Sympathy With the Devil: The Lie of NATO Expansion

Three decades after the end of the Cold War, one of Russia’s most persistent falsehoods is gaining new traction in Western debate: the claim that NATO’s eastward expansion provoked Russia’s war against Ukraine. 

It’s a story long pushed by Moscow but now amplified by unexpected voices in the West. The US economist, Prof. Jeffrey Sachs’ speech to the European Parliament on February 19 and movie director Oliver Stone’s public endorsements of these views, have given the old grievance new reach—millions of views and thousands of shares on social media. 

Stone, who calls Vladimir Putin “a great leader,” went as far as to mourn the “loss of a true peaceful partnership between Russia and the US” and blamed “idiots” in the West for provoking Russia, “a friend of humanity.” 

NATO’s supposed expansion is the lie that will not die. The appeal of this argument is clear — it reduces a complex war of an imperial aggressor resuming its march of conquest to a simple story of Western provocation and Russian victimhood. The small nations that have rushed to secure their safety through alliance membership are simply ignored, treated as collateral damage or as the credulous dupes of a scheming United States.

At the heart of the lie is a supposed promise offered by US Secretary of State James Baker to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in talks in Moscow on February 9, 1990. During negotiations on the future of Germany, Baker told the Russian that, “There would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east.”

This oft-cited remark referred solely to the stationing of NATO troops in eastern Germany after reunification. It had nothing to do (and nor could it) with possible future decisions by sovereign nations in Central and Eastern Europe. Mikhail Gorbachev confirmed this in 2014, stating that the issue of NATO expansion “was not discussed at all” beyond Germany.

The declassified documents show no commitment was made, although Baker did later accept his language was imprecise and that he was “leaning a little bit forward on my skis on that.” The fact that no such terminology was included in any treaty surely proves the point. If Gorbachev had wanted this, he would have insisted. In fact, he said the issue of NATO expansion beyond Germany was simply not discussed. At all. 

It’s also worth noting that early in his presidency, in 2000, Putin stated that Russia might itself join NATO, hardly the remark of a man seething with indignation at Central Europe’s accession a year earlier. “It is with difficulty that I imagine NATO as an enemy,” he told the BBC. 

The narrative of a broken Western promise is a fiction, carefully cultivated by Moscow after the fact to justify its aggression.

What actually happened was that from the mid-1990s onward, the newly independent nations — Poland, the Czech Republic, a then-liberal democratic Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria, and others — were hammering on NATO’s door. Czech President Václav Havel argued in 2002 that alliance expansion marked the final end of “great powers dividing the small, or smaller, European countries among themselves without asking the latter’s opinion . . . Europe is no longer, and must never again be, divided over the heads of its people and against their will into any spheres of interest or influence.”

He spoke for Central and Eastern Europe, where memories of Russian colonial occupation were fresh. Those nations sought protection. They were not duped by Washington; they understood their history all too well. For them, NATO membership was a shield, not a dagger. 

Putin understood this all too well. Russia is a country built on the continuing and sometimes casual violation of international borders. It attacked Chechnya in the 1990s, Georgia in 2008, Crimea and Donbas since 2014, and has now been engaged in the full-scale invasion of Ukraine to erase its independence for three years. The Kremlin has used energy as a weapon, destabilized governments, and interfered in elections across Europe. Moscow’s actions are not a response to NATO’s enlargement but part of a consistent strategy of regional domination.

It is therefore depressing to see prominent citizens in democratic nations repeat the Russian claims. This tendency to oversimplify complex geopolitical realities reflects a deeper problem. After the Soviet collapse, many in the West believed that Russia could be integrated into a rules-based international order. Successive US administrations embraced the end-of-history fairy tale, deprioritized Russia and downplayed the Kremlin’s ambitions. 

US and European naivete about Russia isn’t limited to politicians. Analysts, diplomats, and academics have too often assumed that Moscow’s actions were reactive, and rooted in fear of encirclement. They failed to grasp that Russian strategy was proactive, based on imperial nostalgia and the belief, deeply embedded in the Kremlin, that Russia is destined to lead the Slavic world and dominate the lands of its former empire. 

The atrocities committed by Russian forces in Ukraine — razed cities, mass graves, torture chambers for children uncovered in liberated Kherson — are not the actions of a state acting out of fear. They are the hallmarks of a campaign of conquest and subjugation. And yet, some like Sachs say “that the best thing for the Baltics is to stop their Russophobia.” 

While populist politicians like the UK’s hard-right leader Nigel Farage predictably continue to argue that Russia was somehow goaded into aggressive war, it is alarming to hear a world-wise American like Sachs making a Kremlin-friendly case that the Baltic states should adopt the following approach: “Don’t provoke the neighbor, that’s all. This is not hard.”

As Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s former political strategist, wrote in 2019, Russia doesn’t just interfere in elections — it interferes with minds, so much so that “they don’t know what to do with their own changed consciousness.” Western politicians and thinkers, shaped by this manipulation, often don’t realize how their views have shifted. 

But Surkov also boasted that “the consciousness of being a people . . . predefines its form.” This applies to Russia — and to Ukraine. The idea that Ukraine should trade its sovereignty for peace is strategically foolish. 

As the Ukrainian activist and former MP Lesia Orobets said: “We have learned that if we fight the Russians, we die in thousands. If we give in to the Russians, we die in millions.”

It is madness to think that Europe’s security can be bought by appeasing Russian paranoia. Ukrainians are fighting for their identity and their future. If we Europeans wish for the same, we must be as determined as they are. We cannot kneel before the Kremlin.

Maciej Bukowski is a Non-Resident fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). He is a climate diplomacy and energy security expert, and a PhD candidate at the Institute of Political Science and International Relations at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow.  

Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the position or views of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis.