The Imaginary Threat of NATO Expansion: Debunking a Common Excuse for Russia's Invasion of Ukraine
ZACH FOTIADIS: On February 24, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered what will likely be regarded as among the most notorious speeches in modern history. Broadcasted on Russian state media at 5:30 AM Moscow time, the Kremlin's premier issued a half-hour speech of attempted justifications for his planned invasion of neighboring Ukraine. An uncharacteristically flustered Putin broached a wide range of disparate goals and sentiments, from defending Russian-speaking separatists in the Donbas to implementing a supposed "deNazification" of the Ukrainian nation-state. However, his very first grievance in the address was perhaps the most critical, as he parroted a line long professed by ardent Russian foreign policy apologists: preventing NATO expansion.
As the war in Ukraine passes its six-month anniversary, we must reevaluate the Kremlin’s justification for its military occupation. Putin has argued that NATO expansion posed a threat to Russia—a claim considered largely baseless by a vast number of international affairs analysts. Throughout his speech, Putin lamented the eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and its extending membership to states along the Russian border. “As NATO expands to the east, with every passing year” he stated, “the situation for our country is getting worse and more dangerous.”
This entire line of reasoning reflects an increasingly popular assertion that classifies Russia's assault on Ukraine as a mere defensive measure inhibiting NATO encirclement. According to the theory's proselytizers, the West (in particular the United States) has consistently violated its promises not to expand NATO eastward following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Because the treaty organization was explicitly established to serve as a bulwark against Soviet Russia during the Cold War, pushing NATO’s boundaries adjacent to Moscow constitutes an enormous national security risk for the Kremlin. Prominent international relations scholar and longtime opponent of NATO enlargement John Mearsheimer recently equated Russia's desire to maintain a non-Western sphere of influence in Eastern Europe to America's Monroe Doctrine granting it self-anointed guardianship over Latin America.
Despite some of the seemingly logical presuppositions at the theory's surface, a deep dive into history and geopolitics exposes its fundamental distortions of reality. A number of holes are perceptible right off the bat. Perhaps the most obvious is that independent nations should be able to make alliance decisions free from Russian opinion. As everyone in this conversation will certainly concede, the Soviet Union no longer exists. This means that each of the states entering into the organization are self-governing societies with the right to pursue their own geopolitical path. Given this true proposition, Russia’s approval needn’t be a precondition as to whether Ukraine or Georgia wish to become NATO and/or European Union members. Putin would definitely enjoy having an axis of pro-Russia neighbors, but the decision regarding those nations’ voluntary alliances is not his to make.
If Russia is genuinely interested in dissuading its border states from joining NATO, it may have to first take a long look in the mirror. Why would former Soviet nations actively pursue Westernization and enter into NATO and the EU at the expense of antagonizing the Kremlin? It may very well be because they fear Russian aggression in the wake of irredentist rhetoric and imperialist overtures coming from its government. It’s not a coincidence that countries like Finland (a Russian border state) and Sweden, which had previously expressed little desire to join NATO, are now scrambling to acquire membership in the wake of the war in Ukraine.
As for nations such as the Baltic states, which acceded back in 2004, one likely motivation was what foreign affairs expert Robert Kaplan refers to as Russia’s historic aim of gaining “strategic depth,” or excess land to create space between a country’s populated centers of commerce and hostile territory. This appears consistent with Putin’s decades-long ultranationalist state propaganda campaign glorifying the Old Soviet Union and the Tsarist Russian Empire. The outcome was frightening Eastern Europe into the reassuring embrace of NATO protection.
As for NATO posing a threat to Russian sovereignty, this argument is, for the most part, exceptionally weak. It is true that NATO was originally established with the purpose of safeguarding Western Europe from Soviet hegemony, and was therefore a direct adversary of the Russians. However, NATO‘s role has shifted dramatically since the end of the Cold War. The modern Russian Federation is not the geopolitical superpower of its predecessor, the USSR, and thus was not a serious concern for the organization until six months ago. In the last three decades, it had changed its priorities from containing Russia to mitigating global security hazards in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Libya. NATO has altered its mission from being the military arm of the Western Bloc’s war on communism in Europe, to simply acting as the armed wing of the liberal international order.
This begs the crucial question, why does Russia care if its neighbors join? What serious national security risk does being surrounded by NATO members actually pose? The answer is none. Nada. Zip. NATO nor any of Russia’s border states (nor any country anywhere) have any desire to attack Moscow or violate their sovereignty. And why would they? What possible incentive would they have had to exhibit any kind of preemptive aggression against a potentially volatile regime, not to mention the world’s leading nuclear arsenal with a long history of militarism and retaliation?
There is no better indication of this than the fact that neither NATO nor any country has considered direct military intervention against Russia throughout its bombardment of Ukraine. This remains true in spite of the fact that the Kremlin’s flagrant violation of Kiev’s sovereignty is eerily comparable to Hitler’s 1939 blitzkrieg into Poland that kickstarted the deadliest war in human history. If NATO had any inclination whatsoever of prompting military action toward Russia, now would have been the most justifiable opportunity.
Putin may have gone rogue, but he’s not stupid. The Russian leadership knows perfectly well that NATO poses a near-zero national security threat. In fact, Russia itself has attempted to join NATO numerous times in the past. The genuine reason Moscow—Putin in particular—fears an expansion of NATO membership to include post-Soviet states is that it will undermine the Russian government‘s current status as an illiberal autocracy.
NATO has informally become a political alliance of largely functioning democracies, with some degree of liberalization effectively being a prerequisite for entry. Putin and the kleptocratic oligarchy’s decades-long stranglehold on power via sham elections, jailing political opponents, and curtailing civil liberties and press freedoms is a likely reason for their lack of success in acceding to NATO in the first place. Putin is not concerned about being surrounded by NATO states, but by prosperous liberal democracies that may inspire internal discontent with his strongman dictatorship. The Kremlin’s legitimacy as a virtually authoritarian regime could crumble as Russians witness other former Soviet states achieve substantive democratic reforms. It’s not NATO that terrifies Putin, it’s Western-style democracy.
Perhaps the most sophisticated argument leveled against NATO expansion involves drawing a parallel between Russia’s Eastern European sphere of influence and America’s Monroe Doctrine. This rationale is often invoked as a sort of geopolitical ‘gotcha’ directed at criticisms of Russian imperialism in Ukraine and elsewhere. If China assembled a military alliance in North America, the analogy stipulates, and pushed its boundaries along the US-Mexico border, the United States would throw a fit. In fact, an authentic historical analogy already exists, they claim, pointing to the US-facilitated Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 resulting from the island’s establishment of diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union.
As compelling as this picture may seem, amateur international relations underpins its assumptions. First and foremost, the parallelism to Cuba is a historically inaccurate comparison because America and the USSR were rival global superpowers at the time that posed genuine national security threats to one another. The Bay of Pigs is additionally dissimilar because unlike Russia’s deployment of roughly 200,000 armed military personnel to Ukraine, President Kennedy never authorized American troops to enter Cuba.
As for the Monroe Doctrine generally, Russia’s attempt to equate its exertion of political influence over former Soviet territory with the US’s efforts in the Western Hemisphere doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny. Putin and other critics of American foreign policy often contend that Washington applies standards to enemy nations it refuses to uphold itself. Ok then, fair enough; let’s be balanced.
Numerous Latin American states from Costa Rica to Brazil have recently been developing close economic and diplomatic relations with the US’s chief geopolitical competitor, China. Around 20 Central and South American as well as Caribbean countries have entered the Chinese-sponsored Belt and Road Initiative. This poses a significant challenge to America’s sphere of influence in the region. So by Russia’s logic, shouldn’t the US invade Mexico to prevent the expansion of the BRI and defend American sovereignty?
Sure BRI poses no serious national security threat to Washington, but then again neither does NATO to Moscow. Just like Putin fears being surrounded by liberal democracies, what if Biden decided he disliked being encircled by countries on the Chinese Communist Party payroll? How would the international community react if the US engaged in such behavior? Probably near universal condemnation. More importantly, how would Russia, an intimate ally of Beijing, respond? Probably identically to how America is treating them in the midst of Ukraine.
Perhaps it’s true that America and the West made a tactical error by not integrating post-Soviet Russia into NATO or the liberal international order. Maybe NATO should’ve dissolved altogether following the end of the Cold War, enabling a new, less polarizing organization to form in its place. However, none of this justifies Russia’s actions in Ukraine. As the onslaught continues, let us not have any illusions here. Putin‘s behavior is a blatant violation of international law and sovereignty. No country that stoops to the level of premodern conquest to pursue its national interests is entitled to a shred of sympathy.
Zach Fotiadis is a senior staff writer for On the Record originally from Miami, Florida. He is currently a junior in the School of Foreign Service studying International Politics with a minor in history.