Other countries now under NATO’s protective blanket, however, say the situation in Europe would be far worse if the alliance hadn’t expanded. Janis Sarts, the No. 2 at the Latvian Ministry of Defence, says Russia has been steadily honing its military under President Vladimir Putin and would not need the excuse of foreign antagonizing to show it off.
“NATO expansion produces security,” says Sarts, a career bureaucrat with the ministry who worked through Latvia’s inclusion in the alliance during the “big bang” period. “Our membership now, 10 years old in NATO, has proven that membership in NATO creates stability.”
But membership just as easily could not have happened. Latvia and its sister Baltic countries capitalized on a narrow time frame in the early 2000s. If they had waited just a few years, Sarts says, their easterly neighbor would have interfered.
“By that time Putin’s Russia had been created, and they would have done many things to avoid that kind of scenario,” he says. Russia’s military and foreign influence has only increased since 2008, when it invaded Georgia and seized territory it still holds. Sarts cites its special forces and maneuvering capabilities as particularly strong now.
Such forces will likely deter further Eastern European countries from joining NATO, he adds.
Western leaders say they’re only getting started
“If there were people questioning NATO’s purpose as it hit, earlier this year, its 65th birthday … those thoughts have been retired. NATO clearly has a new raison d’être, or its old raison d’être has been brought forward,” Alexander Vershbow, NATO’s deputy director general, said at a breakfast meeting with reporters this month. “It’s valuable to the U.S. to have a ‘coalition in waiting,’ which is what NATO is.”