NATO Eastern Enlargement: Expansion without Teeth One of the most widespread and pernicious myths that distorts understanding of the Russo-Ukrainian War is the claim that Russia was provoked by NATO enlargement. The claim starts with the supposed promise made to the Soviets at the end of the Cold War. I have documented why this is false before, so will not dwell on that (slantchev.wordpress.com/2024/06/24/the…). Here's I will ask a simpler question: what evidence there is for NATO expansion threatening Russia's security. I have documented opinions by Russian generals saying that it did not, but let's take a look at some data. The Mearsheimer/Sachs argument is that mere accession is already threatening to Russia but they never explain why. NATO is a defensive alliance -- it simply cannot be organized for aggression -- but let's set this aside as well. I will look at some hard evidence of increased threat to Russian security measured in conventional ways we normally do when we talk about things like that: military personnel and expenditures. Figure 1 shows the military expenditures of NATO without the US, the US, and Russia (in log of constant 2023 USD) over the post Cold War period. I added indicators for major military operations by the US and Russia, as well as the years of NATO expansion. Several things are immediately obvious: while the US did experience occasional spending hikes due to the War on Terror, its NATO allies remained essentially flat despite the expansion (meaning the addition of new members did not really add that much to overall spending). In fact, in the 2010s, NATO was REDUCING its spending right up to the point where Russia annexed Crimea. The Russians, on the other hand, began militarizing immediately after the end of the economic crisis of the late 1990s and early 2000s. You can see the clear increasing spending from 2000, with a brief drop after 2016, and its resumption in 2021. If there was a threat represented by spending, Russia was not reacting to it. In fact, it was NATO that was not reacting to Russia's troubling increase. Figure 2 shows the trends in total military personnel where you can see NATO's gradual disarming over time while the Russians -- who had to scale back from the outsized Soviet military -- eventually rebuilt and increased it again. Even the US was reducing from 2010 -- the small upticks at the end are all after Crimea. Figure 3 illustrates the NATO accession even more starkly: for each of the three major expansion cohorts (1999, 2004, and 2009), I computed the total armed force for each cohort before and after joining NATO. You can clearly see the downward trend: joining NATO led to SMALLER militaries for these countries. Hard to see how this is threatening to Russia. It's crucial to realize that these reductions were NOT offset by stationing foreign NATO troops there. In fact, just like the original inclusion of the former GDR was under the explicit agreement that there would be no foreign NATO troops there (or nukes) -- this is the actual meaning of NATO jurisdiction expanding "not one inch eastwards" -- all subsequent enlargements were done with the understanding that the same formula applied to the new members. Figure 4 bears this out: US troop deployments in NATO members in Europe were limited to their original Cold War places in Western Europe (where they were drastically reduced), and nothing in the new members until after the Russian invasion in 2022. Even Crimea resulted in a rather tepid non-response. 1/2
