NATO Expansion: the Road to Cold War and War Itself

In the mid-1990s, I was a professor of international relations at the National War College and a member of the Brookings Institution’s Russian Study Group that held regular off-the-record discussions of key issues. This was an important time when the leading subject for the study group was the question of expanding the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The group had rather high level membership from the National Security Council, the Departments of State and Defense, and the intelligence community, particularly CIA and INR, the intelligence arm of State. These individuals were for the most part supporters of the absurd idea that we had won the Cold War and there was a mood of triumphalism and exceptionalism that was obvious in their support for NATO expansion.

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