A genuinely realistic assessment of the NATO expansion process of the previous decades was that it did not go far enough, was not militarily serious enough, and that, while offering Moscow an open-ended opportunity to be part of the West, the alliance was prepared to return to the containment policies of the Cold War. Russia, not NATO, was on trial, and, as Ronald Reagan might have said, the alliance was prepared to “trust but verify.”
Vladimir Putin is now exacting a particularly Russian kind of price for the West’s failure to bring in Ukraine and Georgia into NATO. And while additional forces have begun to flow toward the new “Eastern Front,” these are late to arrive, too few in number, widely dispersed, lack sufficient combat power or logistics infrastructure, and consume an unsustainable proportion of shrunken American and allied militaries. Perhaps even more important, with the rise of a revisionist China and the trauma of lost wars in the greater Middle East, the United States has developed a kind of strategic tunnel vision, increasingly unable to see its global role.
In addition, the mechanisms of the Atlantic alliance have become dangerously rusty and perhaps corrupted. In his powerful pitch to the Congress, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy bruited the idea of a sort of “League of the Geopolitical West,” for the defense of at-risk, front-line states like Ukraine or Taiwan. Zelenskyy rightly noted that Japan, for example, is liberal and Western in ways that some current NATO members may not be. Russian subversion and Chinese “Belt-and-Road” debt-trap diplomacy may have crippled NATO as an instrument of containment.
