The Pros Cons and Cons of NATO Expansion

In a post by Peter Beinart on the “generation gap” in attitudes about Ukraine he produces a litany of arguments against NATO expansion I to which I wish more people would pay attention:

Back to the generation gap over Russia and Ukraine. It sounds bizarre today but in the late 1990s, when the Clinton administration was considering expanding NATO to include merely Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic—barely anyone at that time was proposing admitting Ukraine—titans of American foreign policy cried out in opposition. George Kennan, the living legend who had fathered America’s policy of containment against the Soviet Union, called NATO expansion “a strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions.” Thomas Friedman, America’s most prominent foreign policy columnist, declared it the “most ill-conceived project of the post-Cold War era.” Daniel Patrick Moynihan, widely considered the most erudite member of the US Senate, warned, “We have no idea what we’re getting into.” John Lewis Gaddis, the dean of America’s Cold War historians, noted that, “historians—normally so contentious—are in uncharacteristic agreement: with remarkably few exceptions, they see NATO enlargement as ill-conceived, ill-timed, and above all ill-suited to the realities of the post-Cold War world.”

I consider the notion of adding Ukraine or Georgia to NATO as bordering on the insane. Each additional member admitted to an alliance should strengthen the alliance not weaken it. This is the opposite of synergy.