NATO – an organization whose entire purpose could be its greatest present failure. It’s a story of an alliance stuck in time, which could be traced to the entire state of affairs between Russia and the United States today. When NATO was established it was at the height of tensions between the US and the USSR during the cold war. But what became of NATO in the post-Cold War era? Nothing different, it seems. The history of the US and Russia has always been a troublesome one, but that’s because the underlying root of the tension between them was never addressed. With the relations between them at an all-time decade low, is it possible to change course?

With the reunification of Germany imminent, and the Soviet Union not far from collapse, the West had promised Russia that it would halt its expansion eastwards in its direction. Several decades later, we know that this isn’t the case now. In the years since the collapse, the entire progression of events and crises between Europe, NATO, the US and Russia becomes obvious. Not only did NATO continue to move eastwards after Germany was reunified, but NATO was adamant on pushing Russia into a corner, as Russia is thought to be Europe’s existential threat. From Russia’s opposite view, it is the reverse; NATO’s continued expansion towards the east, despite its promise not too, is all the evidence they thought they needed that it would only be a matter of time before the great clash between the two military giants occurs.

In 1999, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary joined the military bloc, citing a need to escape from Russia’s former sphere of influence. From Russia’s perspective, the west had now on the borders of Kaliningrad and was gearing up for a new fight; Russia needed to act. It should come as no surprise who became President later the following year, but in case a reminder is needed, his name is Vladimir Putin. In 2004, Bulgaria, Romania and all three Baltic States, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia became full members of NATO, also worried that they might someday be vulnerable to Russia without NATO’s protection. The result, whether intended or not, was that NATO was now on the borders of mainland Russia, and a mere few hours from Moscow. If Russia was perhaps thinking it was paranoid in 1999, the events of 2004 were a provocation. Such actions surely fed into Putin’s rhetoric as he went on to win a second term as president that same year. By the end of 2004, and throughout the beginning of 2005, after several perceived provocations, the Russian leadership was taken aback by the surprise Orange revolution in Ukraine and the subsequent spontaneous protests in Russia, which grew at an alarming rate. The alarm bells sounded and Putin was convinced: this was an attempt to control domestic politics in Russia by the US and its NATO allies, thus refraining from cooperating with Moscow at any cost.

An attempt to include Georgia – on Russia’s southern borders – in NATO sparked a massive diplomatic crisis and a war between both countries in 2008, which led to Russian support of both South Ossetia, and Abkhazia, Georgia’s breakaway regions. A few years later, the uprising in Syria began, threatening Russia’s vital access to the Mediterranean Sea and the rest of the world. The following years, Russia went on the offensive in regaining its geopolitical position in the world, by supporting Assad in Syria, keeping Europe’s dependency on Russian oil, helping forge the Iran nuclear deal, and giving asylum to Edward Snowden. The main trigger that delved the US-Russian relations back into their worst since the Cold War was the NATO membership offer to Ukrainian and the revolution that unseated the Prime Minister, which led to Russian support of ethnic Russian rebels in the east, and the annexation of Crimea. In the face of international pressure and sanctions, Putin held steadfast in order not to be literally backed into a geopolitical corner. With this, he had continued his policy of frozen conflicts around Russia’s borders, to ensure NATO’s inability to ever reach so close to the Russian heartland.

His tensions with Obama persisted in the years to come with increasing rhetoric and sanctions and eventually led to the onslaught of allegations that Russia had interfered in the US election to help elect a friendlier Donald Trump. In retrospect, the US’, and by association, NATO’s paranoia of Russian resurgence, in addition to the evolution of the cold war policy of Russian containment to Russian encirclement, created a self-fulfilling prophecy in which the Russians felt encircled, and the need to protect their interests in the face of what they thought was an existential threat. It is difficult to say where the relations between the West and Russia will go after such a tumultuous couple of decades, but it is highly possible, that one way to allay European concerns about Russian military harassment would have been to extend an allied hand to Russia to join NATO after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Such a move would have allowed all allied countries to be directly militarily up-to-date with Russia’s actions, with coordinated cooperation and dialogue. To put it plainly, all cards would be on the table. Decades of uncertainty in Eastern Europe could have been avoided. If that seems too far-fetched of a hindsight theory, then at the very least, NATO should have stopped while it was ahead, avoiding the curse of the own goal, and ensuring that its existence wasn’t made irrelevant in the face of the ‘Russian bear’.

Military alliances aren’t a new phenomenon, and they will most likely never stop existing, but their purposes and their aims must evolve over time, for the sake of preventing a self-fulfilling prophecy. A country that does not understand why it is such a threat, since it viewed itself as a cooperative partner in the years after the Soviet collapse, and has not come to terms with its historical atrocities, will not understand the need for a military build-up near its borders. It will be threatened in return, and the cycle would go on and on into the new century. The only way to stop the inevitable, and truly find a middle ground that ensures everyone’s safety, is forging at least, a military relationship or guarantee, a final ‘reset’, similar to the one Secretary of State Clinton attempted to create in everything but substance. But we’re a long way from there.