The push to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance to Eastern Europe and Eurasia in the second term of Bill Clinton’s presidency sparked fierce debate among foreign policy experts. The most notable and prescient critic was George Kennan, who warned in a 1997 New York Times article that “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.” He further predicted that expansion would trigger a backlash from Moscow, and when it did, proponents would obtusely dismiss it by saying, “that is how the Russians are.” Kennan, a former ambassador to Stalin’s Soviet Union and the architect of the policy of containment that won the Cold War, was widely regarded as one of America’s greatest diplomats and authorities on Russia. As even proponents of expansion grudgingly concede, Kennan’s unequivocal condemnation of NATO expansion should carry some weight.
Kennan was no voice in the wilderness. In fact, he was expressing the expert consensus. Strobe Talbott, Bill Clinton’s point man on expanding NATO, lamented that virtually everyone he knew with expertise on Russia and Eastern Europe opposed it. Standing with Kennan against NATO expansion was a coalition of America’s best foreign policy minds and most experienced hands. Their numbers included noted anti-Soviet hardliners from the Republican Party such as Fred Ikle and Paul Nitze as well as foreign policy luminaries among the Democrats such as Senators Sam Nunn and Bill Bradley. Reagan’s adviser on Eastern European and Soviet affairs, Harvard historian Richard Pipes—known for his deep pessimism about Russia’s political culture—not only inveighed against NATO expansion as unnecessary and unwise, but even regarded the alliance as an anachronism that should be dissolved. Moreover, in 1997, the debate over NATO expansion concerned Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, with perhaps Romania and Slovenia to follow. Neither Ukrainian nor Georgian membership was on the table. Nonetheless, the weight of expert opinion even then deemed NATO expansion a folly.
Perhaps the most prominent dissenter and advocate of enlargement was Zbigniew Brzezinski. A political scientist and Sovietologist who served as National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter, Brzezinski was known for his abiding antagonism toward Moscow. As he explained in The Grand Chessboard, his 1997 guide to why and how America should seek primacy in Eurasia, Brzezinski saw NATO as a tool for the extension of American power.
Siding with Brzezinski to overrule the Cold War veterans in favor of NATO expansion was Bill Clinton. A Baby Boomer who came of age in an era of unprecedented American abundance and who had escaped reckoning with the harder edge of American power by avoiding service in Vietnam, Clinton’s main interest in the American military was using it abroad to distract attention from his serial private scandals. Some in his administration, however, were more ambitious. Secretary of State Madeline Albright, a protégée of Brzezinski’s, was known for her casual attitude to the employment of force. As she infamously put it to then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin Powell during a debate about bombing Serbia over Kosovo in 1999, “What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”