Yes, NATO Expansion Was a Mistake
NATO expansion was first and foremost a mistake for the United States.
Foreign Affairs has assembled a group of experts to assess whether NATO expansion was a mistake. It’s an interesting cross-section of the debate, and there are several confirmed skeptics and opponents of expansion included in the mix. If I were asked to give a response, I would strongly agree (confidence level 8) that it was a mistake but I would include a caveat. The first is that NATO expansion was first and foremost a mistake for the United States. I can see why former members of the Warsaw Pact wanted to join, and I can understand why nations that had previously been dominated from Moscow would want to be behind the alliance’s shield, but I don’t agree that this was a compelling reason for the U.S. and the rest of the alliance to extend security guarantees to them. The truth is that the U.S. agreed to extend these guarantees on the assumption that they would never need to be honored, and so little serious thought was given to what it meant to pledge to defend these countries. Another caveat might be that NATO expansion was a series of mistakes and not just one big one. There were several opportunities to stop or turn back, and every time the U.S. and its allies chose to keep going.
The first round of NATO expansion was the least provocative and the least objectionable, but it would have been better if there had been no expansion at all because the alliance had already served its purpose and didn’t need to take in new members. If expansion had stopped there and no other states had joined, it would not have become the major irritant in the relationship with Russia that it became, but because Russia was unable to stop the first round their objections to later expansion were also ignored. The second round was a more serious error than the first, and its conclusion coincided with a time of giddy triumphalism in Washington during the early Bush years. Russia accepted the second round grudgingly, but the limit had been reached and many enthusiastic Atlanticists were oblivious to the dangers that further eastward expansion involved. Then the Bush administration agitated for bringing in Ukraine and Georgia, and the alliance came up with the worst-of-both-worlds position at Bucharest that has haunted us ever since. The refusal to repudiate the empty promise made in 2008 compounded the earlier error.