They point out that they have disbanded the Warsaw Pact, their military alliance, and ask why the west should not do the same.” It was an excellent question, and neither the Clinton administration nor its successors provided even a remotely convincing answer. “Many Russians see Nato as a vestige of the cold war, inherently directed against their country. Strobe Talbott, deputy secretary of state, similarly described the Russian attitude. In her memoir, Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s secretary of state, concedes that “ Yeltsin and his countrymen were strongly opposed to enlargement, seeing it as a strategy for exploiting their vulnerability and moving Europe’s dividing line to the east, leaving them isolated.” It would be the first of several waves of membership expansion.Įven that first stage provoked Russian opposition and anger. The administration would soon propose inviting Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary to become members, and the US Senate approved adding those countries to the North Atlantic Treaty in 1998. What was not publicly known at the time was that Bill Clinton’s administration had already made the fateful decision the previous year to push for including some former Warsaw Pact countries in Nato.
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