Between 1989 and 1991, America’s principal adversary evaporated. Without war or revolution, and in a tectonic geopolitical shift, the Soviet Union willfully dismantled. The newly minted Russian Federation seemed to pose little threat. It was isolated internationally, its economy in tatters, and in fits and starts it appeared to be making peace with the US-dominated global order. Asia, too, looked favorable. Washington’s relations with Beijing had been reasonably stable for twenty years, and China was too weak militarily to register as a national security concern.
With commanding global power, the United States no longer needed to hold the balance in Europe and Asia to keep itself safe and prosperous. America’s alliances had outlasted the threats they were designed to address, and policymakers would have to decide their fate. Was it time to discard them? Or should alliances be maintained, and perhaps repurposed for this newly auspicious world?
For some international relations experts, the idea of salvaging America’s security guarantees in the absence of a major adversary was nonsensical.1 But many policymakers saw matters differently. Alliances, they argued, could serve purposes other than deterrence and defense. By anchoring itself to overseas commitments, Washington could make a case for its leadership in a world that no longer seemed to need traditional collective defense. Security guarantees could help the United States consolidate its Cold War gains and, in Europe, could help to spread liberal democracy. Both outcomes would further a new grand strategy based not on deterrence and defense but on prevention: ensuring that serious competition to American power never arose in the first place.
The Clinton administration embraced this new mission, preserving and transforming US alliances in the process. By 1999 NATO was intervening in Kosovo, a conflict that pit the alliance against entirely new adversaries and unmoored it from traditional notions of self-defense. But this detachment from historic alliance objectives gave way to backlash. The windfall of the 1990s created vulnerabilities that twenty-first-century competitors would come to exploit.
During the first two years of his presidency, Bill Clinton and his closest advisors made the decision to enlarge NATO.2 The choice was not entirely obvious: with its adversary gone, the United States might have disbanded the alliance or transformed it to some other end. Maintaining and expanding it, however, would help to democratize and stabilize Eastern Europe. Clinton also saw NATO enlargement as a proxy for America’s role in the world: advancing in the aftermath of the Cold War, rather than demobilizing.3 Many senior officials also backed NATO enlargement as a humanitarian response to intensifying conflict in the Balkans.
Enlargement proponents, whatever their goals, agreed that Russia had to be involved in any effort to expand NATO. Moscow could not be treated like a vanquished foe; if the Russians felt threatened by enlargement they might abandon democratic reform.4 NATO expansion was therefore carried out in consultation with Moscow and was decidedly not premised on a perceived need to counter a Russian threat. To the contrary, expansion went forward on the assumption that Russia was becoming a partner.
If NATO expansion was not a foregone conclusion, alliance transformation was. As Vice President Al Gore noted, “Everyone realizes that a military alliance, when faced with a fundamental change in the threat for which it was founded, either must define a convincing new rationale or become decrepit.”5 In the early 1990s, nearly every senior US official concurred that NATO would have to adopt a new military mission if it was to survive. There was, however, disagreement over just what this mission should be. Some strategists toyed with the idea of refashioning the alliance into a collective security organization—a more inclusive body that would not be directed against any adversary and could even include Moscow. But this would have had some of the same weaknesses of the League of Nations and would not have provided a sturdy security guarantee.6 Others argued the alliance needed new military missions: “NATO must go out of area or it will go out of business.”7
That NATO should welcome new members was an idea born not in Washington but rather Central and Eastern Europe in response to events of the early 1990s. In 1991 Soviet military officers opposed to the reforms that were dissolving the USSR staged a coup and briefly took control of the country. The following year, war seized Bosnia. Observing the dramas around them, the leaders of Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia began to fear that the new Russia would reject democracy, and nationalism would overtake their region. They sought NATO’s protection.
Clinton did not see Russia as a direct threat, but he was sympathetic to the entreaties from Eastern Europe, which offered a coherent rationale for continuing partnership: the United States needed to grow NATO in order to spread democracy and bolster fragile democracies against nationalist resurgence.8 As far as Clinton and his advisors were concerned, this goal was not at odds with Secretary of State James Baker’s ambiguous 1990 pledge, delivered to Mikhail Gorbachev, that the alliance would not expand its borders eastward beyond East Germany. It was never entirely clear what Baker had promised, and any pledge offered was never repeated or codified.9
The Eastern European NATO aspirants probably expected that Clinton would be favorably disposed to their request. On the campaign trail, he had championed democracy promotion alongside aid to a reforming Russia. Once in office, he connected this agenda to NATO expansion, warning that democratic reform in Central and Eastern Europe was not guaranteed, but that the alliance could help to secure it.10 Many of his closest advisors shared this view. Top officials were influenced by a Foreign Affairs article in which several leading analysts argued that NATO should become an alliance “committed to projecting democracy, stability, and crisis management in the broader strategic sense” while managing the relationship with Russia.11
Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s secretary of state from 1997 through the end of his presidency, articulated a similar rationale: adding allies to NATO would foster democracy and further the integration of Eastern Bloc states into the West, thereby helping to avoid another war in Europe.12 As National Security Advisor Tony Lake eloquently summarized, “We have arrived at neither the end of history nor a clash of civilizations, but a moment of immense democratic and entrepreneurial opportunity.… The successor to a doctrine of containment must be a strategy of enlargement.”13 At the core of this argument was a fundamental belief among political scientists and policymakers that democracies did not go to war with one another. It therefore held that the United States would be more secure if the circle of democracies expanded.14
When the administration looked to Yugoslavia, it saw a pressing need for NATO enlargement. As Bosnia was consumed by fratricidal conflict, the White House was increasingly convinced that conflict on Europe’s periphery could endanger democratic consolidation. The case for alliance endurance was also tied to humanitarian concerns: on both sides of the Atlantic, leaders wondered what future NATO could have if it could not stop ethnic cleansing in Europe. Several months after deciding to enlarge the alliance, the Clinton administration also intervened militarily in Bosnia. NATO airstrikes helped to end the conflict, intensifying Central and Eastern European states’ drive for membership.15
Finally, alliance enlargement occurred because there were few barriers to it. The United States was sufficiently powerful economically and militarily that no foreign power could thwart its NATO-expansion goals. Domestic political opposition might have changed Clinton’s calculation, but the post-Cold War sense of strategic triumph was bipartisan. Thus the George H. W. Bush administration declared it was “improbable that a global conventional challenge to US and Western security will reemerge from the Eurasian heartland for many years to come.”16 And within the Clinton administration, most top officials could find a NATO-enlargement logic that appealed (those who did not tended to be defense officials, who worried that an expanded alliance would not be militarily sound). As for existing American partners, they were not prepared to doubt Washington. Western Europe was horrified by its failures to stop the conflict in Bosnia and deferred to the United States. Even Moscow, which hardly welcomed the growing pact, was so preoccupied with its own political and economic dissolution that it had no recourse. Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov likened his government’s acquiescence to “sleeping with a porcupine.”17
The Clinton administration took care to minimize the likelihood that Russia would see NATO’s growth as a threat, and NATO expansionists made choices that demonstrate they were not trying to counter Moscow. NATO enlargement was necessarily an outgrowth of American preponderance, but Clinton made genuine efforts to build a partnership with Russian leadership. The administration hoped it could bolster the Atlantic alliance and support Russian reform simultaneously.
Clinton and his top advisors did not share the opinion of those congressional Republicans who supported NATO enlargement as a form of containment. Russia seemingly was attempting to liberalize its economy and move toward democracy, and while Clinton recognized that backsliding was possible, his instinct was that Moscow was more a partner than a serious military threat. The administration therefore took a “dual track” approach that sought to expand NATO while also beginning a “strategic alliance with Russian reform.”18 Such an approach would have made little sense if its author, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, and the administration as a whole wanted NATO to be a bulwark against Russia.
Russian leadership appeared to understand these relatively benign intentions, even if it did not fully embrace them. In 1993 President Boris Yeltsin not only accepted Poland’s desire to join NATO but even entertained the notion that Russia someday might. On a number of occasions, senior officials on both sides of the Atlantic dangled the prospect of Moscow’s membership. It seemed unlikely, and potentially destructive to the alliance, yet no American policymakers saw a reason to rule it out. Talbott urged Clinton not to use any names or dates when discussing the prospect of NATO enlargement with President Yeltsin—better to move him toward acquiescence rather than reveal a definite commitment at which he would bristle.19
The administration also sought to give Central and Eastern European states ways to associate with NATO without offering them membership prematurely or alienating Russia. This began with the North Atlantic Cooperation Council, a vehicle for collaboration with former Warsaw Pact adversaries. In 1994 the council was supplemented by the Partnership for Peace, which was designed to build trust between NATO and European nonmembers while allowing the alliance to defer the question of whether it should formally enlarge. Yeltsin himself was fond of the partnership, which he believed had postponed NATO enlargement indefinitely, relieving considerable domestic pressure on him. Clinton officials knew otherwise, but they did not disabuse him of this notion as they quietly studied the options for alliance expansion throughout 1994.20
That the specter of a renewed Russian threat was not the catalyst for NATO enlargement was also clear from the initiative’s detractors. Secretaries of Defense Les Aspin and William Perry urged the administration to expand the alliance only if Russia’s domestic reforms failed, and Assistant Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter believed the United States should continue to focus on military cooperation with Moscow, not on expansion. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff John Shalikashvili had operational military concerns: Central and Eastern Europe were largely unprepared to assume the requirements of membership. In the eyes of the general and many of his colleagues, enlargement would saddle NATO with thorny new defense commitments without bestowing it with the capability to uphold them.21
The White House pressed ahead despite the concerns of defense brass. By spring 1994 the National Security Council had begun to draft a NATO-expansion plan, and by summer most of the president’s close advisors favored the policy. In the fall the administration officially decided to support enlargement. At year’s end NATO launched a formal study to explore expansion. Yeltsin, dissatisfied but resigned to the outcome, declared that a “cold peace had replaced the Cold War.” Anticipating that Yeltsin’s successor could be more hardline, Clinton decided to push through enlargement before his counterpart left office. At the same time, Clinton reaffirmed President Bush’s declaration that Russia was no longer a foe and pointed to ongoing meetings between NATO and Russian foreign and defense ministers as evidence. In 1995 he assured Yeltsin that the alliance had transformed since the end of the Cold War, no longer sought to contain Russia, and was focused on newer regional threats.22
The 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act, which set up a council for ongoing cooperation between Russia and NATO, was intended as further confirmation that the revived alliance did not target Moscow. Through the act, the uneasy Russians sought a pledge that the United States would not forward deploy nuclear weapons or permanent troops to new NATO countries. The Clinton team gave Moscow this assurance, although not in treaty form. Alliance planners had no qualms about the Russian request; they were not blind to the possibility of Russian revanchism, but they also were not preoccupied with it. They assessed that NATO possessed conventional military superiority and ample strategic warning, which allowed them to issue new security guarantees to Central and Eastern European states with no forward deployments.23
Outside of the administration, enlargement critics abounded. Most were foreign policy realists, focused on power balancing between the former Cold War rivals rather than on democracy promotion and concerned about the possible security implications of Russian blowback. A group of senior former diplomats who had served in Europe and Russia wrote to Secretary of State Warren Christopher arguing that enlargement imperiled the future of the alliance. Venerated scholar-practitioners including Kennan, Kissinger, Paul Nitze, and Brent Scowcroft were scathingly critical. Kissinger was particularly upset—the United States was bargaining with its defeated adversary and, he said, giving Moscow the chance to undermine the future of NATO. Kennan, who had opposed the formation of NATO in 1949, called enlargement “the most fateful error of American foreign policy in the entire post-Cold War era.” Many other scholars shared this view.24
For policymakers, these complaints were unpersuasive. In 1997, with both Clinton and Yeltsin reelected, NATO leaders announced that Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic would join the alliance. But first the Senate had to ratify expansion. The opposition came from Republicans wedded to the idea of NATO as a Russia-focused alliance. Defense hawks derided the administration’s extensive consultation with the Russians. There was also some question about how much NATO enlargement would cost. The administration’s estimates varied widely, from $30 billion to $70 billion over ten to fifteen years. In a relatively benign security environment, defense requirements seemed indeterminate; there was no consensus on what enlargement would entail militarily.25 An enlarged NATO apparently could spend as much or as little as it liked.
Whatever qualms some Senate Republicans had, they could not move the body as a whole. In 1998 the Senate voted overwhelmingly to enlarge NATO, and the three new members joined in 1999. The enlargement decision was in many ways “the culmination of everything we had been working for, everything for which we had risked nuclear war,” said James Steinberg, Clinton’s deputy national security advisor and later deputy secretary of state in the Obama administration. Throughout the Cold War, American foreign policy had been premised on the rationale that many Eastern Bloc countries “would eventually be restored to the Transatlantic community,” he explained.26 In 2004 seven more countries joined the alliance, followed by two in 2009, and one more in 2017.
By far the most controversial step was the decision to admit the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, which had, under duress, been Soviet republics until 1991. Well before they were admitted, experts understood that the Baltics were essentially indefensible in military terms because they lie on the Russian border, and the alliance had forsworn new forward deployments.27 This was further evidence that NATO enlargement did not seek primarily to deter and defend against Russia—and that the alliance had moved considerably beyond its founding strategic logics.
The demise of the Soviet Union also left America’s Asian allies without major-power adversaries. While strategists throughout the administration understood that China was on the ascent, it was simply too early for most US officials or their alliance counterparts to recognize the challenge Beijing would become. In the long term, the White House understood, alliances might be useful as a hedge against Chinese power. But for the time being China policy would be aimed at engagement. President Clinton was not primarily concerned about deterring China or defending against it; rather, he sought to promote democratic and free-market principles there.28 And on matters of alliance, the Clinton administration was largely focused on NATO expansion and conflict in the Balkans.
Northeast Asian allies sensed that their region was not a priority, as evidenced by the decreasing stakes of their cooperation with the United States.29 Over the course of the 1990s, diplomacy surrounding the US-Japan and US-Korea pacts concentrated on intra-alliance issues, especially trade policy and burden-sharing. With one clear exception—North Korea—national security objectives were secondary; the alliances were preserved largely as ends unto themselves, rather than as means of advancing strategic goals. Southeast Asian allies got even less attention. In the absence of defense and deterrence objectives, these alliances languished.
By the end of the Cold War, and in the years immediately after it, serious rifts formed between the United States and its allies Japan and South Korea. Both the Bush and Clinton administrations saw Japan as America’s next major competitor. Policymakers were concerned with punishing Japan for its commercial and industrial policies; the future of the alliance was at best a secondary issue.30 South Korea, too, looked more like an economic nuisance than a reliable friend. Defense planning documents from 1992 show American officials torn over the status of their Northeast Asian partners. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney wanted them to contribute more to the common defense and wondered whether they should primarily be feared or trusted.31
Meanwhile the Japanese and Korean publics increasingly questioned the value of alliance. Politicians and activists asked whether, in the absence of a great power threat, close US ties still served their interests. Left-wing political factions rose to power in both countries, and with a relatively peaceful post-Cold War security environment, the governments in Seoul and Tokyo focused inward.32
In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, then, the United States, Japan, and South Korea did not so much act as allies as squabble about the terms of their partnerships. They battled over economic policy and burden-sharing. American forward basing became a political flashpoint for Japanese and Korean leaders.
Even before the Soviet Union collapsed, more Americans feared the economic threat from Japan than worried about the military one from Moscow. Policymakers were fixated on gaining access to Japanese markets. Defense officials who emphasized the value of the alliance were accused of “shielding Japan” and subordinating pressing economic concerns to outdated military ones.33 Trade friction ran high for the first Clinton term, and Japanese officials began to wonder if Washington would abandon them for some form of alignment with China.34 By the end of the decade, however, Japan’s flagging growth snuffed out American economic envy.
The trade relationship between Washington and Seoul was less piqued but still fractious. Washington sought greater access to Korean markets, particularly those for rice and automobiles. US officials also wanted more protections for American intellectual property. Members of Congress worried that South Korea was shifting its defense procurement away from the United States, and many complained that it was not putting enough of its growing economic capacity toward defense. In the early post-Cold War years, Seoul did agree to pay more toward US basing costs, but this did not assuage American worries.35
Alongside economic competition came rising political tensions as Japanese officials expressed doubts about military subordination to their US ally. Throughout the Cold War, Japan had been guided by the Yoshida Doctrine, which held that the country should concentrate on economic growth while the United States took responsibility for its security. This was a maximally congenial arrangement. Article 9 of the Japanese constitution prevented Tokyo from using military force except in cases of narrowly defined self-defense, but the United States would provide the defense and deterrence the recovering state needed. In exchange the Japanese generously supported American troop presence, granted unfettered base access, and made few demands on the United States. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, Tokyo presumed that Japan was on track to become Asia’s regional hegemon. Japanese officials undertook a major strategic review that questioned whether the country should continue to rely on American protection. Some favored aligning more closely with China, others with international institutions. Either approach meant downgrading US influence in Japan. Tokyo ultimately affirmed the necessity of the US security guarantee, but there was hardly an enthusiastic consensus on the matter.36
When Japan had an opportunity to demonstrate its value to the alliance during the 1991 Gulf War, many American officials felt it made a poor showing. Japan’s constitutional restrictions prevented it from sending troops, but it did not even comply with its ally’s request to aid with nonmilitary logistics and transport. Instead Japan gave financial aid.37 Tokyo was criticized for its risk-averse “checkbook diplomacy,” and American officials questioned the security role that Japan could play if it could not contribute to post-Cold War missions.38
American officials had similar concerns about South Korea’s alliance commitment. Seoul appeared to be charting a course for independence: the end of the Cold War, and massive economic growth, meant that the country did not need to rely so heavily on the United States. In particular, because South Korea’s economy was driven by exports, it developed global interests of its own—interests that did not always align with America’s. It began to explore relationships with China and Russia and with other formerly communist countries. South Korean domestic politics divided between two main camps: conservatives who supported the security alliance and took a hardline position toward North Korea, and progressives who sought greater reconciliation with the North and space from Washington.39
Another preoccupying intra-alliance issue was basing. The presence of US soldiers was already a major concern in Japan and South Korea when the Cold War ended, but matters only became more fraught in 1995, when three US servicemen abducted and raped a twelve-year-old girl in Okinawa. Amid outcry from the local population, the United States and Japan agreed to move American bases on Okinawa to less populous areas, lest the issue continue to inflate anti-American sentiment. The agreement has still not been fully implemented. The Okinawa negotiations were watched closely in South Korea, where several troubling incidents involving US soldiers and Korean civilians had led to a desire for a smaller American military footprint.40
Much of the tension between the United States and its Northeast Asian partners reflected the listless character of the alliances. Allies can be at odds even when they are united around a shared goal, but when there is no mutual adversary, no clear strategic purpose, alliance strife may overwhelm achievement. Post–Cold War purpose returned to each alliance, if briefly, through an intensified threat from Pyongyang. But Japan and South Korea responded very differently, demonstrating that post-Cold War drift had already set in.
In 1993–1994 it became clear that North Korea was producing plutonium that could be used in nuclear weapons. A true crisis emerged when the North began to unload its reactor at Yongbyon. The United States considered responding with military force but instead made diplomatic overtures to Pyongyang. That culminated in the 1994 Agreed Framework, a deal that gave North Korea food and energy aid in exchange for compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty, to which it was a signatory. The initiative caused some consternation in Seoul, as officials feared they were being cut out of a bargain critical to their country’s security. The United States and South Korea also had their differences over the implementation of the nuclear deal, with Seoul periodically worrying that Washington was giving North Korea too much in exchange for minimal changes in behavior. However, despite South Korea’s interest in diplomatic autonomy, no administration in Seoul could any longer deny the need for an American security guarantee.41 The North’s nuclear ambitions provided a new alliance rationale.
The 1994 crisis had a very different effect on the US-Japan alliance. Washington consulted with Tokyo about using Japanese bases for the possible mission against North Korea but was rebuffed. A North Korean crisis would have put Japan in harm’s way, yet Tokyo invoked its constitutional restrictions to justify its refusal to aid the United States in its own defense. Secretary of Defense William Perry later said that if a conflict had taken place and Japan had continued to refuse access, “it would have been the end of the alliance.” Japan’s estrangement evoked memories of its Gulf War paralysis just three years before, and US policymakers concluded that they urgently needed to coordinate more closely with both Seoul and Tokyo.42 America and its allies had a clear regional adversary, and they were not equipped to cope with it.
In 1994 Assistant Secretary of Defense Joseph Nye assumed his position with the intent of introducing new purpose to America’s Asian alliances. In particular, he was concerned about China. At the National Intelligence Council, he and his team had analyzed possible futures for the region and concluded that in a number of plausible cases China would become a major regional power with significant military capabilities. The United States, he believed, would need its alliances to balance power in the Pacific. To that end, he sought to assure South Korea and Japan that the United States would maintain a significant post-Cold War regional defense commitment. The result was the February 1995 Department of Defense East Asia Strategy Report, often referred to as the Nye Initiative. According to the strategy, the United States would not reduce its troop presence in Asia; the number would remain fixed at 100,000, on par with US forces in Europe.43
Nye’s strategy had plenty of detractors, including congressional Republicans who argued that the Pentagon’s troop numbers were arbitrary—unmoored from any particular threat and lacking basis in warfighting or deterrence needs. These criticisms were understandable, but evidently Pentagon leaders felt that some threshold was needed to prevent Congress from pressing for further drawdowns. And the Nye Initiative did help to convince allies that they would not be surprised by a precipitous American withdrawal from the region, as when the Nixon and Carter administrations drew down from Taiwan and Carter attempted to pull troops from South Korea.44 The exact defensive and deterrence value of the troops was indeed open to question, but in 1995 that was less important than their assurance potential.
While Washington tried to quell intra-alliance angst and keep its position in Northeast Asia, its standing in the south deteriorated with its full permission. After the Vietnam War, Washington deprioritized Southeast Asia, and Southeast Asia increasingly turned away from Washington. Thailand, a military partner but not a full-fledged holder of an American security guarantee, ejected US troops following the drawdown.45 Anti-American sentiment accrued in the Philippines throughout the 1980s, and the looming expiry of a major basing agreement caused an alliance rift in 1991. The Bush administration was not willing to beg or overcompensate Manila to renew base leases, believing the strategic value of Southeast Asia to have dwindled in a post-Cold War world. The Philippine Senate voted to end American leases at Clark Air Base and the Subic Bay naval facility, bringing the US military presence in Southeast Asia to an end.46
There was no such post-Cold War schism in the US-Australia alliance, but there was a perceptible drift that suggested neither country was as valuable to the other as it had been. After the two sides managed a raft of 1980s policy disagreements ranging from the Strategic Defense Initiative to the Lockerbie bombing over Scotland, the end of the Cold War laid bare an emerging gap. Post-1991 Australian strategy emphasized integration with the rest of Asia and development of new, non-American partnerships. Australians perceived the United States to be indifferent to the future of the alliance and prickled at Washington’s failure to consult with Canberra on several major national security issues. During his December 1991 visit to Canberra, President Bush was asked if ANZUS was “dead or dying.” Similar queries were put to his Australian counterpart. By 1994 the US Department of Defense announced that it “would neither seek nor accept primary responsibility for maintaining peace and security in the region.”47 The US-Philippines and US-Australia pacts survived, but the partners no longer knew to what ends. Both alliances idled, yet there was no real reason to dismantle either.
By preserving its alliances in Northeast Asia while neglecting those in the Southeast, Washington inadvertently crafted two tiers of pacts. The ROK and Japan alliances had recouped some regional purpose in North Korea and received substantial attention to quell intra-alliance tensions. In the south, there was no strategy, leaving the area especially vulnerable when China reemerged.
Tellingly, the new East Asia strategy sought to shape the strategic environment to prevent the emergence of a peer competitor. By implication, China was no such competitor.48 Americans encouraged Beijing to join international institutions and liberalize its markets, on the theory that this would help it develop in a more benign fashion and never become a major security threat.
Defense Department officials understood that China could become a rival several decades on, but policymakers preferred an “engage and hedge” approach, which bore some similarity to its Russia initiative. That meant cooperating with Beijing on some security issues while preserving America’s alliances in case China became more assertive.49 The Pentagon was especially focused on developing confidence-building measures to reduce the chances of an escalatory US-China clash.50 The United States did not, however, renovate its Asian alliances with the purpose of meeting an emerging China threat.
Two decades into the twenty-first century, it seems perplexing that the United States did not more vigorously counteract the long-term challenge posed by a rising China and revise its alliances to that end. But accurate prognostication would have been an extraordinary feat in the 1990s. Consider that, as late as the 1995–1996 crisis in the Taiwan Straits, Beijing looked nothing like a rival. The crisis erupted after the president of Taiwan accepted an invitation to visit the United States for a college reunion in the spring of 1995. After much wrangling, the United States allowed him to make the trip, which China opposed in an effort to isolate Taiwan. Over the summer, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) responded by conducting a massive military exercise and missile tests near Taiwan. It was the biggest mobilization of Chinese troops since the Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979 and the first modern demonstration of Beijing’s military capabilities within the First Island Chain.51
But the United States was not impressed and mounted a muscular response. Two aircraft carrier battle groups were sent to the opening of the Taiwan Straits to show that the United States was prepared to defend Taiwan, with whom it had a quasi-alliance relationship under the Taiwan Relations Act.52 The Chinese then stood down.
From the American perspective, the Chinese looked skittish. With a demonstration of American military prowess, Beijing had backed away from a cause it considered fundamental to its sovereignty. China had been far more bellicose toward a US partner than American officials had anticipated, but Washington cowed Beijing. In the throes of the standoff, Pentagon officials were stunned to learn that China had not detected the two carrier groups approaching the Strait; Chinese sensors were so unsophisticated that they had missed the massive military movement altogether. While China had asserted itself as a potential regional threat, it had a long way to go before its military capacity would put it in America’s league.53
Chinese leaders came to a similar conclusion. They had seen unbridled American might on display in the 1991 Gulf War. And now they were humiliated on what they considered their home turf. In 1996 China redoubled its spending on missiles and other technology that could keep the US military from operating close to its shores.54
These were early but formative steps toward the bristling and technologically savvy contemporary Chinese military. Pentagon officials understood that this future was possible, and certainly Nye was concerned. But some of those same officials also recall mid-1990s classified intelligence assessments which held that the PLA was unlikely to become a modern fighting force to rival the United States. Even officials who studied Beijing’s strategy closely underestimated dramatically the pace and scope of its military development.55 At century’s turn, scholars still agreed that the PLA was nowhere near peer status. Furthermore, China-watchers believed that Beijing would face hurdles at home before it could become a major power: it would have to reconcile Leninism and capitalism in a swiftly growing economy without unleashing social forces that might threaten the regime. This seemed a formidable task—possibly an insurmountable one. There was simply no consensus that China would become a significant strategic competitor and therefore no foe against which to direct the strategic energies of Asian allies.56
On March 24, 1999, NATO went to war for the first time in its fifty-year history. The operation heralded the alliance’s changing role. With no superpower enemy to deter and defend against, NATO assumed new political and humanitarian goals—in this case, protecting Albanians in the Serbian enclave of Kosovo from ethnic cleansing. And, just as in the early years of NATO enlargement, Russia was seen not as a foe but as a critical diplomatic partner.
Kosovo’s status within Serbia had been contested for decades, and Serbian President Slobodan Milošević had a long history of oppressing Kosovars. He had not targeted Kosovo during the Bosnian war, but after the peace settlement he turned against the Kosovar Albanians. His forces drove 1.3 million people from their homes and pushed 800,000 out of Kosovo entirely. When Milošević attacked the Kosovo Liberation Army in spring 1998, NATO set its sights on creating a Kosovo protectorate within Serbia. After negotiations with Milošević failed to secure the province, the alliance began what it hoped would be a swift bombing campaign. Seventy-eight days and 27,000 munitions later, Milošević surrendered. A NATO-led force of 50,000 troops established the Kosovo protectorate.57 By all accounts the NATO air campaign, without a single alliance casualty, accomplished its political ambitions.
NATO’s first war exemplified the fundamental tensions of the alliance’s post-Cold War rehabilitation. The Clinton administration argued that the mission would bring common purpose to an enlarged NATO, giving it legitimacy and credibility in its post-Cold War role. But that logic struck some as flawed. Should NATO have to go to war to justify its survival? At the very least, it was clear that NATO had deviated far from its Cold War purpose. It was using its military might to end a sovereign government’s brutal ethnic cleansing campaign—a worthy goal, but one unrelated to the direct defense of its members.58
This made the Kosovo mission legally dubious. As a defensive military alliance based on Article 51 of the UN Charter, NATO was authorized to use force only if its members were attacked. Kosovo was not a NATO member and was internationally recognized as part of Serbia. NATO’s use of force was therefore, legally speaking, an operation against a sovereign state—even if its goals were humanitarian. Several NATO members believed the alliance needed UN authorization to use force in Kosovo, as there was otherwise no legal justification for the mission. While negotiating with Milošević in 1998–1999, the United States and its partners managed to pass UN Security Council resolutions condemning human rights abuses in Kosovo and calling on Serbia to restrict its military activities, but none of these resolutions authorized the use of military force. Ultimately there would be no Security Council permission for NATO’s intervention, and the United States did not seek it before the bombing campaign began. The failure of peace negotiations at Rambouillet, France, in early 1999 made clear that any request for a council vote would falter thanks to Russian opposition.59
NATO could hardly have denied that it was operating beyond its remit. Its objectives demonstrated as much. NATO sought to establish a protectorate in Kosovo, not its independence, and initially hoped to achieve this through demonstration exercises and humanitarian assistance.60 As it neared a decision for war, NATO ruled out the use of ground troops and committed to what it thought would be only a few days of air strikes. It conducted the air war from 15,000 feet, in hopes of avoiding casualties that would split its coalition.61 If the bloodshed in Kosovo had been a direct threat to members of the alliance, NATO would likely have been less reticent.
Thus an alliance whose mandate was for defense and deterrence on behalf of its members went to war with a very different rationale and a dubious legal basis. After the war a UN commission led by former South African President Nelson Mandela concluded that NATO’s campaign was “illegal but legitimate.” It halted the violence in Kosovo but did not conform with international law or NATO’s core purpose.62
A final demonstration of NATO’s transformation was Russia’s role as a diplomatic partner in the conflict—a collaboration that would have been unthinkable during the Cold War. Russia and Serbia were historic allies, and Milošević sought to consolidate Moscow’s support to counter NATO pressure. But American strategy sought the opposite. With its allies, Washington worked to ensure that Russia would not actively oppose NATO policy, even when it could not fully support it.63
In the lead-up to war, Russia was a vital interlocutor between NATO and Serbia, urging Milošević to accept the stationing of foreign troops in Kosovo to prevent diplomacy from collapsing. After Milošević’s crackdown on the Kosovo Liberation Army, the allies secured Russian support for a UN resolution demanding human rights improvements in Kosovo, as well as a Russian abstention from a decision to impose sanctions on Belgrade. Moscow would not agree to any UN language that threatened the use of military force but privately expressed to Washington that it understood why NATO would make such threats.64
When NATO opted for war, however, Russia’s leaders were irate. Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov called the air campaign the worst aggression in Europe since the Second World War. President Yeltsin warned that the war could lead to global conflagration. Moscow believed that, by proceeding without a Security Council resolution, NATO was neutering the United Nations. Russia demanded an end to the bombing, and in the final days of March sent several ships to the Mediterranean, prompting NATO fears that Moscow could be sharing alliance flight data with the Serbs. However, in the face of NATO unity at an April 1999 summit, Yeltsin reached out to President Clinton with an offer to help end the war through diplomatic means. Yeltsin appointed former Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin to act as special envoy to Kosovo.65
Moscow’s diplomatic intervention was crucial to convincing Milošević to surrender. Publicly Chernomyrdin expressed rage at NATO, insisting that the intervention had set back US-Russia relations “by several decades.”66 But the focus of Russian diplomacy was not Serbian grievances—it was ending the bombing, helping Serbia retain sovereignty over Kosovo, and ensuring that non-NATO countries were included in the postwar occupying force. Privately Chernomyrdin pushed Milošević to surrender almost entirely on NATO’s terms. This meant that Moscow itself would have to sacrifice its interests, including agreeing to a NATO occupation under UN authority, as opposed to by UN forces. Moscow also negotiated with Washington over its own participation in the peacekeeping mission. Russia preferred to have a sector of Serbia under its auspices but agreed to distribute its 4,000 troops between the NATO sectors. Russian troops remained under Moscow’s tactical command but allowed NATO to maintain operational control.67
Michael Jackson, NATO’s commander in Kosovo, concluded that Russia’s role “was the single event that appeared to me to have the greatest significance in ending the war.”68 The former adversary had helped NATO prove itself and establish a new purpose, one having little to do with self-defense and deterrence against a great power threat.
By the end of the decade, the United States and its allies had not only salvaged security guarantees but also taken genuine steps to update them for the post-Cold War world as they saw it. NATO admitted new members and carried out a successful air campaign in Kosovo. It thwarted nationalist violence on the continent, demonstrated military prowess, and relied on a former adversary as a diplomatic partner. All this confirmed a novel alliance logic.
The United States and its allies in Asia settled into the new status quo. In 1996 Tokyo and Washington developed defense guidelines that laid out Japan’s role and stabilized the alliance, and the Japanese government passed legislation that allowed it to help defend US forces. Japan and South Korea agreed to take on greater financial burdens for the stationing of US forces, such that by the late 1990s they were among the cheapest places on earth to post American troops. As North Korean nuclear and missile threats mounted, both allies sought closer defense coordination with the United States.69 The thaw came against the background of reduced economic rivalry, as the 1998 financial crisis felled hard-charging Asian markets and years of recession took their toll in Japan.
After the attacks of September 11, 2001, US alliances held strong. Japan, South Korea, Australia, and NATO—invoking Article V for the first time—gave significant support to US wars in the Middle East. The British fought beside the United States in Afghanistan as early as fall 2001, and NATO led the UN-mandated International Security Assistance Force there from 2003 to 2014, with a mission that included 130,000 troops and twenty-eight reconstruction teams. As of this writing, NATO continues to train and advise Afghan security forces through its Resolute Support operation. NATO also led a mission to train and equip Iraqi armed forces and police from 2004 to 2011, despite considerable public and allied-leadership opposition to the US invasion. Japan provided fuel, supplies, and reconstruction support in Afghanistan and Iraq. South Korea sent troops and police to Afghanistan and Iraq, where Seoul had the third-largest presence, behind only the United States and the United Kingdom. Australia participated in the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, where it continues to train forces.70 In the Philippines the United States supported counterterrorism training, providing a new rationale for alliance.71
Senior George W. Bush administration officials were heartened by allies’ contributions and urged continued cooperation, specifically with respect to counterterrorism. The White House saw terrorism as the country’s most pressing threat, and therefore the task to which American security guarantees should be turned. By operating jointly, the thinking went, Washington and its allies could demonstrate to terrorist adversaries the world over the efficacy of old pacts under modern threat conditions.72
But as the United States and its allies identified new reasons to work together, novel strategic circumstances developed around them. Wars in the Middle East were in many ways a diversion from the more fundamental challenges of Russian and Chinese power. Old rivals were beginning to reassert themselves, sometimes at the alliances’ most vulnerable points. Improbably, America’s security guarantees had outlasted their adversaries. But in their victory, they were not reequipped for the major security threats of the twenty-first century.
Leading foreign affairs thinkers argue that America’s post-Cold War alliances were not only under-prepared for Russian and Chinese resurgences but also provoked them. According to this view, by preserving its alliances even as Cold War adversaries were on the wane, the United States incited a backlash that could have been avoided. Prominent scholars such as John Mearsheimer have argued that NATO enlargement was the “taproot” of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and invasion of Ukraine, so undermining Moscow’s security that it was compelled to lash out anew. Vladimir Putin has made a similar case to justify Russian revanchism.73 For their part, China’s leaders insist that the US alliance system in Asia is a “Cold War relic” that undermines regional stability.74 But is there concrete evidence that America’s decision to keep and repurpose its alliances provoked former adversaries?
If such evidence exists, it should be found in the case of NATO enlargement. But while there is no doubt that NATO’s expansion contributed to Moscow’s feelings of strategic diminution, it is another matter to claim enlargement caused Russia’s revanchism. Russian backlash began before the decision to enlarge NATO was made. Russian nationalists opposed the Kremlin’s economic and political reforms in the early 1990s, particularly following the “shock therapy” intended to induce rapid transition toward capitalism. And Russian anger was stoked further by demonstrations of NATO power and Russian impotence—namely, the Kosovo operation—than it was by NATO’s post-Cold War continuation and growth. This antipathy intensified after the ruble collapsed in 1998. “There is no doubt that the economic prescriptions promoted by the United States and the IMF contributed to the Russian public’s backlash against the West,” Steinberg said. “Especially in the early years, US policy was driven more by economic orthodoxy than a sensitivity to political realities in post-Soviet Russia.” As Talbott put it in 1993, the American approach needed “less shock and more therapy.”75
The claim that Russia was provoked by NATO expansion also ignores the fact that, during the first few years of the expansion process, Russia did not see NATO as a menace. Quite the opposite—Russia’s leaders accommodated themselves to the alliance’s post-Cold War efforts and even joined them. Moscow enrolled in the Partnership for Peace, signed the NATO-Russia Founding Act, and for years maintained that it was considering membership. As late as 2002, Vladimir Putin publicly hinted at and privately sought Russian NATO accession.76 Halting NATO’s expansion did not become a Russian foreign policy objective until after the round completed in 2004.77
None of this is to say that Moscow was pleased by NATO’s activities. In the late 1990s, prominent experts such as Scowcroft worried about Russian anxieties and argued that the United States should therefore slow the pace of NATO enlargement.78 The Kosovo intervention, however, was probably more damaging than alliance enlargement. Moscow’s reaction to the campaign was “strident condemnation”—the alliance was bombing a Russian partner in its former sphere of influence, seemingly confirming long-held fears that a reinvigorated NATO would upset peace and stability in Europe. As bombs were falling in Kosovo, Chernomyrdin declared, “The world has never in this decade been so close as now to the brink of nuclear war.”79 Russia became a diplomatic partner for lack of other options, and US-Russia relations may never have recovered from Kosovo’s strain.80
The particulars of enlargement also suggest that it was not NATO’s preservation and expansion that provoked Russia. During the first round of enlargement, Russia was largely quiescent. What it objected to most strenuously was extension of membership to the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, three of the seven states added to NATO in 2004. The inclusion of these former Soviet republics exacerbated Moscow’s declinist dismay. Even the most enthusiastic enlargement advocates acknowledged the political dangers of including the Baltics.81 We might therefore conclude that a more limited expansion, or an expansion that included different states, could have been acceptable to Russia, or at least, rankled it less.
In short, the timeline of expansion does not support the strict causal claim that NATO enlargement provoked renewed Russian aggression. Anti-Western and nationalist sentiments in Russia were not born of alliance expansion, per se, but were primarily piqued by economic policies and exercises of NATO power that contributed to and reinforced Russia’s sense of diminution. In the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Moscow had experienced the sort of geopolitical loss and economic shock normally reserved for catastrophic defeats in war. Russia was almost certain to begrudge NATO’s resilience, but that does not establish that enlargement drove the revanchism that dismembered Crimea and Ukraine.
Nonetheless, there exists a more modest and plausible linkage between post-Cold War American alliance renovation and twenty-first-century geopolitics. These refurbishments—at first ad hoc, later directed toward counterterrorism—lacked clear focus on major-power defense and deterrence, inadvertently helping to create significant strategic vulnerabilities. Whether or not Russia’s leadership saw NATO expansion as a true threat in the 1990s and early 2000s, it claims to do so now, after the enlargement process landed the alliance on Moscow’s doorstep. NATO’s newfound proximity to Russia makes the alliance much harder to defend and increases the chances for escalation and hot war. This is a liability NATO courted during a moment of triumph. Imbued with the elixir of unipolarity, NATO leaders were distracted from the strategic imperatives of defense and deterrence. Meanwhile in Asia, the two-tiered system of pacts was at best focused on North Korea, and at worst, diverted and listless.
Thirty years later, America’s shields have endured the end of the Cold War but lost their luster. They outlasted their foes but were unprepared when rivals emerged anew. A long-postponed alliance reckoning has now arrived.