[NATO expansion] may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.
In a similar vein Susan Eisenhower, President Eisenhower's granddaughter, wrote an open letter to Bill Clinton, co-signed by 49 military, political and academic leaders, calling "the current U.S. led effort to expand NATO... a policy error of historic proportions."
NATO affirmed at its 2008 summit that "NATO welcomes Ukraine's and Georgia's Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO." In the communique of its June 2021 summit it reaffirmed this commitment in the face of "Russia's recent massive military build-up and destabilising activities in and around Ukraine [which] have further escalated tensions and undermined security." We should notice here that the Russian military build-up didn't happen suddenly. The current crisis is a case of Russia saying 'enough already' to NATO's ongoing build-up near Russia.
Putin's demands that NATO pledge not to admit Ukraine (and Georgia) and to limit the deployment of troops and weapons to NATO's eastern flank are reasonable. He is being much more accommodating than we would be if Russia or China were doing in the Western Hemisphere what the U.S. and its allies are doing in Europe.
Biden and his foreign-policy team seem determined to revive a cold-war bipolar divide between the West and the East, with the threat of a still-expanding nuclear arsenal constraining each side. This is a wasteful and reckless vision of Europe. It forces Russia and China to forge a defensive alliance against the West instead of developing their distinctive roles in a broader multipolar world. We need instead to go back to the vision proposed by Mikhail Gorbachev of a continental community stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok in which nations can live harmoniously while adopting different sociopolitical systems.
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