Continuing from my last post on the matter, this deserves a separate entry…
NATO brought the West a half-century of security, and “this, in fact, is the beginning of another 50 years of peace,” said Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.), ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee and a key player in the ratification effort. “In a larger sense,” he added, “we’ll be righting an historical injustice forced upon the Poles, Czechs and Hungarians by Joseph Stalin.”
Various pro-NATO shills will tell you that the Czechs, Poles, and Hungarians wanted to join NATO, and that might have been true but without the approval of the Western countries, this would not be possible. There actually were voices that had the foresight and knew this will eventually lead to conflict.
There was opposition to NATO expansion:
In Russia, NATO expansion, which continues to be opposed across the entire political spectrum, will strengthen the nondemocratic opposition, undercut those who favor reform and cooperation with the West, bring the Russians to question the entire post-Cold War settlement, and galvanize resistance in the Duma to the START II and III treaties; In Europe, NATO expansion will draw a new line of division between the “ins” and the “outs,” foster instability, and ultimately diminish the sense of security of those countries which are not included;
In his memoir, Duty, Robert M Gates, who served as secretary of defense in the administrations of both George W Bush and Barack Obama, stated his belief that “the relationship with Russia had been badly mismanaged after [George HW] Bush left office in 1993”. Among other missteps, “US agreements with the Romanian and Bulgarian governments to rotate troops through bases in those countries was a needless provocation.” In an implicit rebuke to the younger Bush, Gates asserted that “trying to bring Georgia and Ukraine into Nato was truly overreaching”. That move, he contended, was a case of “recklessly ignoring what the Russians considered their own vital national interests”.
Insomniac Resurrected 