On July 26, 1949, Ohio Senator Robert Taft delivered a speech in which he explicated his reasons for voting against ratification of the North Atlantic Treaty. His remarks included the following:

“If we undertake to arm all the nations around Russia from Norway on the north to Turkey on the south, and Russia sees itself ringed about gradually by so-called defensive arms from Norway and Denmark to Turkey and Greece, it may form a different opinion. It may decide that the arming of Western Europe, regardless of its present purpose, looks to an attack upon Russia. Its view may be unreasonable, and I think it is. But from the Russian standpoint, it may not seem unreasonable. They may well decide that if war is the certain result, that war might better occur now rather than after the arming of Europe is completed.

How would we feel if Russia undertook to arm a country on our border; Mexico, for instance?” Taft correctly anticipated a future in which NATO expansion would provoke a military response from Russia. He also foresaw the rationale behind Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine; namely the fact that NATO’s encirclement of Russia would make Moscow feel threatened.

In September 2014, NATO began delivering arms to Ukraine as part of an effort to combat pro-Russian separatist forces in the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. In June 2015, the United States proposed a deployment of tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles to Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania as part of an effort to shore up NATO training exercises. In December 2015, Poland considered participating in a NATO program in which countries without nuclear weapons would be able to borrow them from the United States. In January 2017, NATO carried out a “large-scale defensive drill” along the Polish-Lithuanian border. In March 2018, the U.S. provided “chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear defense training” to the Estonian military. And in August 2019, NATO upgraded a ballistic missile defense system in Romania. Taft’s dire prediction elucidated the contradiction at the heart of the North Atlantic Treaty. In attempting to guarantee the security of Western Europe, it instead increased the likelihood that the region would face hostilities from the east. It was only a matter of time before Russia took stock of the military activity to its west and decided that a preventive strike would be its best course of action. …

On February 24, 2022, Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, thus fulfilling the prophecy outlined by Taft. That conflict is now in its fourth year. By all accounts, it is unlikely to end anytime soon, even with an additional series of peace talks currently taking place in Istanbul.

Nearly thirty-five years after the end of the Cold War, NATO remains a relic of a bygone era. The West insisted that its preservation would ensure peace. They claimed that expanding NATO eastward would forestall or prevent Russian aggression, guaranteeing freedom and prosperity for Eastern Europe. They were wrong.