible less than a century ago. Why don’t we bring more countries into the alliance? I don't know, maybe Russia can even join us one day, and Europe could finally be at peace!” So, with a sense of almost naive optimism, came the age of NATO enlargement beginning in 1995.

So, NATO enlarged. First, NATO released its white paper on NATO enlargement called “A Study on NATO Enlargement" in 1995. The study basically said, there is “nothing wrong with enlarging NATO”. Then, it accepted memberships for 19 more states, which includes eastern European states such as Poland, Estonia, Slovenia, Lithuania, and more. 

Now, let's talk about Putin. More specifically his reaction to NATO enlargement. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Putin did not seem to mind NATO enlargement, even going so far as to suggest Russia would not mind joining NATO in 1999 in an interview with BBC journalist David Frost. Putin enjoyed a functional relationship with many of the key NATO members, such as the US, France and Germany, making energy trade deals and security cooperation in counterterrorism after 9/11. But the one thing that Putin did not do well was maintain friendly relationships with its eastern European states such as Ukraine, Georgia, and Belarus, which is ironic given that these states were part of the Soviet Union, and in places such as Ukraine, the public held very favorable views of Russia and Putin. Ever since these states gained independence and sovereignty, they became independent, making foreign policy decisions based their own interests. Western Europe had very effective and functional institutions and strong economies and to eastern Europeans, they seemed to be very lucrative opportunities. Russia, on the other hand, did not have very competitive offerings for the eastern European states, other than not criticizing human rights violations in these states. And the Russian were not very skilled in peaceful diplomacy. They were more like KGB agents on steroids. So, relations began to sour between Russia, Georgia, and Ukraine, a little bit with Belarus as well. This was before Georgia and Ukraine announced their desire to join NATO in 2008.

Take a look at Russia and Georgia and how that relationship was deteriorating before Georgia announced its desire to join NATO in 2008. Georgia had two breakaway regions called South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which were formed in 1991 and 1992. Russia had supported South Ossetia and Abkhazia militarily and after their secession had sent Russian peacekeeping troops in both regions. Russia and Georgia were at each other's throats ever since 1992, and Georgian nationalists had always tried to garner public support to retake South Ossetia and Abkhazia but lacked the political and military power to do so. 

There were always small skirmishes between Georgia, South Ossetia, and Abkhazia throughout the 90s and early 2000s. Then, in 2004, Georgia held parliamentary elections. The incumbent President Eduard Shevardnadze and his party declared victory in the parliamentary elections. The opposition claimed that the results were fraudulent, and led massive popular protests, which came to be called the Rose revolution. After failed mediation attempts by US and Russia, the protesters were able to take over the parliament, and President Shevardnadze quickly resigned. Mikhaeil Saakashvili became the new President of Georgia in 2004. Saakashvili had a significant nationalist platform. He wanted to reintegrate South Ossetia and Abkhazia back into Georgia. From 2004 to 2008, the relationship between President Saakashvili and President Putin began to deteriorate at an alarming pace. Skirmishes between Russian, South Ossetian, Abkhazian, and Georgian forces became more frequent. Russia wanted to keep South Ossetia and Abkhazia under its control to keep a stronghold in Georgia. It would allow Russia to exert coercive influences in Georgian politics. Saakashvili saw Russian support over South Ossetia and Abkhazia as threats to Georgia’s sovereignty. The situation was already at a knife’s edge when in 2008, after years of escalation with Putin, President Saakashvili announced Georgia’s desire to join NATO in the 2008 Bucharest summit. Months later, Russia invaded Georgia. The 2008 Russian-Georgian war lasted 12 days and did not significantly change the boundaries between South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Georgia. The war ended with a cease-fire agreement mediated by French president, Nicolas Sarkozy. 

The war was the result of a failed relationship between Saakashvili and Putin on the issue of the breakaway regions in Georgia, which started years before the 1995 NATO enlargement. Saakashvili went to NATO after the troubles started, most likely as a way to defend Georgia from Russia after years of escalatory threats from Russia. What's interesting is that in the controversial 2008 Bucharest Summit where Saakashvili announced Georgia's wish to join NATO, NATO did not extend a Membership Action plan to Georgia nor Ukraine, because the key members, France and Germany, did not want to escalate tensions with Russia and did not want the alliance to be dragged into territorial disputes in Georgia. You cannot begin the process of joining NATO without a Membership Action plan.

Furthermore, when French President Nicolas Sarkozy brokered the cease-fire agreement, he favored Russia’s demands over Georgia’s. President Bush chastised President Saakashvili for provoking Putin. An EU report over the Russo-Georgian war incorrectly blamed Georgia for firing the first shots. And just mere months after the war ended, France agreed to manufacture and sell two helicopter carrier naval vessels to non other than Russia. A Russian military official joked that the French warships would have made the invasion of Georgia easier. The plan to sell the helicopter carriers ended only after Russian invaded Ukraine in 2014. And when President Obama began his presidency in late 2008 after Bush, he announced a “Russia reset” policy, a resetting of soured relations between US and Russia, which largely meant ignoring the 2008 Russo-Georgian war. 

The idea that NATO’s prospective expansion into Georgia caused Russia to invade makes less sense as you learn more about the details of Russo-Georgian relations. It just does not help explain what happened. And it makes even less sense in the explaining Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014.

Ukraine had announced its desire to join NATO in the 2008 Bucharest Summit with Georgia. As with Georgia, NATO did not offer Ukraine a Membership Action Plan. Ukraine was not involved in an active territorial dispute with Russia at the time (which was the reason Georgia was denied), but it had too many issues in governance such as high levels of corruption for NATO to consider accepting Ukraine. It is important to note that Ukraine signaled its desire to join NATO during President Viktor Yuschenko’s administration. Yuschenko was considered a pro-western president and with good reason. When he was running for the presidency in 2004 against Viktor Yanukovych, who was considered a pro-Russian candidate, Yuschenko barely survived an assassination attempt. That his opponent Yanukovych, who was considered suspect in the assasination attempt, had support from Russia did not help Yuschenko hold a high regard for Russia. It also did not help that when Yanukovych tried to rig the 2004 elections and fraudulently claim victory, and Russia stood by Yanukovych. After massive protests by the Ukrainian people, Yuschenko was able to win in a fair election, which is called the Orange revolution. Russia now had a serious problem. Russia had backed a losing, and cheating, horse, and its reputation with the Ukrainian public and the new Yushenko administration got off to a very bad start. So President Yuschenko, given everything that had happened to him and Ukrainian society by Russia, understandably was very anti-Russian. 

A pro-Russian politician supported by Russia gets involved in election fraud, and causes widespread backlash leading to popular protests that ultimately forms an anti-Russian government. Ukraine’s Orange revolution may sound similar to Georgia’s Rose revolution. It would be tempting to group the two revolutions together and see it as the common cause that led to deteriorating relations between Georgian and Ukraine with Russia. But, I would argue that the consequences for the two revolutions on their relations with Russia are quite different as anti-Russian President Yuschenko would lose the presidency to Viktor Yanukovych in the 2010 presidential election.

But President Yuschenko was unable to resolve chronic problems of Ukrainian politics and society, such as corruption and weak economy, as well as infighting in his own political party during his presidency. His popular support tanked, and his former opponent Viktor Yanukovych won fairly in the 2010 election. 

Russia appeared to have high hopes for President Yanukovych, who did enact policies that favored Russian interests in Ukraine. For one, Yanukovych renewed the lease for the Russian naval base in Crimea, which is strategically important for Russia as it forms the backbone of Russia’s Black Sea fleet. The base had been there for centuries, and while the Ukrainian public was apathetic at best about the issue there were growing opposition to Russia’s naval base in Crimea after people found out that Russia’s Black Sea fleet participated in the invasion of Georgia in 2008. Despite Yanukovych's pro-Russian policies, which you can read or watch here, the Russians wanted more. The Russians engaged in a coercive diplomatic campaign to prevent Ukraine from signing an Association Agreement with the EU, with the hopes of forcing Ukraine to join the Russian led Customs Union. Once again, it was not about NATO. It was about Russia forcing Ukraine's economic policies. The situation in Ukraine cannot be explained by pseudo-realist explanations that try to shoe-in NATO vs Russia balance of power. The empirical evidence does not support this narrative. It seems more and more likely that the most powerful explanation of what happened in Georgia and Ukraine is that character of Russia's foreign policy is that of a bully.