Tom Switzer on why NATO Expansion Explains Russia’s Actions in Ukraine

Ajay0 · Jun 15, 2025

Australian political writer, commentator and policy analyst Tom Switzer on why NATO expansion explains Russia's actions ..

Why NATO Expansion Explains Russia’s Actions in Ukraine - Australian Institute of International Affairs

The list of opponents to NATO enlargement from three decades ago reads like a who’s who of that generation’s wise men. It included architects of the Cold War containment doctrine, senior defence and intelligence officials from the Nixon-Carter-Reagan eras, former ambassadors and senior diplomats to Moscow (Arthur Hartman, Jack F. Matlock, and Robert Bowie) former Australian prime ministers Malcolm Fraser and Paul Keating, leading political scientists such as a Ronald Steel, prominent magazine editors (Owen Harries, Charles Maynes) and, not least, distinguished historians such as Robert Conquest, Richard Pipes, John Lewis Gaddis, and Britain’s foremost military intellectual Sir Michael Howard.

Officials in the state and defence departments also rejected NATO plans to expand eastwards, including the Polish-born chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General John Shalikashvili and US Defense Secretary Les Aspin, as well as his successor William Perry, who considered resignation in late 1994 when the policy proposal moved forward. Former defense secretaries Robert McNamara and James Schlesinger aired their concerns that NATO enlargement would decrease allied security and unsettle European stability.

In the lead up to the Senate’s ratification in 1998, the New York Times editorial board warned: “The most important foreign policy decision America has faced since the end of the Cold War… could prove to be a mistake of historic proportions.” And this: “It is delusional to believe that NATO expansion is not at its core an act that Russia will regard as hostile.”

George Kennan—intellectual architect of the Cold War containment doctrine, a former ambassador to the USSR, and one of America’s wisest students of Russian affairs—spoke for the many dissenters in 1997 when he warned that NATO expansion “would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.”

It would weaken Russian reformers, embolden hard-liners, undermine strategic arms agreements, and escalate East-West tensions when Russia got back on its feet and began acting like a great power.
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Tom Switzer on why NATO Expansion Explains Russia’s Actions in Ukraine

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