But, as it turned out, Western powers, especially the US, didn’t really care how this New World Order looked to Russia. Old members of the Soviet alliance, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic, joined NATO in 1997, with Clinton insisting simply, that ‘It is the right thing to do’. Clinton didn’t listen to George Kennan, the architect of America’s policy of containment towards the Soviet Union, who clearly understood the implication of NATO enlargement. Writing in the New York Times in February 1997, he warned that ‘expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era’.
He added: ---- ‘Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the Cold War to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.’
Under George W Bush, the US continued to use NATO to fashion a Europe almost directly defined against Russia. Putin’s half-baked appeals for Russia’s own membership were repeatedly met with blank looks, while the Baltic states Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia became NATO members in 2004. And in 2009, Croatia and Albania were also admitted.