The Kremlin’s decision to invade Ukraine has been primarily driven by the threat of NATO’s expansion along Russia’s border. Its strategic objective is to annex some Ukrainian territory and badly weaken the country so it cannot join NATO.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, a chorus of government officials, academics, commentators, and retired bureaucrats and diplomats has dismissed all links between the crisis and the decades-long NATO expansion. Moscow’s aggression, we are told, is all about Vladimir Putin’s imperial impulse—his desire to recreate the Russian empire.

In reality, the Kremlin’s conduct has been primarily driven by the threat of NATO’s expansion along Russia’s border. We had some warning of Russia’s strategic sensibilities three decades ago.

During the 1990’s debate over whether Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic should become alliance members, many military and foreign-policy experts argued that NATO expansion would lead to big trouble with Russia. It would create the very danger it was supposed to prevent: Russian aggression in reaction to what Moscow would deem a provocative and threatening Western policy.

The list of opponents to NATO enlargement from three decades ago reads like a who’s who of that generation’s wise men. It included architects of the Cold War containment doctrine, senior defence and intelligence officials from the Nixon-Carter-Reagan eras, former ambassadors and senior diplomats to Moscow (Arthur Hartman, Jack F. Matlock, and Robert Bowie) former Australian prime ministers Malcolm Fraser and Paul Keating, leading political scientists such as a Ronald Steel, prominent magazine editors (Owen Harries, Charles Maynes) and, not least, distinguished historians such as Robert Conquest, Richard Pipes, John Lewis Gaddis, and Britain’s foremost military intellectual Sir Michael Howard.

Officials in the state and defence departments also rejected NATO plans to expand eastwards, including the Polish-born chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General John Shalikashvili and US Defense Secretary Les Aspin, as well as his successor William Perry, who considered resignation in late 1994 when the policy proposal moved forward. Former defense secretaries Robert McNamara and James Schlesinger aired their concerns that NATO enlargement would decrease allied security and unsettle European stability.

In the lead up to the Senate’s ratification in 1998, the New York Times editorial board warned: “The most important foreign policy decision America has faced since the end of the Cold War…  could prove to be a mistake of historic proportions.” And this: “It is delusional to believe that NATO expansion is not at its core an act that Russia will regard as hostile.”

George Kennan—intellectual architect of the Cold War containment doctrine, a former ambassador to the USSR, and one of America’s wisest students of Russian affairs—spoke for the many dissenters in 1997 when he warned that NATO expansion “would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.”

It would weaken Russian reformers, embolden hard-liners, undermine strategic arms agreements, and escalate East-West tensions when Russia got back on its feet and began acting like a great power.

In the 1990s, Russia was no threat to the West and incapable of serious military action. But “if humiliated further and made desperate,” as then National Interest editor Owen Harries warned in 1996, “it could be dangerous in a way that a wounded animal can be dangerous.” In such circumstances, providing “extreme chauvinistic elements in Russia to exploit frustrations, resentments and wounded national pride… would have unpleasant consequences both internally and internationally.”

Harries—a conservative academic at the universities of Sydney (1956-66) and New South Wales (1966-74), and an Australian diplomat-policymaker with impressive credentials as a Cold Warrior—argued: “Expanding NATO violates the wise principle enunciated by Winston Churchill: ‘In victory, magnanimity.’ Churchill was no softy, but he recognized the stupidity of grinding the face of a defeated foe in the dirt.”

In a widely quoted essay in the US Foreign Affairs magazine as early as 1993, Harries warned of the perils of any proposal to intrude US military power into Russia’s sphere of influence. It would not just greatly annoy the Russians, but it would have little credibility, create splits within the alliance, and require much in blood and treasure.

Other prominent Australians, most notably Harries’ former boss Malcolm Fraser as well as another prime minister, Paul Keating, also warned that extending western security commitments eastwards would provoke the bear.

In 1997, Keating delivered a lecture at UNSW warning: “To move Europe’s military demarcation point to the very borders of the former Soviet Union is, I believe, an error which may rank in the end with the strategic miscalculations which prevented Germany from taking its full place in the international system at the beginning of this century.”

Opponents also drew attention to the US and German assurances given Moscow during the early 1990s that if Russia withdrew from their Warsaw Pact and accepted German unification, NATO would not move “one inch eastwards.” According to Kennan in 1998: “We did not, I am sure, intend to trick the Russians, but the actual determinants of our later behavior… would scarcely have been more creditable on our part than a real intention to deceive.”

Shortly after the Senate ratified the first tranche of enlargement (Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland) in April 1998, Kennan told Thomas Friedman: “I think it is the beginning of new Cold War… Of course, there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say we always told you that is how the Russians are – but this is just wrong.”

This history serves to highlight the extent to which many distinguished military and foreign-policy experts raised strong objections to moving NATO into Russia’s backyard. Their warnings about poking at the bear proved prescient. And yet, as they consistently warned about a near-certain confrontation with post-Yeltsin Russia, it’s important to note that the opponents of NATO expansion in the 1990s were never dismissed as Kremlin apologists or Russia’s “useful idiots.” Nor were they treated as if their views were outside the boundaries of serious public discourse.

However, the intellectual climate is very different today. If anyone—including prominent scholars like John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs—blames NATO expansion for the Ukraine crisis, they instantly arouse anger and suspicion about their motives. Although they are popular on social media, today’s critics of NATO enlargement are virtually ignored across mainstream media outlets and their intentions are all too often impugned. Never mind that they are effectively reaffirming the entirely legitimate criticisms that Kennan, Harries, the New York Times, and others raised a generation earlier.

What’s changed in three decades? Why are today’s opponents of NATO expansion treated with contempt and derision?

The answer lies in understanding the power of groupthink. People, including politicians and policymakers, increasingly indulge in what Harries called the “parochialism of the present”—a tendency to believe that what is happening to us now must be of unprecedented significance.

After all, Ukraine is the first major war in Europe since World War Two and Russia was clearly the aggressor. Moreover, there is a history of revanchist attitudes in Moscow and Putin’s thuggish and autocratic persona helps confirm the widespread view in the West that Russia took up arms exclusively because of its imperialistic ambitions, not because of anything the United States and its allies did, including NATO expansion.

Although the Western conventional wisdom insists that Russia is inherently and incorrigibly expansionist, the Russian armed forces lack the military power to conquer Ukraine, much less countries in the erstwhile Warsaw Pact. A Russia having its work cut out for itself in Donbas is no threat to Europe. Nor has Putin ever expressed interest in making all of Ukraine part of Russia, much less reconstituting the Russian empire. His strategic objectives appear more limited: he wants to annex some Ukrainian territory and badly weaken that country, so it is in no position to join NATO.

Moreover, as the critics warned in the 1990s, it was inevitable that Russia, with an improving economy thanks to its oil and gas resources, would eventually push back at a US-dominated military alliance encroaching on its borders. That is precisely what happened in Georgia (2008), Crimea (2014), and Ukraine (2022).

The cold reality is that we are facing the prospect of a frozen conflict coupled with Russia annexing even more Ukrainian territory, leaving Ukraine as a broken rump state. This is a tragedy for sure, but it almost certainly could have been avoided if US leaders had heeded the warnings of the many wise opponents of NATO expansion during the 1990s.

 This article is based on a lecture delivered to the Australian Institute of International Affairs (NSW) and a longer essay in Modern Age, an American journal of conservative opinion. 

Tom Switzer is executive director of the Centre for Independent Studies, a Sydney-based classical liberal public-policy think tank. He is also the host of Between the Lines and Sunday Extra on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Radio National. He is a former senior associate at the University of Sydney’s United States Studies Centre, editor of The Spectator Australia (2009–2014), opinion editor for The Australian (2001–2008), an editorial writer at the Australian Financial Review (1998–2001) and assistant editor at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC (1995–1998). In recent years, Switzer has also been a regular commentator for Sky News television, Fairfax Media and ABC radio and television.

This article is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.