As US position on Ukraine-NATO shifts, a recall — and why it matters

During his February 12 phone call with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, US President Donald Trump rejected as “impractical” the possibility of Ukraine joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), the 32-member transatlantic military alliance in which an attack on any member is considered an attack on all.

The possibility of Ukraine becoming part of NATO has been Moscow’s declared casus belli. Though the US and its European allies have never committed to when Ukraine might join the alliance, the statements by Trump and Hegseth mark a fundamental shift in America’s Ukraine policy.

NATO member countries in Europe. (Image: The New York Times)

West’s broken ‘promises’

In 1990, James Baker, President George H W Bush’s Secretary of State, assured Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader who oversaw the dissolution of the USSR, that “not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction”, according to the transcript of the conversation preserved in the Gorbachev Foundation Archive.

But in fact, NATO continued to expand steadily eastward, adding former Soviet allies and satellites as members.

In 2000, Robert Gates, who served as CIA Director from 1991-93 and later as Secretary of Defence under Presidents George W Bush and Barack Obama, said in an interview that Gorbachev and others “were led to believe” that the West would not pursue the “expansion of NATO eastward”. (Miller Center’s George H W Bush Oral History Project)

NATO’s eastward march

In 1999, less than a decade after the collapse of the USSR, NATO onboarded former Warsaw Pact countries Czechia (formerly part of Czechoslovakia), Hungary, and Poland.

President Bill Clinton presented this as a project for democracy: “We want all of Europe to have what America helped build in Western Europe — a community…where nations cooperate to make war unthinkable. That is why I have pushed hard for NATO’s enlargement and why we must keep NATO’s doors open to new democratic members.” (Speech delivered in San Francisco, 1999; Clinton White House Archives)

In 2004, more Warsaw Pact countries — Bulgaria, Slovakia (formerly part of Czechoslovakia) and Romania — joined NATO, as did erstwhile Soviet republics Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and Slovenia, which was formerly a part of neutral Yugoslavia. NATO was now literally at Russia’s doorstep.

Albania and Croatia joined in 2009, and Montenegro and North Macedonia in 2017 and 2020 respectively, expanding NATO’s Eastern European footprint further.

Moscow’s concerns

The expansion of NATO presents Russia with a classic “security dilemma”, a situation in which the actions of one state to make itself more secure tends to make another state less secure, and prompts them to respond in ways that result in a spiral of hostility.

Article 5 in the NATO Charter of 1949 establishes the principle of collective defence, such that “an armed attack” against any NATO member is to be considered as “an attack against them all”, and all NATO members would be obligated to defend the one who has been attacked.

Putin’s Russia sees NATO as a tool of Western hegemony, and its expansion eastward appears as the US creeping up on its Cold War enemy, which Moscow perceives as a threat to its national security.

“…The US has a Monroe Doctrine which says that the Western Hemisphere is our backyard… The same logic applies to the Russians,” political scientist and international relations doyen John J Mearsheimer said at Idea Exchange at The Indian Express last year.

While Russia has protested NATO’s eastward expansion since at least 1997 when President Boris Yeltsin tried and failed to obtain a guarantee from Clinton that NATO would not add any former Soviet republics, the possibility of Ukraine joining the alliance has been the ultimate red line.

For Russia, securing the more than 2,000-km land and sea border with Ukraine is critical to its national security, and Moscow has been clear that Ukraine joining NATO would be “a declaration of war”.

The Trump disruption

President George W Bush was the first major leader to suggest that Ukraine should be brought into NATO. But France and Germany were opposed, and the Bucharest Summit produced a “worst of all worlds” compromise — a promise without a timeline for delivery. While nothing changed for Ukraine, Russian insecurity spiked sharply. Putin annexed strategically vital Crimea in 2014, and ultimately invaded the Donbas in 2022.

Meanwhile, NATO continued to repeat its resolve to let Ukraine in. In July 2024, at the NATO summit in Washington, its leaders pledged to support Ukraine on an “irreversible path to full Euro-Atlantic integration, including NATO membership”.

All this has changed now. Trump is all but certain to either steer NATO in a different direction or cause some fundamental fissures in the alliance in his attempt to do so.

“President Trump will not allow anyone to turn Uncle Sam into Uncle Sucker,” Hegseth told America’s NATO allies, a reference to President Dwight D Eisenhower’s 1959 lament about European dependence on the US security umbrella.

While Hegseth has somewhat softened his stance since, Vice President J D Vance used his speech at the Munich Security Conference on Friday to attack Europe and say nothing on Ukraine — even though he did meet President Volodymyr Zelenskyy afterward.

American and Russian representatives will meet in Riyadh on Tuesday, where some indications on the direction of the war, now almost three years old, could emerge. Zelenskyy has, however, said he would not recognise the outcome of any negotiations of which Ukraine is not a part.