NATO Expansion ‘Lit the Fuse’ on the Ukraine War

Key Points – Post-Cold War NATO expansion, which pushed a US-led military alliance to Russia’s borders, was a predictable and avoidable provocation that made the war in Ukraine all but inevitable.

-By promising Ukraine future membership in 2008 but denying it the formal security guarantee of Article 5, the West engaged in “provocation without protection,” leaving Kyiv dangerously exposed.

-This strategic blindness, which ignored Russia’s rational security concerns about encirclement, created the conditions for conflict.

-This same dynamic is now being repeated with North Korea, risking future wars if the West does not learn to practice strategic restraint.

NATO Expansion: How the Ukraine War Started?

Let’s stop lying to ourselves. The war in Ukraine wasn’t the product of madness, or delusion, or some freakish return of 19th-century imperialism. It was the result of power politics – pure, predictable, and avoidable. NATO expansion didn’t “justify” Russia’s invasion. But it did provoke it. Anyone still denying that is either dishonest or historically illiterate.

After the Cold War, Washington decided that it could expand a military alliance created to contain the Soviet Union right up to Russia’s border – without consequence. The logic was triumphalist. History had ended. Russia had lost. It would have to accept that NATO, a Western military alliance run by the United States, would keep absorbing states formerly under Moscow’s thumb. When objections were raised, they were dismissed. The warnings were loud and persistent – from Kennan, Mearsheimer, Burns, Kissinger. No matter. The alliance grew anyway.

Ukraine was the final straw. For Moscow, it wasn’t just another post-Soviet republic. It was the linchpin – the symbolic and strategic frontier. In 2008, NATO declared that Ukraine “will become a member.” That declaration was a turning point. It triggered a chain reaction. Russia invaded Georgia later that year. It annexed Crimea in 2014. It launched a full-scale war in 2022. Not because Putin lost his mind, but because he calculated – correctly – that NATO was closing in, that Ukraine was slipping out of Russia’s orbit, and that the West lacked the stomach to stop him.

What the West did was worse than provocation. It was provocation without protection. We encouraged Ukraine’s westward drift. We armed and trained its forces. We drew it into NATO’s institutional and operational orbit – but refused to extend full membership, refused to trigger Article 5. We created a client, not an ally. And we left it dangling. Ukraine got all the exposure and none of the shield.

It hasn’t been destroyed. That matters. Ukraine still stands. It has fought with determination and resilience. It controls most of its territory. But it has also been devastated. The war has gutted its economy, leveled cities, bled its population, and turned large parts of the country into rubble-strewn fronts in a grinding attritional campaign. None of that was inevitable. It was the price of geopolitical miscalculation.

The West told itself a story: that NATO was a force for peace; that it was defensive, benevolent, and value-neutral. It treated NATO expansion like a technicality – something no rational state could oppose. But in the real world, states don’t care about your intentions. They react to capabilities, alignments, and encroachment. And in Russia’s eyes, NATO’s behavior looked like a military coalition absorbing its neighbors and threatening to swallow what remained of its buffer zone. Not a values-based club, but a slow-motion siege.

This wasn’t just Russia being paranoid. It was Russia being rational. In international politics, great powers don’t let rival alliances expand freely into their near abroad. The United States certainly wouldn’t. Imagine a Chinese military alliance incorporating Mexico or Canada. It wouldn’t even get close. But we expected Russia to accept NATO on its doorstep – and even worse, to accept Ukraine, the keystone, joining the Western camp permanently.

And here’s the kicker: the lesson hasn’t been learned. The West still refuses to accept that this war was the outcome of its own strategic blindness. Instead, it recycles moralistic slogans, blaming the war entirely on authoritarianism or “civilizational conflict.” That makes it easier to justify escalation. It also guarantees we’ll stumble into the next war without understanding how we got here.

Look to the Korean Peninsula. The same dynamic is playing out. North Korea, another nuclear-armed pariah state, has drawn a clear conclusion from Ukraine: never disarm, never trust guarantees, never let the United States get too close. Pyongyang saw what happened to Ukraine when it gave up its nuclear weapons in the 1990s and accepted Western assurances. It watched NATO drift closer to Kyiv. It watched as Russia responded with war – and the West, predictably, failed to intervene directly.

Now North Korea is accelerating its modernization: solid-fueled ICBMs, hypersonics, tactical nuclear drills, rapid-launch systems. These are not vanity projects. They’re strategic deterrents. And they’re being built precisely because North Korea sees itself as next. Meanwhile, the U.S., South Korea, and Japan are tightening trilateral defense coordination. We call it deterrence. Kim Jong Un sees encirclement. Sound familiar?

The parallels are real. Ukraine existed in a grey zone – aligned with the West, but unprotected by treaty. So does Taiwan. So did Georgia. These are places where spheres of influence collide, and where overreach becomes dangerous. Realism doesn’t mean abandoning allies. It means recognizing where the firebreaks are, and how to avoid crossing them.

What’s needed now is restraint, not because restraint is soft or idealistic, but because it’s the only position grounded in strategic sanity. We cannot keep expanding alliance networks and ignoring the blowback. We cannot keep treating every non-aligned state as territory to be absorbed into “the West.” And we cannot pretend that nuclear-armed powers will indefinitely tolerate being boxed in without reacting.

Ukraine was the consequence of ignoring all of this. It was the price of forgetting how great powers behave. The war didn’t start because of some spontaneous imperial spasm. It started because we pushed too far, too fast, and expected there would be no consequences.

Now, the strategic environment is even more unstable. NATO is larger, but the risks are greater. Russia is dug in, not defeated. North Korea is modernizing, not deterring itself. China is watching, not backing down. And Washington – still high on post-Cold War fumes – is sleepwalking into another confrontation, convinced that history is on its side.

It isn’t. History doesn’t pick sides. It punishes illusions.

NATO expansion lit the fuse in Ukraine. If we refuse to acknowledge that fact, we’ll light the next one too – and next time, we may not be so lucky.

About the Author: Dr. Andrew Latham

Andrew Latham is a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities and a professor of international relations and political theory at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN. You can follow him on X: @aakatham.

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