2冷戰死灰復燃

文章章節標題及重點整理

文章標題： 冷戰死灰復燃

本章標題： 1 發動全球反恐戰爭（Waging a Global War on Terror）

以下為文章的主要章節結構與重點提煉：

一、前言：反恐戰爭的慘重代價

• 阿富汗戰爭是美國史上最長、最昂貴的戰爭。
• 兩場戰爭（阿富汗 + 伊拉克）總花費超過4兆美元，大量美軍與平民傷亡。
• 最終結果：兩場戰爭均以失敗告終（塔利班重掌阿富汗、伊拉克陷入長期混亂）。

二、美國的黃金時代：1989–2003

• 柏林圍牆倒塌後至伊拉克戰爭前，美國處於「單極時刻」。
• 民主資本主義全球擴張，中國尚未成為主要挑戰者。
• 九一一事件一度提升美國國際聲望，但也成為轉折點。

三、老布希與第一次波斯灣戰爭：建立新世界秩序

• 1990-1991年老布希處理伊拉克入侵科威特。
• 強調「以法治代替叢林法則」，組成多國聯盟，嚴格遵循聯合國決議。
• 採用鮑威爾主義（壓倒性武力、明確目標、可行退場策略）。
• 戰爭迅速勝利，但拒絕推翻海珊政權，展現戰略克制（與小布希形成強烈對比）。

四、阿富汗戰爭：未走的路

• 蓋達組織崛起與九一一事件背景。
• 布希政府「Ready! Fire! Aim!」的草率決策。
• 拒絕塔利班交出賓拉登的協商機會，直接選擇推翻政權。
• 托拉博拉戰役為最大失誤：錯失捕殺賓拉登的最佳機會。
• 過度依賴北方聯盟、排除塔利班參與波恩會議，埋下長期叛亂根源。
• 2006年起塔利班重新崛起。

五、伊拉克戰爭重演相同錯誤

• 新保守派長期推動「伊拉克解放」。
• 以**大規模毀滅性武器（WMD）**為由發動戰爭（後證明為假情報）。
• 兵力嚴重不足、戰後解散伊拉克軍隊與大規模去復興黨化，引發叛亂與內戰。
• 2007-2008年「增兵」（Surge）暫時穩定，但未能解決根本問題。
• 2011年撤軍後ISIS崛起。

六、民主幻想：為何無法建立民主

• 阿富汗與伊拉克缺乏民主所需的經濟、社會與歷史條件（人均GDP低、無中產階級、無法治傳統）。
• 與二戰後西德、日本重建成功形成對比。
• 布希政府嚴重低估「國家建設」的困難度。

七、失敗的代價：布希主義與國際秩序的崩壞

• 布希主義核心：單邊主義、先制攻擊、無限期全球戰爭、強制輸出民主。
• 嚴重摧毀老布希建立的後冷戰國際秩序。
• 美國從「手持大棒、輕聲細語」的典範，變成破壞國際規範的「公牛」。

結論：武力容易摧毀舊秩序，卻極難建立新秩序。

整體核心論點：

小布希政府在九一一後以反恐為名發動的全球戰爭，因新保守派意識形態、情報失真、戰略失誤與民主幻想，導致美國嚴重消耗國力、損害國際信譽，並為後續大國競爭（冷戰死灰復燃）埋下重要伏筆。

需要我幫你把這些重點做成更簡潔的版本、中英文對照、簡報格式，或是針對特定章節再深入整理嗎？

Chapter Two

Reviving the Cold War

Russia’s invasions of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022 revived debates about enlarging NATO that had begun with German reunification in October 1990 and continued as NATO incorporated the Baltic states and every former member of the Warsaw Pact except Russia by 2009. Advocates of enlargement saw Vladimir Putin’s aggression as vindicating the wisdom of expanding NATO’s umbrella. Russia would never have dared invade a NATO country, they maintained, since Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty declares an attack on one to be an attack on all and obliges the alliance to defend the targeted country with armed force if necessary. They noted that Article 5 has never been triggered in NATO’s seven-decade-plus history. Critics of this view responded that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Like the American diplomat and historian George Kennan, who had opposed creating NATO in the first place and disputed that it had deterred Soviet aggression during the Cold War, they remained skeptical that NATO’s expansion to fifteen new countries, six bordering on Russian territory, had deterred Russian aggression in the years since the Cold War. On the contrary, they contended that the prospect of extending membership to Georgia and Ukraine, which had been publicly discussed by NATO leaders since 2008, provoked Russia’s incursion into Georgia that year and its two subsequent wars on Ukraine.1

The debate is not new. Founded at the start of the Cold War when US-Soviet relations were descending into mutual acrimony, NATO has always been a strange duck. In his farewell address from public life in 1796, George Washington had warned future generations “to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.”2 Americans heeded this admonition until 1949, when Harry Truman led a dozen countries to create an unprecedented alliance that required a twenty-year initial commitment and contained no mechanism for expulsion. A year earlier, Stalin’s Berlin blockade and his backing for a communist coup in Czechoslovakia had crystalized American domestic support for the treaty, smoothing the path for easy Senate approval over the objections of isolationists like Ohio senator Robert Taft and in the face of trenchant opposition from Kennan. Today, with thirty-two members, NATO is the largest peacetime alliance in the world and the longest-lived multilateral one.

Kennan had standing. He was the hard-nosed realist who had come to prominence in 1946 when, as the American chargé d’affaires in Moscow, he had warned the State Department in an eight-thousand-word telegram—published anonymously in Foreign Affairs magazine the following year—that the Soviet leaders were implacable antagonists who would never abandon their ambitions to entrench and export their system. He opposed creating NATO, however, because he thought that it would escalate the inevitable tensions and militarize them. He also thought it unnecessary. The Soviet Union’s dysfunctional economic system would hobble its global ambitions and eventually cause it to collapse under its own weight. All the US needed to do in the meantime was block efforts at expansion—his doctrine of containment—and build up prosperous, democratic countries in the West. Arguing with communist leaders was pointless. The battle that mattered was for the hearts and minds of the Russian people. The best way to win it was to build enviably flourishing political and economic systems in Western countries. As would be true half a century later, Kennan’s arguments fell on deaf ears.3

Geopolitical Terrain at the End of the Cold War

After the Berlin Wall came down in late 1989, growing momentum for German reunification forced questions about NATO’s future onto the agenda. Changing events on the ground recast debates about options, as politicians scrambled to keep up with accelerating public sentiment in both East and West Germany in support of unification. Supermajorities in their parliaments voted for it on September 20, 1990, and the German Democratic Republic went out of business two weeks later. Only months before, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev had been debating with West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and the post–World War II occupation powers about whether they should accept reunification before NATO’s future was settled. But momentum soon sidelined the debates, and the final agreement on Germany they all scrambled to sign said nothing about NATO’s future outside Germany. It didn’t even specify which NATO troops or weapons could be deployed in the former German Democratic Republic. These questions would be revisited multiple times in subsequent years.

Gorbachev’s cooperation was needed because in 1990 the Soviets still had some 338,000 troops, 4,200 tanks, 1,300 aircraft, and 180 rocket systems stationed in the GDR—artifacts of the occupation agreement signed at the end of World War II. They also had nuclear weapons there and in several other Warsaw Pact countries (the pact would be disbanded the following year), as well as in Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan—all of which would soon become independent countries. Gorbachev’s bargaining position was weak—his economy was imploding and his political world was disintegrating—but with some 35,000 nuclear warheads in his arsenal, it was vital for the US to secure Soviet cooperation. This was not a time for bluff-calling, let alone confrontation.4

And the Russians were cooperating. Both Gorbachev and then, after the USSR ceased to exist in December 1991, Russian President Boris Yeltsin were both remarkably forthcoming. Gorbachev signed the START I nuclear arms reduction treaty in March of 1991. Yeltsin moved quickly to implement its requirements and began energetically on START II, which sought to shrink both the US and Russian nuclear arsenals by 60 percent from their Cold War peaks. He went out of his way to brief US Secretary of State James Baker on how he would retain command and control authority during and after the transition, even at one point sharing details on Soviet nuclear launch protocols and how they would change. There are no more closely held nuclear military secrets.5

Yeltsin’s openness and willingness to trust Baker in these ways reflected and enhanced the strongly pro-Western sentiment then prevailing in Russia, as did his repeated assurances to Baker and Kohl that he would move rapidly to replace the remnants of the Soviet system with democracy and a market-based economy. He removed Russian weapons and forces from all the former Warsaw Pact countries on schedule, never did or said anything to suggest that Russia might try to regain control of any of them, and signed a series of cooperative agreements with NATO for joint management of regional security threats. Even the decision to retain docking rights for the Soviet naval fleet in Sevastopol was sanctified by a twenty-year agreement with Ukraine, which led to the Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation, and Partnership, signed in Kyiv in May 1997.6 As with his efforts to implement market reforms—the so-called shock therapy pushed by Western experts—Yeltsin tried to create irreversible facts on the ground as fast as possible.

This transformation was neither easy nor painless. In hindsight, it is doubtful that the broad consensus in the West on the merits of shock therapy was right. Countries like Poland that established market economies overnight did not perform better than those like the Czech Republic that reformed gradually. The two best-performing postcommunist economies in the world are China and Vietnam. Both introduced market relations gradually, Vietnam sector by sector starting with agriculture and foreign firms, and China by growing the private sector alongside the state sector. Russia took the other path. Yeltsin leaped enthusiastically onto the shock therapy bandwagon, with Western leaders and commentators cheering from the rafters. Arguably, he had little choice. The Soviet command economy was so widely discredited and collapsing so fast that perestroika (literally “restructuring”) became less a cautious reform, as Gorbachev had envisaged, than the opening of floodgates.7

What was inarguable, and what no one disputed at the time, was that shock therapy would produce widespread pain for millions of Russians. Indeed, this was so widely understood that some shock therapy advocates maintained that it should be accomplished before moving on to political reform, lest economically strapped voters use their new democratic rights to throw sand in the wheels of reform or even reverse it. But that was not a real option either, because the Soviet political system was as widely discredited and disintegrating as fast as the command economy. Many features of the new political order—including basics like national boundaries—were yet to be hammered out, but it was obvious even to the casual visitor that the highly mobilized former Soviet citizens in Russia, who had shown themselves capable of taking to Moscow’s streets in the tens of thousands, would no longer accept authoritarian rule. This came as a surprise to many Western commentators who had not fully grasped that although the Soviet Union had a strong Communist Party, it had a weak state. Once the party lost credibility with the population and even the confidence of its own leaders, the Soviet state turned out to be a paper tiger. Those pushing market reform had no choice but to pursue it in a chaotic new democracy that would be a work in progress at best.8

Misreading the Stakes in the Soviet Transition

That much was obvious, but the first President Bush failed to show the farsighted creativity in dealing with the Soviet collapse that he had displayed when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Some commentators have faulted him for flatly rejecting all proposals—from Gorbachev, German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, French President François Mitterrand, and even his own Secretary of State, James Baker—for NATO to consider leaving, or at least denuclearizing, West Germany as a condition for Moscow’s agreeing to its unification with East Germany. “To hell with that!” was Bush’s response.

Those critiques of Bush miss the mark. When the momentum for unification began accelerating in the summer of 1990, no one knew that the Soviet Union would collapse eighteen months later, making the end of the Cold War a serious possibility. Many in Western capitals worried that hard-liners might force Gorbachev to backtrack on perestroika or even remove him from power. His celebrity status in the West—he would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October—was not matched at home. His popularity was plummeting amid snowballing food and consumer shortages that led to panic buying, spiraling inflation and unemployment, proliferating black markets, huge protests, and even shots fired at him on the Revolution Day parade in November of that year.9

The backlash against Gorbachev showed up in Soviet negotiations with the West. Hard-liners like KGB head Vladimir Kryuchkov, Central Committee member Valentin Falin, and decorated military veteran Sergey Akhromeyev astonished their German and American counterparts by openly opposing concessions Gorbachev was offering. Western concerns about his grip on power would be vindicated by a coup attempt in August 1991 that might well have succeeded had Boris Yeltsin—whom the plotters also planned to arrest—not faced down the insurrection by climbing onto a tank to denounce it outside the Russian Parliament building. In the summer of 1990, it seemed likely that some other Eastern European countries would soon follow the GDR out of the Warsaw Pact but not that the pact itself would disintegrate, and all bets were off about the Soviet Union’s future. Nor, given the Nazi past, was there much enthusiasm in European capitals for the idea of a unified Germany that might be untethered from the Western powers and tempted to develop its own nuclear weapons. No American president would then have contemplated significant changes in the NATO alliance, especially its role in Germany.

But things were very different a year and a half later. By then, there was no Soviet Union or Warsaw Pact, and no danger of either returning. The command economies were obviously defunct and rapidly disappearing. Boris Yeltsin was in control of the new Russia and moving rapidly and transparently to implement far-reaching economic and political reforms and reduce the nuclear threat. In the first half of 1992, he secured unified control of the former USSR’s nuclear weapons while also decommissioning large parts of the arsenal and announcing that Russia would no longer target the United States. He could not have been more cooperative. Bush acknowledged as much when they met at Camp David in February and agreed to sign a joint statement declaring the Cold War to be over and that their two countries were no longer adversaries. Unlike his predecessor, Yeltsin understood that wholesale transformation of Russia’s economic and political systems was vital not only to the country’s future, but also to refashioning its relations with the West. And as with Gorbachev before him, it was obvious that Yeltsin would soon confront reactionary headwinds. He needed help delivering tangible benefits for the Russian people if he was going to implement lasting change.10

At this, Bush failed spectacularly. Indicative of his myopia was his decision to side with Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady—against the advice of Baker and even some neoconservatives like Richard Perle and Charles Krauthammer—in refusing to forgive Soviet-era debt. At the time, the US government held only $2.8 billion of the $65 billion held by foreign creditors, the bulk being owed to other Paris Club governments and the London Club of private investors. However, Germany—which was heavily exposed—needed American help to ensure that Yeltsin would follow through on Gorbachev’s commitment to remove Russian troops and military assets from the former GDR. It wouldn’t have taken much arm-twisting to convince the other creditors, all of whom had strong interests in Yeltsin’s success, to follow suit if the Bush administration had led by example. Even forgiving the US’s $2.8 billion would have helped Yeltsin face down the antireform forces that began congealing as soon as hyperinflation exploded after he abolished price controls within days of the Soviet Union’s demise. Yet the Bush administration didn’t even try, even though other distressed countries were receiving major debt write-downs at the same time. Yeltsin was obliged not only to keep servicing the Soviet debt, as the US Treasury Department was demanding, but even to assume responsibility for some tsarist-era debt that Lenin had repudiated in 1918—lest he jeopardize US grain shipments on which Russia was critically reliant that winter.11

Bush’s shortsightedness became the pattern for the remainder of his administration and the Clinton one that followed. Their modus operandi was to eke out last-minute assistance when Yeltsin was facing one imminent catastrophe or another, but little more. Instead of this dollar-short-and-day-late approach, what was obviously needed, as none other than former US President Richard Nixon argued in a memo that was widely shared with journalists in March 1992, was massive, transformative help. Nixon invoked the American failure at Versailles after World War I and the visionary leadership Bush had just shown in Kuwait to argue that Bush had a historic opportunity to seize the moment and an obligation to do for Russia what the Marshall Plan had done for Europe after World War II.12

Nixon had no doubt that it was in Russia, not Eastern Europe, that “the final battle of the Cold War will be fought.” Lauding Yeltsin as the country’s most pro-Western leader ever and its first democratically elected one, he detailed the hard changes Yeltsin had embraced and that Gorbachev had refused to contemplate: risking his life to defend the democratic transition against a reactionary coup; agreeing to the departure of the Baltics and then the dissolution of the USSR; ending aid to other communist regimes, notably Cuba; exceeding the cuts in nuclear weapons that Bush had proposed; and supporting what everyone knew would be painful free-market reforms at home—including freeing up the price system, decollectivizing agriculture, and privatizing state assets. Nixon excoriated Bush for providing Yeltsin with little more than “pathetically inadequate” photo-ops, leftover food and medical supplies from the Gulf War, and a handful of Peace Corps volunteers—“generous action if the target of our aid were a small country like Upper Volta but mere tokenism if applied to Russia, a nation of almost 200 million people covering one seventh of the world’s landmass.” Instead, Bush should step up with food and medical aid to get Russia through the critical months until the economic reforms began working; take advantage of the unprecedented pro-American sentiment in Russia to send thousands of Western managers to help restructure the economy; pressure international financial institutions to provide tens of billions of dollars for currency stabilization; restructure Soviet-era debt and suspend debt servicing; open Western markets to Russian exports; and coordinate large-scale government and private-sector assistance as was done in Western Europe after World War II. Without immediate help on this scale, Nixon insisted, in a few months, backlash would set in against the market reforms and their Western advocates. Time was of the essence.

And the costs of missing the opportunity were hard to overstate. Arms reduction would founder, ending the peace dividend, and the opportunity to get beyond Cold War antagonisms would be lost. But if Yeltsin succeeded, Nixon argued—invoking the political science finding that democracies do not fight one another—future generations need not face the fear of armed conflict that had hovered throughout the Cold War. And a free-market Russia at peace with the West would create opportunities for billions of dollars in trade that would produce millions of jobs in the US, just as rebuilding the European economies had done after World War II. Nixon conceded that making this case would be challenging with a sluggish US economy in an election year, but he noted that Bush had displayed the requisite leadership skills in building support for the Gulf War two years earlier. Now was the time to do it again, when the costs of failure and the opportunities offered by success were immeasurably greater.

Nixon’s invoking of the Marshall Plan was salutary. The Truman administration had encountered rough sledding to convince Congress to enact it in April 1948, when—like Bush in 1992—the president was facing an uphill battle for reelection, and then to keep funding it after the US economy went into recession at the end of the year. Yet Truman and his secretary of state, George Marshall, mounted a massive publicity campaign that overcame considerable skepticism on Capitol Hill, with the House eventually approving the Economic Cooperation Act by a vote of 329 to 74 and the Senate approving it 69 to 17. In this they were helped along by the strongly positive endorsement of the House Select Committee on Foreign Aid, on which Nixon—then a young navy veteran and freshman conservative Republican congressman—sat. They convinced lawmakers that the rapid deterioration of the European economies in 1946 and 1947 risked a repeat of the 1920s, when Europe had become engulfed by communist and fascist uprisings with catastrophic results over the next decade. The logic, as Marshall explained in a Harvard commencement speech in June 1947, was that the US should invest in restoring health to the European economies, “without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace.” Nixon understood that the West faced a comparable challenge with Russia early in 1992—not of a return to communism, but of Yeltsin’s being succeeded by an “aggressive Russian nationalist” who would threaten the emerging post–Cold War peace and the possibilities for prosperity that came with it. Truman had defied the electoral risks and won reelection in 1948. Bush rejected Nixon’s clarion call but lost anyway in 1992.13

The Marshall Plan had been expensive. The US spent $13.3 billion on aid to Europe and another $2.2 billion on the economic reconstruction of Japan from 1948 to 1952, for a combined cost of $15.5 billion—about $200 billion in 2025 dollars. (Between 1991 and 2000, by contrast—when the US economy averaged 3.4 percent growth, there was no recession, and Clinton was paying off the Reagan and Bush deficits to take the budget into surplus for the first time since the 1960s—the US spent $6.2 billion on bilateral aid to Russia, or about $12 billion in 2025 dollars. That was 6 percent of the Marshall Plan commitment and 0.15 percent of the $8 trillion the US would go on to spend on the Global War on Terror, a drop in the bucket by any measure.) Bush had no intention of committing resources on anything like this scale, even though the Marshall Plan’s vital role in fostering thriving, peaceful economies across Western Europe was widely acknowledged. It had won Marshall the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953 and is often cited by historians as one of the main reasons they rank Truman in the top echelon of American presidents.14

Marshall’s logic was surely all the more pertinent when the vanquished adversary possessed forty-five thousand nuclear weapons, many located in Eastern Europe or spread across four Soviet republics on the brink of independence, and over which control was uncertain. The dangers were not just of inadvertent deployment or nuclear blackmail by any of the republics or by third parties that might gain access through them, but also of proliferation. Rumors abounded of former Soviet officials who were searching for opportunities to sell nuclear weapons or the ingredients to make them, whether to governments or nonstate actors. There was also the danger of renewed conflict among parts of the collapsing Soviet empire if hard-liners gained the upper hand again in Moscow.15

These considerations made the case for a massive US investment to ensure stability in the post-Soviet countries overwhelming. “In victory, magnanimity,” Churchill had declared at the end of World War II. Despite his uncompromising insistence on unconditional surrender of the Nazi regime, he was a champion of the Marshall Plan, without which, he wrote, “Europe might well have foundered into ruin and misery in which the seeds of Communism might have grown at a deadly pace.” Kennan, who helped draft the Marshall Plan, agreed. They had lived through the consequences of ignoring the plight of defeated adversaries three decades earlier and had no desire to do so again.16

It wasn’t just Nixon urging Bush to make major commitments to Yeltsin’s Russia in early 1992. Dennis Ross, director of Policy Planning at the State Department, also pushed for an extensive program, and there was considerable pressure from Capitol Hill to act boldly—including from conservative stalwarts like North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms, who promised support for an ambitious program. Bush could have drawn on such commitments to create momentum for action had he chosen to, but instead of deploying the leadership skill he had used to move a divided Congress to military action in the Middle East the previous year, he dragged his feet. It was not until Bill Clinton started attacking him on the campaign trail for doing so little that Bush finally announced $24 billion of multilateral support funded by the G7 nations, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. The pledge raised expectations in Moscow, where reaction against reformist Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar’s policies was solidifying—fueled by the dire economic conditions. But much of the package turned out to be smoke and mirrors, and some of the aid—including a vital $6 billion stabilization fund—never materialized. The US contribution turned out mostly to be grants to buy American food products. What did come arrived in dribs and drabs after Gaidar had already been replaced by Viktor Chernomyrdin, who curtailed much of the reform agenda.17

By the start of the Clinton administration, supporting economic transformation in Russia was becoming a much more formidable task. Shortages and inflation had emboldened Russian critics, who portrayed Yeltsin as a gullible purveyor of self-serving Western advice. The reformers had been sidelined, and Chernomyrdin was backpedaling, facilitating corrupt takeovers of former state assets by oligarchs, restoring subsidies to defunct industries, and otherwise compromising with hard-liners to prevent a full transition to a competitive market economy. The confrontations escalated into a constitutional crisis in 1993 when Yeltsin, after ordering the army to open fire on the parliament building, dissolved the Duma and called new elections. Right-wing populists led by the ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky won the most seats, and the resurgent communists—against whom Yeltsin would fight a rearguard action for the rest of his presidency—also made a strong showing. The only thing that could have changed the dynamic was a visibly successful economic transformation. Helmut Kohl, who also talked up the Marshall Plan analogy to the new US president, understood this, as did others, including the British ambassador to Moscow, Sir Roderick Braithwaite, who insisted that the most important task was to supply what was needed to foster a viable democracy in Russia.18

Some members of the incoming Clinton administration understood that major infusions of Western capital would be needed to stabilize the new Russian economy and jump-start economic reforms, notably Treasury officials Larry Summers and David Lipton. Clinton agreed initially, promising much greater commitments. But once it became clear that he would not invest the political capital needed to seek congressional support on the scale they thought was required, they turned their attention to multilateral institutions. Summers had some success in convincing the IMF to relax assistance conditions that Russia could not possibly meet, but, as happened during the Bush years, key components of promised assistance were delayed and vital stabilization funds never materialized. The bulk of Clinton’s bilateral assistance to Russia was given with an eye to shoring up Yeltsin at moments of crisis. Almost half of his largest commitment of $1.6 billion in 1994 was for food assistance, $700 million of which was credits to buy American food. These were notably larger commitments than Bush had made, but they did nothing to help Russia move toward a diversified market economy that might sustain democratic politics in the medium term.19

Doing more for Russia would have been a tough sell in American politics after 1994, when Yeltsin began a brutal military campaign in Chechnya and the Republicans took control of the US Congress. It would also have been harder to accomplish on the ground. Following a Communist Party surge in the 1995 legislative elections (it won more seats in the Duma than the next three largest parties combined), Yeltsin only avoided all but certain defeat in the 1996 presidential contest with massive infusions of cash from the oligarchs in return for fire-sale giveaways of state assets that increased his dependence on them and accelerated the country’s move toward gangster capitalism.20 It might have been too late to reverse these changes after the mid-1990s, but the Clinton administration could at least have stuck by a political equivalent of the Hippocratic oath and avoided doing harm. Its approach to NATO enlargement failed even at that.

Misreading the Security Stakes

In June 1997, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was invited to speak at Harvard’s graduation. By then, senior figures in the Clinton administration had convinced themselves that enlarging NATO into the former Soviet bloc countries was in America’s interest. To build public support for such a plan, Albright hoped to ride the coattails of Marshall’s famous Harvard speech half a century earlier. Declaring that the administration was “striving to fulfill” Marshall’s vision, she extolled NATO as a defensive alliance while insisting that it “did not regard any state as its adversary, certainly not a democratic and reforming Russia.” Yet she never addressed the question that emanated from Moscow: If not Russia, which adversary was the alliance defending against? Russian suspicions might have been contestable if the country could plausibly have aspired to join NATO, but by then Yeltsin’s requests to do exactly that had been rebuffed too often for anyone in the Kremlin or the Duma to take the prospect seriously, regardless of what Albright, her deputy and Russia hand Strobe Talbott, or others said in public.21

From the start, Clinton had been confident that Yeltsin’s need for Western financial support meant that Russian objections to NATO expansion could be bought off. As early as 1994, the most aggressive enlargement hawks, such as Talbott and Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke, were arguing that even compensation would be unnecessary. Russian leaders should instead be made to see NATO enlargement as an inevitable process that they were powerless to stop, a sentiment that was soon echoed by Jimmy Carter’s former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who insisted—without explaining why—that NATO expansion was an “incomparably higher” imperative than managing relations with Russia. Events would prove the predictions made by Holbrooke, Talbott, and Brzezinski partly right. Yeltsin’s government was too weak and too dependent on the US to do anything except complain at each step and then back down. The administration’s real challenge that Albright was trying to address at Harvard was skepticism at home.22

Invoking Marshall’s Harvard speech to legitimate NATO enlargement fifty years later betrayed willful blindness to his motivation. His goal had been to avoid replicating the errors of Versailles when an economically decimated and militarily isolated Germany was left floundering while the victors rebuilt themselves and crafted the postwar order. It was as if Marshall had proposed eking out financial assistance to a defeated Germany in dribs and drabs after 1945 while hemming it in with a powerful military alliance. Marshall’s purpose had been to supply Germans with the tools and incentives to forsake their historical proclivity for military adventurism by helping them prosper in an economy that was well integrated with the West and under a security umbrella that would buttress their territorial integrity. Taking the comparison seriously at the end of the Cold War would have meant concentrating first and centrally on Russia, as Nixon had said five years earlier, not least because of Russia’s nuclear capabilities. The obvious priority was to ensure that anti-Western hostility would not be rekindled there as had happened in Germany during the 1930s. If NATO was going to expand to the east after the Cold War, the first country to be included should indeed have been the new Russia.

There was an inescapable tension between focusing on Russia as a dangerously vulnerable defeated adversary and the aspirations of the former Warsaw Pact countries to integrate themselves into the West by joining NATO. This tension was present from the start, but it became manifest when Vice President Albert Gore visited Moscow in December 1994 to reassure Yeltsin that the various pronouncements that had been made about NATO enlargement would not happen before the 1996 Russian elections. On his return, Gore met with Clinton and his defense team to clarify the priorities. The majority view in the room was that “right” was on the side of Eastern European countries that were keen to join NATO as soon as possible. Deferring expansion until later in the decade was declared to be “not feasible.” This meant that the remaining diplomatic task was what Gore had realized was impossible: convincing the Russians that expansion was not directed against them. The only dissenting voice was Defense Secretary Bill Perry, who believed this priority to be badly wrongheaded. Russia was the former adversary that could become one again. Doing what was needed to get START I and START II implemented and then to secure additional arms reductions should trump the desires of the Eastern Europeans. He almost resigned over the decision but ended up staying to try to slow NATO expansion.23

In her definitive history of NATO in the 1990s, Not One Inch, Mary Sarotte portrays this as a tragic choice between two compelling but incompatible national security imperatives. The Clinton administration developed a creative solution to the dilemma early on, the Partnership for Peace (PfP), a cooperative security organization made up of NATO countries and former Warsaw Pact members. The brainchild of Joint Chiefs Chairman John Shalikashvili, PfP was intended to show that the former Warsaw Pact countries could cooperate with NATO members to manage regional security crises—the most pressing being the deteriorating situation in the former Yugoslavia. Initially, it did so, yielding the gratifying precedent of NATO and Russian forces working together to defuse a regional conflict. Beyond this, PfP had the merit of temporizing on NATO enlargement. Countries would be told that constructive participation in PfP was a way station on the road to possible NATO membership, making it unnecessary to confront the impact enlargement might have on dealing with Russia as the principal nuclear adversary. The US could continue to work with an enthusiastically committed Yeltsin to retrieve remaining stray nukes, particularly from Ukraine, ratify and implement START I and START II (which would reduce both nuclear stockpiles by 60 percent), and get going on START III as well as on new limitations on chemical, biological, and even conventional armed forces. Yeltsin grasped the larger picture, welcoming PfP as “a stroke of genius” that would dissipate growing anger in Russia in response to the rumblings about NATO expansion. As Clinton said, creating PfP would avoid drawing a new line across Europe further to the east.24

On Sarotte’s account, Clinton undermined PfP’s efficacy early on, however, by proceeding with NATO enlargement willy-nilly. The pressure came from multiple sources. There were trenchant enlargement advocates in the administration, notably Tony Lake, Richard Holbrooke, Strobe Talbott, and, eventually, Secretary of State Warren Christopher. They disliked PfP just because it deflected pressure for enlargement, so they sought to sideline it, if not scuttle it completely. Pressure also came from aspiring NATO members, especially Polish President Lech Wałęsa and Czech leader Václav Havel, who enjoyed standing in the West as heroic former dissidents. They were induced to join PfP only after getting back-channel assurances that they would be fast-tracked into the alliance. There were military contractors like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon who coveted lucrative contracts from new NATO members. There were staunch Republican advocates of NATO enlargement in Washington, who wrote the policy into the Contract with America, their manifesto for the 1994 midterms in which they won control of the House of Representatives for the first time since the 1950s. Their victory spooked Clinton, who was keenly aware that he might need Polish American and Czech American votes in districts he had won narrowly in 1992 for his reelection in 1996. So he got off the fence and backed the enlargement advocates in his administration by declaring that whether NATO would expand was no longer in question; it was a matter of when and how. This left PfP on life support as a temporizing device that would satisfy Russia.25

And then there were the Europeans. Helmut Kohl, who had warned early and often of the dangers of humiliating Yeltsin with aggressive NATO enlargement, nonetheless welcomed adding Central and Eastern European countries because it would take Germany off the front line between NATO and Russia. One of his advisors put this bluntly, declaring that it would be better “to defend Germany in Poland than in Germany.” Kohl also favored NATO expansion to take pressure off the European Union quickly to accept Eastern and Central European aspirants. Likewise with French President Mitterrand, who, like Kohl, had been an earlier advocate of either replacing NATO with a broader pan-European security organization or at least submerging it in a larger entity to avoid replicating Cold War dynamics. He saw value in opening Western institutions to former Soviet bloc countries, but like other EU leaders, he balked at the expensive agricultural subsidies and associated costs of admitting them to the union. They preferred NATO enlargement as the cheaper path to integration.26

Sarotte makes a compelling case that pursuing enlargement undermined PfP as an instrument to stave off the tension between the incompatible imperatives, to respond to Eastern Europeans who wanted to join NATO, and to manage security relations with Yeltsin’s Russia. She is less convincing, however, that the first of these was a strategic imperative for the US at all. There were many inside and outside the administration in Washington who, like Bill Perry and his eventual successor as defense secretary, Ash Carter, doubted either that it was a strategic imperative at all or, if it was, that it was anywhere near as important as securing major arms reductions and managing security relations with the new Russia for the long run. Much of the time, proponents of NATO enlargement proceeded as if its desirability was self-evident and shifted the focus to other matters. They insisted that the Russians had no right to veto expansion, regardless of what Baker, Genscher, and others might have said to Gorbachev in 1990, and they noted that the Helsinki agreement signed by the Soviets in 1975 recognized the right of all countries to choose their own alliances.27

As arguments about the merits of enlargement, these were non sequiturs. It was obviously true that Soviet agreement to enlargement was required only for Germany, where the Soviets had jurisdiction as a post–World War II occupying power, and also that no agreement about Germany would bind other former Warsaw Pact countries in the future. But that implies nothing about what strategic purpose enlargement might serve for the US, if any. Likewise with affirming, as they repeatedly did, that every country was free to choose its own alliance partners. Agreeing that people are free to marry whomever they want doesn’t mean you have to marry someone just because they want to marry you. Placating Wałęsa or Havel with a promise of NATO membership in return for their joining PfP might have made Clinton—who, as Sarotte says, always liked to “bring everyone along”—feel good.28 But that was hardly a reason to do it, not least when it undermined a central purpose behind PfP. Neither Polish nor Czech participation was essential to PfP’s success. Russian participation was. Most likely, the others would have joined anyway if the US had continued insisting that there was no other path to eventual NATO membership.

The Europeans turned out to be more clearheaded realists than anyone who prevailed in the Clinton administration. The Germans’ preference for adding members to NATO to keep themselves off the front line was manifestly self-serving, and the decision to reject early admission of any former Soviet bloc states to the EU in favor of countries like Austria, Finland, and Sweden made it clear that the main European concern was existing members’ interests regardless of what new aspirants might want. It was cheaper, for them, to integrate the Eastern Europeans into Europe by expanding NATO—particularly because the US would bear much of the cost. This began with the NATO Enlargement Facilitation Act in 1996, in which the US committed $60 million to help prepare Poland, the Czechs, and Hungary to join the alliance. Despite considerable debate about the eventual cost, it soon became clear that the only way to include them by 1999 at a price American lawmakers would stomach involved retaining Warsaw Pact armaments that could not easily be integrated into NATO systems. This further antagonized the Russians. Even so, the price tag for adding these countries would run to at least $30 billion over the first decade and a half, most of which would end up being shouldered by the US.29

What of running scared of swing-state American voters with Eastern European heritages and pro-enlargement hawks on Capitol Hill? Clinton’s freedom to maneuver on that front was limited until November 1996, but once he was reelected, the domestic electoral constraint went away. That was before the administration’s full-court press to win public support in the run-up to the July 1997 Madrid NATO Summit, where invitations to Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic would be issued. Moreover, many conservatives in Congress and the broader national security community came out in trenchant opposition once the enlargement plan became common knowledge, starting with George Kennan, who wrote in The New York Times in February 1997 that expansion would be “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post–Cold War era.” It would jeopardize arms reduction by restoring the Cold War dynamic to US-Russian relations; it would “inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion”; it would retard the progress of Russian democracy; and it would “impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”30

Kennan was not alone. Two-thirds of the right-of-center Council on Foreign Relations were polled as opposed to enlargement, as were dozens of then-current and former senators and public officials, who signed open letters of opposition. Some skeptics believed that Eastern and Central Europe should remain nuclear-free, or that enlargement would saddle the US with responsibility for the security of countries that might get into unpredictable conflicts—not least because some had border disputes with one another. Others believed that the better course was to get rid of NATO, turn European security over to the Europeans, and refocus America on its other global interests, notably in Asia. Others saw the enlargement agenda as an ill-considered effort for an obsolete alliance, led by cheerleaders like its secretary general, Javier Solana, to find a new mission that would give it a new lease on life. In a widely quoted op-ed, Brent Scowcroft, former national security advisor under George H. W. Bush, and Democrat Sam Nunn, former chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, argued that taking on new members that did not meet NATO military criteria would weaken the alliance. Like Kennan, they warned that it would undermine normalization with Russia, scuttling arms control. “The central failure of Versailles,” they recalled—echoing Nixon’s warning to Bush—“lay in the fatal miscalculation of how to deal with a demoralized former adversary. That, above all, is the error we must not repeat.”31

Clinton never engaged the concerns that enlargement would undermine arms reduction and provoke a nationalist response in Russia, except to dismiss them at one point as “silly.” From 1994 onward, the administration sought to redirect debate about the merits of enlargement to topics that took the question as settled. Creating momentum to get started with expansion in 1999 exemplified this tactic. It focused on that date after Solana declared in 1997 that the fiftieth anniversary of NATO’s founding was too good a PR opportunity to miss, and enlargement came to be seen as a way to deliver a political win for a beleaguered Clinton after the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke the following January. The reality that, even with substantial subsidies, no aspirant could meet NATO membership criteria by 1999 deflected attention to yet other questions: Which criteria could be waived? How many countries could be added? Everyone had their pet candidates. The French wanted Romania and Bulgaria. Albright, born in Prague, wanted the Czech Republic. The Polish Brzezinski threw spitballs at PfP from the sidelines and lobbied for Poland. Talbott was so insistent about adding the Baltics that this became known as the Talbott Principle in the White House—though no one explained what turned an intense desire into a principle. And once it became clear that the British drew the line at Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, the conversation pointed to a new set of questions: How could the White House sell those particular three on Capitol Hill, to allies, and to others in the government who wanted different or additional countries? The need to keep everyone on board made it all but inevitable that the price for adding any initial group would be adding others later.32

When Clinton signed the formal admission of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic to NATO on April 23, 1999, declaring that doing so erased the “arbitrary line” that had divided Europe until that day, he was being disingenuous or worse. If no more countries were added, it would simply be shifting the arbitrary line to the east, an event he had repeatedly declared he wanted to avoid. But by then, he had been vocal for months about his “robust open door” policy on future expansion. In case there was any lingering doubt, NATO publicly welcomed the interest of nine additional countries, including the three Baltics that were former Soviet republics, at its 1999 summit in Washington, DC. This made it clear that the line would keep moving toward Russia, and that it would even intrude into former Soviet territory.33

By the time of the Washington summit, it had also long been clear that there could be no question of Russia’s joining either NATO or the EU. It was also clear that the US was unwilling to accept limits on the personnel that could be deployed in new member countries or on Article 5 guarantees for future NATO members, such as Norway’s prohibition of nuclear weapons on its territory and of NATO troops except during wartime. In effect, the US was insisting on the right to do exactly what the Soviets had tried to do by installing nuclear weapons in Cuba in 1962. Poland does, after all, share a border with the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad Oblast. Perhaps aware of this disturbing parallel, even Lech Wałęsa—the most ardent of Russia skeptics and expansion advocates—had indicated in 1995 that he was open to Norwegian-style conditions on Poland’s accession. Holbrooke and Christopher brushed this offer aside as a poison pill that might limit future NATO deployments. They wouldn’t even accept maintaining existing ceilings on weapons, ensuring that as NATO expanded, Russia would face an ever-growing “defensive” military force moving inexorably toward its territory and increasingly close to major cities such as Moscow and, especially, St. Petersburg. The only concession they ever made was to declare at the signing of the NATO-Russia Founding Act in 1997 that they had no current plans to station NATO forces in the newly added countries.

Was there a plausible way for the Russians to see this start to enlargement in benign terms? NATO remains a military alliance geared to protecting its members from attack, but perhaps a case could have been made that since the Cold War was over by then, it was evolving into an international peacekeeping organization that would work with the UN Security Council to prevent international aggression. Any such claim became an impossibly tough sell in March 1999, however, when NATO bombed Kosovo without Security Council authorization, despite no NATO member—or any other country—having been attacked or threatened. NATO’s goal was to protect the Kosovar Albanian population, who were suffering ethnic cleansing at the hands of the Serbian majority. Unsurprisingly, these events took US-Russian relations to a new low amid opinion polls showing that 93 percent of Russians disapproved of the bombing. Yeltsin suspended participation in the Permanent Joint Russia-NATO Council, and the Duma refused to ratify START II, obliterating the last remnants of momentum on arms control. Reformers like Yegor Gaidar and former Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev who favored openness to the West had by then been marginalized by Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov and other hard-liners. As the first round of expansion went forward, they could do nothing except lament from the sidelines at the possibilities that had been squandered.34

The Clinton administration was tactically adept at exploiting Russian weakness and devising ways to co-opt or marginalize objectors at home and abroad to enlarge NATO all the way to Russia’s border. But it never answered the skeptics who wanted to know how and why growing NATO served America’s strategic interests. Nor did it seriously consider the chickens that would come home to roost when future Russian leaders found themselves less dependent on the West, about whom Gorbachev had cautioned in 1990 when he found himself powerless to prevent NATO’s initial move into East Germany: “You cannot humiliate a nation and believe that there will be no consequences.” Oblivious to such considerations, the Clinton administration enlarged NATO in 1999 and set it on a path to keep growing, regardless of Russian objections, for one simple reason: They did it because they could.35

NATO and Putin

NATO’s 1999 enlargement and its action in Kosovo dealt a fatal blow to the Clinton administration’s relations with Yeltsin’s Kremlin. Reeling from the economic collapse that had forced him to plead for an IMF bailout the previous year, Yeltsin remained embittered for the rest of his premiership. But his successor, Vladimir Putin, began by charting a different and more constructive course. As prime minister, he had tried in 1999 to defuse tensions over Kosovo in conversations with Talbott and Clinton’s national security advisor, Sandy Berger. He had distanced himself from Russian efforts to interfere there and downplayed hard-line Kremlin rhetoric as preelection skirmishing. In his first meeting with Bill Clinton, he said that—unlike the Kremlin hawks—he was open to preserving the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972 despite congressional Republican moves to authorize a US missile defense system. And unlike Yeltsin, Putin remained silent about the initial round of NATO enlargement. In February of 2000, while still acting president, he told NATO Secretary General George Robertson, “I want to resume relations with NATO. Step by step, but I want to do it.”36

Putin’s reversion to Cold War attitudes that began in the mid-2000s is all the more notable in view of how he started out. On ascending to the presidency in 2000, he quickly revived the defunct NATO-Russia cooperative process, created a streamlined NATO-Russia Council, launched collaboration on a host of issues from counterterrorism to proliferation to maritime search and rescue, and began lobbying for Russia to join the alliance. Within two weeks of the 9/11 attacks, he promised to share intelligence on al-Qaeda and the Taliban with the US, opened Russian airspace to the US, agreed to give military assistance to the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, and, most remarkably of all, agreed to have American troops in central Asia—an unprecedented move that went over like a lead balloon with his own military establishment. Nor did he make much fuss, initially, at the first round of NATO enlargement that took place on his watch. Evidently, he was probing for the possibility of a reset.37

Putin’s early interest in NATO was matched by lobbying for Russian economic integration with Europe. In the mid-1990s, when still a translator for St. Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak, Putin had responded positively to Helmut Kohl’s remark that he couldn’t imagine Europe without Russia. Kohl was not alone. In 1992, British Prime Minister John Major had urged the EU to “widen its imagination” and admit Russia, a move he thought would “banish utterly” the threat of nuclear war. Ten years later, Italian Prime minister Silvio Berlusconi was still calling for Russia to join the EU in the wake of newly elected President Putin’s declaration that “no matter where our people live, in the Far East or in the south, we are Europeans.” Everything Putin did in those years implied that he saw Russian integration into NATO and Europe as feasible and desirable, from openly lobbying for inclusion into Western institutions to working to harmonize Russian and EU economic regulations. As Joe Biden, then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, put it, “No Russian leader since Peter the Great has cast his lot as much with the West as Putin has.”38

Two developments changed Putin’s outlook. One was the second Bush administration’s aggressive unilateralism in Iraq. It wasn’t just anger at the toppling of a regime that had no connection to the 9/11 attacks, even though—as Putin warned Bush multiple times—that move was exceedingly unpopular in Russia. It provoked vitriolic anti-American demonstrations in major Russian cities and sparked backlash from Kremlin hard-liners who complained that Putin’s cooperation had yielded few benefits. Russia had not been admitted to the World Trade Organization. US trade restrictions had not been lifted, and foreign direct investment in Russia was falling. Another source of Russian anger was that the country held billions of dollars of Iraqi debt and was close to sealing a $40 billion bilateral trade deal that was jeopardized when the US toppled the regime. George W. Bush, who had welcomed NATO expansion “eastward and southward, northward and onward” in June of 2001, was tone-deaf to Russian concerns.39

Like the Kosovo bombing four years earlier, the Iraq invasion lacked Security Council authorization. As such, it undermined the premise of Putin’s overtures: that with the Cold War over, Russia could aspire to navigate successfully in a multilateral world regulated by international institutions. Bush’s actions made clear that the New World Order his father had sought to establish twelve years earlier was defunct. Instead, the US would act as a global hegemon when and where it chose—even in defiance of close allies like France and Germany, which also opposed the Iraq invasion. Like Yeltsin before him, Putin was discovering that cooperation was largely a one-way street. Unsurprisingly, he recalibrated. As he had warned in the same 2000 interview in which he declared that Russians were Europeans and their path forward was democratic, “if they push us away, then we will be forced to find allies and reinforce ourselves. What else can we do?”40

In December 2004, Putin declared that the recent round of NATO enlargement—in which seven countries, including the Baltics, had been added—was a negative “factor” in Russia’s relations with the West, though he was still conceding the “sovereign right” of former Soviet republics to decide whether they wanted to join NATO through the following May. He became steadily more negative after that, as the Bush administration and NATO leaders made increasingly positive statements about membership for Georgia and Ukraine. In Munich in February 2007, he condemned the Bush administration’s unilateralism as an “almost uncontained hyper use of force in international relations” that flagrantly violated international law, and he denounced NATO enlargement as a “serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust.”41

Putin was, by then, reflecting widespread Russian opinion. As US ambassador to Russia William Burns warned Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in February 2008, “In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.” Offering Ukraine a Membership Action Plan (MAP)—a to-do list for countries aspiring to join the alliance—would be seen as “throwing down the strategic gauntlet” that would put the NATO-Russia Council on life support, if not destroy it. Proceeding down that path with Georgia would likely lead Moscow to recognize the Abkhaz separatists there, creating a high risk of armed conflict between Russia and Georgia. Burns’s warnings did not prevent President Bush from going out of his way to visit Kiev in April 2008 and declare that he strongly endorsed NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. That same month, NATO’s leaders announced in Bucharest that those countries’ MAP applications would be approved, and that the alliance would “now begin a period of intensive engagement with both countries at high political level” to address outstanding issues, and would report on progress to NATO members’ foreign ministers by the end of the year.42

Burns’s prediction about Georgia came true in August, when Russian troops invaded the country in support of separatist rebels in South Ossetia. Putin also began questioning Ukraine’s independent status, given its patchwork construction in the Soviet era. He started referring to Ukraine as closely tied to Russia, if not inseparable from it, and even claimed that all former Soviet ethnicities, including Ukrainians, were Russians. After Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, he said the move had been necessary to preempt Ukraine’s joining NATO, which would have compromised Russia’s security interests in Sevastopol. “Who does NATO act against?” he demanded. “Why is it expanding towards our borders?” By 2022, the prospect of Ukraine entering NATO had become a “red line,” because Russia “cannot feel safe, develop and exist while facing a permanent threat from the territory of today’s Ukraine.”43

The other major change was that by 2003, Putin was well on his way to getting Russia’s economic house in order. He had replaced Russia’s sclerotic tax system with a 13 percent flat tax, reduced and greatly simplified the corporate tax, and begun aggressive tax enforcement. These reforms created a predictable stream of revenue and, for the first time since its creation, a solvent Russian state. He also took advantage of the global boom in oil prices aggressively to repay Russia’s staggering foreign debt. By 2003, Russia’s ratio of debt to GDP had fallen from over 100 percent at the time of its default five years earlier to less than 40 percent, lower than that of many Western countries. He was even prepaying Russia’s foreign creditors, so that the debt would be all but eliminated by 2008. By the time the global financial crisis hit, Putin’s government would largely have tamed inflation, financed the government’s budget out of current revenues, and saved $160 billion of surplus oil income in a stabilization fund that enabled Russia to avoid a major collapse.44

Putin was also on his way to reining in the oligarchs who had dominated Russian politics since they had bailed Yeltsin out of his troubles in 1996. As soon as he came to power, Putin moved quickly to get them off his back by forcing them to pay taxes and clipping their political wings. Within months, he had arrested one media magnate who was critical of his reforms, Vladimir Gusinsky, and intimidated a second, Boris Berezovsky, into fleeing the country. In early meetings with oligarchs, he made it clear that those who evaded taxation would lose their assets and possibly their freedom. By mid-2003, he was taking down Russia’s wealthiest oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, for avoiding taxes, building an oil pipeline to China that Putin opposed, and mocking Putin in the media. Khodorkovsky’s business partner was arrested for tax evasion in July, followed by Khodorkovsky himself in October—an unmistakable shot across the other oligarchs’ bows. Khodorkovsky would spend the next decade in prison. In short, by 2003, Putin was the confident leader of a resurgent economy who no longer depended on Western largesse. He had few reasons to cooperate with a US government that acted with scant regard for Russia’s interests or concerns.45 As during much of the Cold War, Washington and Moscow once again found themselves trapped in a destructive dynamic known by game theorists as a prisoners’ dilemma.

Prisoners’ dilemmas arise when two parties who share an interest in cooperating face incentives not to do so. An arms race is the classic illustration. Both sides would be secure if both chose a low-arms strategy, avoiding the race. But in deciding what to do, each side reasons that it is better off with a high-arms strategy. Each wins if its adversary picks a low-arms strategy, and each at least keeps up if its adversary picks a high-arms strategy. Opting for a low-arms strategy carries the risk of being played for a sucker if the adversary picks a high-arms strategy, the worst outcome of all. But because both sides reason in the same way, the arms race continues indefinitely. This is why game theorists say that mutual defection is the dominant strategy in a prisoner’s dilemma. It loads the dice against a cooperative outcome.

One way out of this dynamic is for one country to become so powerful that all potential adversaries will knuckle under and accept its authority. When the US used nuclear weapons against Japan in 1945, the philosopher Bertrand Russell—who realized that the American nuclear monopoly would be temporary—set aside both his pacifism and his antipathy for all things American to declare that the US should immediately declare itself the world’s government and develop the most powerful nuclear arsenal possible to back up its authority.46 President Truman wisely ignored that advice, but in its early years, the George W. Bush administration verged on a version of it by believing that the US could create its own reality, which others would have to accept. But in Afghanistan and Iraq, the administration soon discovered that the power to destroy an adversary does not translate into the power to govern it or even to stop lethal groups within its territory from attacking you. Doing that would take more resources than any government can commit indefinitely. It would also involve doing things that key constituencies find abhorrent—as Israel discovered in its invasion of Gaza after the Hamas terrorist attacks on October 7, 2023. In reality, even great powers must negotiate with adversaries, and they often invest in norms and institutions to help manage their conflicts lest they become unsustainably overextended. The New World Order that George H. W. Bush had sought to create was an example. Having obliterated it, his son forced the US to act alone, while his aggressive unilateralism made negotiations with adversaries vastly more difficult.

If no one can force adversaries to cooperate, the only way out of a prisoners’ dilemma is to build enough trust between the parties to make promises of mutual cooperation credible. Because talk is cheap, it will never be enough. The adversaries must refrain from exploiting cooperative moves by the other side to signal their commitment to cooperation. This can happen through ongoing interactions using a strategy called tit-for-tat: Start by cooperating, then mirror whatever your adversary does. Benign tit-for-tat is exceedingly hard to initiate when the danger to you is potentially catastrophic if your adversary reneges. This is why successful negotiations among nuclear powers are difficult and rare. Because the stakes are so high, neither will likely risk cooperating unless they believe they have no choice. One such opportunity presented itself between the US and the USSR—and later Russia—at the end of the Cold War. Russia’s economy was so devastated and its successive governments so weak that the country was willing to risk cooperating with the West to rebuild itself. This created the unusual opportunity to replace a malevolent tit-for-tat dynamic with a benign one. The moment would not last.

After World War II, George Marshall understood the risks of taking advantage of a vanquished adversary. If the defeated Axis powers were forced to accept adverse outcomes in the war’s immediate aftermath, once they were back on their feet they would retaliate. That had been the lesson of Versailles. He also understood that refraining from taking advantage would not be enough. It would be important to create a host of mutually beneficial relationships among former enemies, so that they would have powerful incentives not to defect once they were able to do so. This is why he wanted the US to invest in rebuilding their economies and integrating them into a system of cooperative trade. Winston Churchill, who drew the same lesson from Versailles, favored a postwar European union that would include France and Germany. The goal was to ensure that they gained major economic, social, and cultural benefits from cooperation with each other—benefits they would be loath to jeopardize by returning to armed conflict. These relationships help sustain the mutual expectation that neither side will revert to military escalation. Both sides know that the other has a lot to lose: free movement of people and trading relationships among countries, joint educational and scientific ventures, and regulatory cooperation over issues like public health and the environment.

The tragedy after the Cold War was that the Clinton administration and both Bush administrations failed to act on the lessons of Versailles that had motivated Marshall and Truman after World War II. Whether out of shortsightedness, hubris, or both, they missed how fleeting the opportunity was or what the costs would be of failing to seize the moment with the country that mattered most: the former deadly adversary with whom a cooperative relationship could be created by helping jump-start its transition from communism to capitalism and then deepening economic, social, and cultural ties in the 1990s and early 2000s. Instead, they became sidetracked into the easy agenda of enlarging NATO into Eastern and Central Europe without taking seriously the damage this did to the rare opening that had arisen with Russia.

Putin might have evolved into a malevolent authoritarian at home and an assertive nationalist abroad, regardless of American actions. But the evidence is strong that he wanted something more than mere accommodation until the US turned to unilateralism in 2003. He saw this unilateralism as indifferent, at best, to Russian concerns, and he saw NATO’s relentless eastward expansion as a gratuitous threat. By the same token, Putin’s early support for Ukraine and other former Warsaw Pact countries joining the EU was motivated by his expectation that the Russian economy would also become closely integrated with the EU, even if Russia did not formally join the union. Once he realized that Russian integration with Europe was a nonstarter, the prospect of an ever-more powerful EU became a threat—particularly after the EU admitted the Baltics and five other former Eastern European countries in 2004. Unsurprisingly, Putin began beefing up the Eurasian Economic Community that he had created four years earlier and inducing Ukraine and other former Soviet republics to join it instead of the EU. Putin’s growing frustration at being sidelined infused his Munich speech in 2007, when he complained about Western efforts to “substitute NATO or the EU for the UN.”47

The following year was a turning point. By 2008, the US was a less intimidating adversary than it had been when Putin first came to power. Washington’s hand-picked regime in Afghanistan, led by President Karzai, was flailing at a resurgent Taliban, and America’s Iraq gambit had become a humiliating quagmire. The gathering financial storm—with the investment bank Bear Stearns failing in March and Lehman Brothers in September—shattered America’s prestige as the incontestable arbiter of global economic relations and custodian of the world’s financial markets. America’s geopolitical and economic disasters meant that Putin had fewer reasons to accept US unilateralism or to tolerate NATO’s overtures toward a country like Ukraine, with its large expatriate Russian population and strategic importance as Russia’s only point of access to the Black Sea. It is not surprising that Putin, politically secure and economically empowered at home, was unwilling to stand passively by when NATO went public at its Bucharest summit in April with the blunt declaration that Georgia and Ukraine would soon join the alliance. From his point of view, it was a gratuitous, hostile move that signaled no interest in cooperative tit-for-tat with Russia. He responded accordingly.48

The US and its allies continued supplying reasons for him to keep pushing back. Once Albania and Croatia were added during the Obama administration in 2009, Russians had lived through NATO enlargement at the hands of two Republican and two Democratic administrations. This bipartisan pattern of relentless eastward expansion would continue, with Trump presiding over the addition of Montenegro and North Macedonia and Biden of Finland and Sweden, so that by 2024, six NATO countries shared boundaries with Russia. The addition of Finland in 2023 added 1,335 kilometers to NATO’s shared borders with Russia, almost doubling it to 2,550 kilometers. EU enlargement into Eastern Europe also continued after 2004, if at a reduced pace, with the addition of Bulgaria and Romania in 2007 and Croatia in 2013. In September of that year, Ukraine announced its intention to sign a free trade agreement with the EU, a step toward membership that the Russians opposed as incompatible with Ukraine’s existing Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation, and Partnership with Russia.49

Returning to the presidency in 2012 after a four-year stint as prime minister, Putin quickly became more nationalistically assertive. A year earlier, he had rebuked President Dimitri Medvedev for abstaining from the UN Security Council resolution authorizing NATO’s intervention in Libya. Now he started pushing hard to consolidate and expand the Eurasian Economic Union as a competitor with the EU, sidelining Russia’s recent accession to the WTO that Medvedev had initiated in 2009. In December of 2013, he induced Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych to shelve the proposed EU deal in favor of a $15 billion bailout and natural gas price concessions from Moscow. But this was only after the EU’s shambolic attempt to woo Ukraine backfired when it insisted on terms so draconian that no Ukrainian leader could have accepted them. Putin’s more generous deal required Ukraine to join the Eurasian Union. With Ukrainians equally divided over whether to sign up to the EU free trade agreement or the Eurasian customs union, Yanukovych accepted Putin’s offer. This precipitated an escalating crisis in Ukraine that ended in Yanukovych’s ouster and subsequent flight to Moscow in February 2014.50

Putin’s decision to seize Crimea two months later was, in part, a successful bid to boost his sagging popularity at home in the wake of falling oil prices and slowing Russian growth. But it also reflected a growing sense of geopolitical and economic isolation, as successive American administrations and European governments froze Russia out of the post–Cold War Western order, encroaching on the country’s western frontier with security and economic institutions that excluded Russia. This isolation was underscored when the new provisional government in Ukraine bypassed constitutional procedures, declared that it would rescind Yanukovych’s agreement with Russia, sign the European Association Agreement, and negotiate new financial packages with the IMF and the EU.51

We will never know whether Putin would have evolved differently had the Clinton and Bush administrations responded more constructively to his overtures in the early 2000s. What we do know is that they never seriously tried. Repeating the US pattern with Yeltsin, they froze Putin out of the post–Cold War order they were constructing and squandered rare opportunities to try to forge something better. At critical junctures, figures as different as Richard Nixon, Jesse Helms, George Kennan, Brent Scowcroft, Sam Nunn, and Bill Perry urged them to focus on the real prize: a fundamental reordering of relations with the country that posed the real strategic threat to the United States and the rest of the West. They sacrificed this possibility to pursue dubiously beneficial tactical gains by expanding NATO onto Russia’s doorstep. They expected Putin to swallow a relentlessly encroaching military presence that no US administration would have tolerated in the Western hemisphere, let alone on its own borders.

Russia and the US might have ended up in a new Cold War anyway, but they might not have. The choices US administrations made foreclosed other possibilities, trapping relations in a downward-spiraling prisoner’s dilemma from which escape now seems as difficult as it had been at the height of the Cold War. In the run-up to Putin’s second invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Biden administration dismissed his demand for a commitment that Ukraine would never join NATO as ridiculous whataboutism, insisting that NATO was purely a defensive alliance with an open-door policy. By then, Putin had indeed become a threat to the rules-based international order that the US claimed to guard, but he didn’t start out that way, and it was not inevitable that he would evolve as he did. The NATO door never opened for Russia despite Putin’s benign early conduct, and successive American administrations compounded his alienation with their own blatant disregard for the rules-based international order. The US invaded Iraq and toppled its regime in flagrant violation of international law five years before Putin went into Georgia, and it led an illicit NATO mission to topple Libya’s government three years before he first set foot in Ukraine. This was scarcely the action of a defensive alliance, and it sabotaged Medvedev’s effort to reset Russian-US relations during his interregnum at Moscow’s helm, reinforcing Putin’s hardening line when he returned to the presidency.52

And what has been gained? A central unexamined conceit behind NATO enlargement was that it would make its members more secure, and the more that were added, the more secure they would all become. This safety-in-numbers rationale was fallacious for at least three reasons. One, which goes all the way back to George Kennan’s rationale for opposing the formation of NATO in 1949, was that it would provoke a militarized response on the other side commensurate with the perceived threat. Helmut Kohl’s candid admission to Bill Clinton in 1993 that he favored adding Poland on the grounds that he would rather fight the Russians there than in Germany gave impetus to this dynamic, because others would obviously invoke the same logic. Successive US administrations tried to blunt the predictable Russian reaction by pushing the line that, unlike the original NATO, the post–Cold War alliance wasn’t directed at any country in particular, but this was never believable and never believed. The result was bound to be escalating tension as the relentlessly expanding NATO encroached toward, and then into, the former USSR.

Second is the danger that expanding alliance commitments might dangerously escalate conflicts. That risk became evident as early as June 1999, following NATO’s unilateral action in Kosovo. Russian forces responded to NATO’s action by advancing on the airport in Kosovo’s capital city, Pristina, to be part, they said, of a peacekeeping force in the wake of the bombing campaign. US General Wesley Clark, then NATO’s supreme allied commander for Europe, ordered NATO Secretary General Javier Solana to block Russian access to the airport. Escalation was avoided only because the British commander of NATO’s Kosovo Force, General Michael Jackson, refused to order his forces to block the Russians, declaring, “I’m not going to do that. It’s not worth starting World War III.” After a two-week standoff, the field commander on the ground negotiated a de-escalation with the Russians. The Americans later complained that the field commander’s refusal to act amounted to insubordination, but his British superiors backed him up with the result that, eventually, the matter was dropped. Cooler heads prevailed in this instance, but the episode underscored the escalatory risks of multiplying security guarantees.53

Third, an ever-expanding NATO was bound to become increasingly unwieldy as conflicting interests and agendas of the different member countries began evolving unpredictably in a multipolar world. Turkey’s military involvement in Syria in 2019 raised the possibility that alliance members might find themselves either dragged into an action they did not support or in violation of their treaty obligations. By 2025, the prospect of Poland becoming involved in the Russia-Ukraine war on the Ukrainian side, or for that matter Hungary on the Russian side, could not be dismissed as unthinkable. What would that mean for the countries tied to them by Article 5 guarantees? This is to say nothing of a direct conflict between two alliance members, put on the table in late 2024 when President-elect Donald Trump declared an American interest in annexing Greenland from Denmark. During the original Cold War, most conflicts and potential conflicts were subsumed into the overarching standoff between the capitalist US and the communist USSR. Neither the emergence of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961 nor Nixon’s opening to China in 1972 had much impact on this dynamic, at least not where NATO and Europe were concerned. That is no longer true. Threats to international security today have nothing to do with capitalism versus communism. They are also less predictable, placing inevitable strains on a sprawling alliance, not least because many of NATO’s actions—as the interventions in Kosovo and Libya revealed—are unrelated to its members’ security.

This lack of a well-defined rationale means that it would be generously euphemistic to describe NATO today as a Rube Goldberg machine. Its purpose during the Cold War was clear: to contain if not deter the Soviet threat to the US and its allies, a threat that was underscored by episodes like the Soviet intervention in Hungary in 1956, the Berlin Crisis in 1961, and the events surrounding the Prague Spring in 1968. Starting with the Clinton administration’s enunciation of criteria for joining the PfP in 1993, once the Soviet empire collapsed and the world’s other major communist countries embraced capitalism, NATO leaders began declaring that its purpose was to protect and promote democracy. This was perhaps explicable once the anticommunist rationale had gone away, but it has never been true. Portugal was a founding NATO member in 1949, decades before its democratic transition. Greece remained in NATO during its period of dictatorship from 1967 to 1974, as did Turkey through successive coups that ejected elected governments from power. Nor is it true today, given the democratic backsliding in Turkey and Hungary—an awkward fact for an alliance that has no mechanism for expelling members from its ranks.

The Cold War conflict also provided a rationale for NATO’s economic structure that has not worn well since the Soviet Union collapsed. During the Cold War, American leaders judged it to be in the country’s interest to provide security guarantees to its allies to promote cohesion and limit nuclear proliferation that would threaten US hegemony had those allies chosen to go their own way. Dwight Eisenhower’s hope to forestall France’s creation of an independent nuclear arsenal in this way failed, but the NATO security umbrella was sufficient to prevent additional proliferation among its members (Britain’s nuclear program was well underway before NATO was formed) and keep everyone on board.54 The Soviets maintained cohesion among Warsaw Pact countries in a similar way. The quid pro quo for the Americans was to bear the disproportionate cost of Europe’s defense.55 This practice continued with NATO enlargement, with the new members heavily underwritten by the US. But once the strategic rationale that motivated the Cold War had disappeared, it was only a matter of time before a US administration would come to power that would ask why they were underwriting security for dozens of European countries—a question to which there is no obviously compelling answer.

It was not inevitable that decades of bipartisan consensus on enlarging NATO would be replaced by an America First ideology that thumbed its nose at allies and adversaries alike. But by the time Donald Trump was elected in 2016, the opportunity to create a post–Cold War international order that would have been more genuinely rules-based had been so thoroughly squandered by the disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and by NATO’s relentless eastward drive that a reckoning was long overdue. By then, George Washington’s admonition to avoid permanent alliances seemed to contain notably more wisdom than the series of quicksilver rationalizations for NATO enlargement that had displaced one another since 1990. The world that successive post–Cold War leaders had bequeathed had not quite descended into a Hobbesian war of all against all. But it did resemble one conjured up by Lord Palmerston when he said of his country, “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.”56

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