Explaining NATO and Ukraine: How a 30-year-old debate still drives ...

Russian President Vladimir Putin chairs a meeting with members of the U.N. Security Council via a videoconference at the Novo-Ogaryovo state residence outside Moscow on Friday.With more than 100,000 Russian troops circling the Ukrainian border, prompting formal diplomatic engagement from the United States and NATO, a 30-year-old foreign policy debate has made a return to center stage. "And so Secretary of State [James] Baker, in a speculative way in an early stage of negotiations, says to Gorbachev, 'How about this idea: How about you let your half of Germany go, and we agree to move that one piece forward?' "But President George H.W. Bush rejected the idea, and when more formal negotiations began later in 1990, a ban on NATO expansion was never actually offered, Sarotte said. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the NATO expansion question became more urgent — both for the U.S. looking to cement its influence in Europe and for countries emerging from communist control, like Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. The U.S. hoped that its financial support, along with diplomatic overtures from NATO, could be enough to counterbalance Russia's displeasure over expansion — but ultimately, that didn't work, Goldgeier said. When the compromise was announced, some analysts were surprised that "there was not this major temper tantrum" from Putin and Russia, said Rose Gottemoeller, an American diplomat who served as deputy secretary general of NATO from 2016 to 2019. Now, Russia's protests over Ukraine's future membership have put the U.S. and NATO in a difficult spot over NATO's "open-door" policy. "Ukraine is moving closer to the West — but it's doing it because the Russians have been annexing Ukrainian territory and threatening the Ukrainians."(In annexing Crimea, Russia itself broke a promise: In the Budapest Memorandum, a treaty Russia signed with the U.S. and U.K. in 1994, it committed "to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine" in exchange for Ukraine's denuclearization.)None of that has deterred Putin, for whom Ukraine is "personal," says Andrea Kendall-Taylor, a former senior U.S. intelligence officer now with the Center for a New American Security.