Have 20 Years of NATO Expansion Made Anyone Safer?

Nation Contributing Editor Stephen F. Cohen and John Batchelor continue their weekly discussions of the new US-Russian Cold War. 

Cohen notes that 20 years ago, in 1997, President Bill Clinton made the decision to expand NATO eastward. That same year, in order to placate post-Soviet Russia, then weak and heralded in Washington as America’s “strategic friend and partner,” the Russian-NATO Founding Act was adopted. It promised that expansion would entail no “permanent stationing of substantial combat forces.” Cohen takes the occasion of this anniversary year to ask whether NATO’s eastward expansion has created more insecurity than provide the security it promised. He divides the question into several subjects, which he and Batchelor discuss.