Further, long before the NYT debate in 2013, the clamour for “terminating” NATO had been growing in several European countries. Just days before the US presidential election in November 2004, The Guardian’s influential security affairs columnist, Jonathan Steele, wrote: “Nato is a threat to Europe and must be disbanded.” “An alliance which should have wound up when the Soviet Union collapsed now serves almost entirely as a device for giving the US an unfair and unreciprocated droit de regard over European foreign policy,” Steele added. Besides, it has been now over three decades that the debate over the continuous existence, enlargement and expansion of NATO has engulfed the media, the academia, and the political class in the West.
Additionally, in a profound, insightful essay recently, the historian Mark Rice, while wondering whether NATO has any purpose in a post-Cold War world, reminds us “NATO’s mission from the very beginning was as much political as military.” Trying to be fair to both supporters and critics of NATO’s post-Cold War continuing expansion, Rice wrote: “For supporters of expansion, a larger NATO would provide security to democratizing countries, solidifying their transitions from communism and opening new economic prosperity through greater connections with the European Union; on the other hand, critics of enlargement argue that the new members would not offer NATO much military or strategic benefit, and that those countries would be better served through other organizations, including the OSCE and EU.”
However, when speaking of the NATO existence and expansion, especially during the post-Cold War period – before the rise of “strongman” Vladimir Putin to power – no one can ignore Mary Elise Sarotte’s Not One Inch: Russia, America, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate, acknowledged by critics “the best-documented and best-argued history of the NATO expansion during the crucial 1989-1999 period.” Not One Inch (2021) builds on her earlier ground-breaking work 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe, adjudged the best book on NATO in post-Cold War era by the Financial Times in 2009.