NATO Is Expanding, and Everyone Is Curiously Silent – The New Republic

Thosethree words have, for the past three decades, provided the rocks upon whichanti-NATO advocates have built their arguments. Naturally, those anti-NATO voices,pointing to Bakers quip, have gladly ignored any evidence contradicting thisinterpretation. Theyve ignored the fact that Gorbachev revealed in 2014 that Bakers commentsmadeto a country, and to a government, that no longer existswere directed solelytoward NATOs presence in eastern Germany,not eastern Europe writ large. The topic of NATO expansion was not discussedat all, and it wasnt brought up in those years, Gorbachev said, adding thatBakers comment was specifically made in [the] context of eastern Germany.(Gorbachev made clear there was no promise regarding broader enlargement, accordingto a Brookings Institute summary of Gorbachevscomments.)

Thesedetractors have also ignored the reality that Boris Yeltsin, wrangling in themid-1990s over NATOs growth into former Warsaw Pact countries, never bothered to cite Bakers pledgein trying to get the U.S. to slow the expansion. Most pertinently, they ignoredthe realities that Yeltsin and an early Vladimir Putin even made noise about potentiallyjoining NATO themselves, or that Putin hardly raised his hackles when NATOexpanded into, say, the Baltics in the mid-2000s. These arguments and debates typicallypop up whenever NATO expansion bubbles up: when NATO expanded into Croatia andAlbania in 2009, when Montenegro joined the alliance in 2017, when Georgia andUkraine drifted into NATOs orbitwith the Kremlin using the latter as anexcuse to feed its revanchist militarism.

Andyet, with the dawning of this decade, theres been a deafening silence greetingthe latest round of NATO expansion. Instead of public debate and the inflamedpassions of isolationists and integrationists, North Macedonias move towardincreasing NATOs ranks has been greeted with silence. Its falleninto something of a black hole in American politics.

Normally,backing the accession would be a political gimme for the White House: As theChicago Council recently found, the percentage ofAmericans favoring increasing U.S. commitments to NATO is as high as its everbeen. But Trump and his constellation of supporters are loath to highlight thefact that the U.S. is extending its security umbrella that much further, lestit upset his nominally isolationist base. Meanwhile, Democrats are hardly predisposedto credit Trump with enabling the expansion of NATO member stateseven though NorthMacedonia took drastic steps, well in keeping with liberal values, to completethe process. And so North Macedonias accession into NATO rolls onbut thekind of public debate around the wisdom of the move and implications for Americannational security seen in the past is nowhere to be found.

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NATO Is Expanding, and Everyone Is Curiously Silent - The New Republic