The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is entering its third age. When it was founded three quarters of a century ago, it was meant to contain the spread of communism and confront the military might of the Soviet Union. In other words, to keep Western Europe capitalist and under US control. Despite the allegations of the Soviet propaganda at the time, NATO was a defensive rather than an aggressive alliance. Through all the crises of the Cold War period, it stood still.
When the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union imploded, NATO gained a victory it had not won. The US-led military bloc refused to dissolve upon the completion of its original mission. Instead, it sought to become the sole security regulator for Europe. It went onto an offensive and waged war against Serbia. It went “out of area” to fight in Afghanistan. It embarked on an enlargement spree to include the former Soviet satellite countries of Eastern Europe, and some ex-republics of the USSR itself.
Yet, it miserably failed to manage relations with the former adversary, Russia. It spurned Moscow’s request for membership and proposed a partnership instead which turned out to be essentially hollow. It ignored Russia’s security interests by refusing to stop its expansion all the way toward the Russian border and turning down Moscow’s proposals for a pan-European security order. The issue of Ukraine’s membership in NATO, which the Kremlin perceived as an intolerable threat to its national security, became the principal cause of the Ukraine war, now in its fifth year.
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