1AC security claims are an ideologically driven narrative designed to justify US dominance. Russian threat inflation renders consideration of policy alternatives impossible

(Rajan Menon is the director of the grand strategy program at Defense Priorities and senior research fellow at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University ,https://bostonreview.net/articles/nato-and-the-road-not-taken/, 3-16)

Declassified documents demonstrate that President Boris Yeltsin expressed his opposition to NATO to the Clinton administration on several occasions, and that senior U.S. diplomats relayed to Washington the pervasive antipathy toward the policy within Russia’s foreign policy and national security apparatus. For example, in 1993, as Secretary of State Warren Christopher was about to depart for a meeting with Yeltsin, the chargé d’affaires at the U.S. embassy, James Collins, sent a cable warning that NATO expansion was “neuralgic to the Russians,” who feared that they would “end up on the wrong side of a new division of Europe . . . if NATO adopts a policy which envisions expansion into Central and Eastern Europe without holding the door open to Russia.” That outcome, warned Collins, “would be universally interpreted in Moscow as directed at Russia and Russia alone—or ‘Neo-Containment’, as Foreign Minister [Andrei] Kozyrev recently suggested.” NATO never had any serious intention of guaranteeing Ukraine security through membership. It left Kyiv in limbo. Collins was right. Consider what Yeltsin told President Bill Clinton during their May 10, 1995, meeting in Moscow: I want to get a clear understanding of your idea of NATO expansion because now I see nothing but humiliation for Russia if you proceed. How do you think it looks to us if one bloc continues to exist while the Warsaw Pact has been abolished? It’s a new form of encirclement if the one surviving Cold War bloc expands right up to the borders of Russia. Many Russians have a sense of fear. What do you want to achieve with this if Russia is your partner? [T]hey ask. I ask it too: Why do you want to do this? We need a new structure for Pan-European security, not old ones! Perhaps the solution is to postpone NATO expansion until the year 2000 so that later we can come up with some new ideas. Let’s have no blocs, only one European space that provides for its own security. Putin’s animosity toward NATO’s enlargement represented continuity, not a personal quirk, and was well understood in Washington. For example, in a February 2008 cable written shortly before the fateful Bucharest summit and addressed to the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (among others), the U.S. ambassador to Russia, William Burns, now the head of the CIA, noted: Foreign Minister [Sergei] Lavrov and other senior Russian officials have reiterated strong opposition, stressing that Russia would view further eastward expansion as a potential military threat. NATO enlargement, particularly to Ukraine, remains an ‘emotional and neuralgic’ issue for Russia, but strategic policy concerns also underlie strong opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. In Ukraine, these include fears that the issue could potentially split the country in two, leading to violence or even, some claim, civil war, which would force Russia to decide whether to intervene. In his 2019 memoir, The Back Channel, Burns notes that he made the same point, although more vividly, in a memo to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, also written in February 2008. “Ukraine’s entry into NATO,” he wrote, “is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.” It’s wrong, therefore, to reduce Russian aversion to NATO expansion to Putin’s paranoia and fear of democracy, or Russia’s historical baggage. No leader in Moscow liked the policy, and they minced no words about it. However, out of weakness and economic dependence on the West, and the United States in particular, they had to come to terms with it—including by signing the May 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act, and settling for sops such as the NATO-Russia Council, formed in May 2002. In the 1990s, Russia, led by an ailing and often inebriated Yeltsin, was near economic collapse and its armed forces were debilitated. After Putin became president in 2000, Russia gained the economic and military power to go beyond verbal objections to NATO. The catalyst was NATO’s decision related to Ukraine’s and Georgia’s membership at its Bucharest conclave. Thereafter, Russia turned from protests to pushback. The first sign of this change was the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia, which occurred soon after the Bucharest meeting. Then, in 2014, fearing that Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution would lead to alignment with NATO and the EU, Russia annexed Crimea and created two breakaway statelets in Ukraine’s Donbas region. The crisis that Putin’s war has created between Russia and the West can only be understood by bringing NATO expansion into the picture. However, this is not to say that the remote prospect of Ukraine entering the alliance at all justifies Putin’s decision to invade it. It does not. Still, it is worth thinking about the road not taken as it offers lessons for the future. The rupture that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has created between Russia and the West will likely persist as long as he remains president, perhaps longer. But it ought to be an occasion to reflect on whether the United States missed an opportunity, as early as 1989, to forge a European order that included Russia rather than one that kept it on the outside, increasing its sense of alienation and exclusion, and ensuring that it would have no stake in safeguarding it and would, instead, seek to destroy it. The history of NATO expansion raises the question of whether there was an alternative way of organizing Europe after the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989. As it happens, expanding the alliance toward the Russian border was not the only feasible choice. Once the Soviet-aligned communist governments in Eastern Europe (or East-Central Europe as the region is now called) began to crumble and Germany’s reunification became imminent, President Mikhail Gorbachev proposed disbanding both NATO and the Warsaw Pact in favor of a new, inclusive, trans-European security order stretching from the Atlantic to the Ural Mountains. President George H. W. Bush dismissed this idea and Gorbachev’s follow-up proposal for a unified but neutral Germany. Knowing that Gorbachev held a weak hand—he was battling political opponents at home and dependent on Germany to provide money for the 500,000 troops stationed there (who would eventually have to be sent home and housed and fed)—Bush insisted that NATO was in Europe to stay and that its writ would encompass all of a unified Germany. He understood that the United States needed NATO to remain a European power but was also, understandably, skittish about dismantling a structure that had worked for half a century. Leaders are often inclined, by default, to favor the status quo, especially when it favors them. Bush’s stance also suggests that, even at the tail end of the Cold War, the United States envisioned an enlarged NATO and understood that it would be impractical if the alliance’s troops and weapons were formally barred from eastern Germany, the corridor to East-Central Europe. Conceiving and creating a wholly new security system amid fast moving, unexpected events—the collapse of the communist states in the old Eastern Europe, the unraveling of the Soviet Union, the Soviet nuclear weapons remaining in what would become the independent states of Belarus and Ukraine—would have required an uncommon boldness of vision. The pity is that the United States didn’t give it any serious thought. Now, those with the most influence on U.S. foreign policy—those belonging to the executive branch and Congress or who work for the major newspapers and prominent think tanks—are in no mood to reflect on lost opportunities. To the contrary, along with the shock created by Putin’s attack on Ukraine, there is a mood of triumphalism. Russia’s aggression has been interpreted as a vindication of the decision to expand NATO. The prevailing view is that, if anything, the United States should double down and increase its military presence in Europe, including in NATO’s eastern flank. Indeed, this camp wants to make it permanent, even though Section IV of the NATO-Russia Founding Act stipulates that there will be no “additional permanent stationing of substantial combat forces” there. This call to station even more American troops and armaments in Europe is curious considering that European countries’ combined GDP ($15.3 trillion) is more than ten times Russia’s ($1.5 trillion). Moreover, Europe boasts world-class tech companies and many top-grade defense industries—in short, ample wherewithal for self-defense. What Europe lacks is political will, and that owes to the iron-clad U.S. defense guarantee that endures even thirty years after the Cold War. The watchword in Washington remains that the United States must maintain its status, as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright put it, as “the indispensable nation.” Part of that role involves serving as the protector par excellence for European countries that recovered from the ravages of World War II decades ago to become competitors of the United States in the global marketplace. The proper lesson to draw from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is that Europe must, at a measured but deliberate and demonstrable pace, move toward much greater self-reliance in defense, even if it eschews the more ambitious goal of “strategic autonomy.” Those, including me, who favor greater European autonomy in defense are not tipping their hats to Donald Trump. Unlike him, they are not calling for junking NATO overnight, seeking to extort money from European governments in exchange for continued U.S. protection, or damning them as deadbeats. Their basic point is that Europe can manage its own defense and should seek to do so gradually while preserving trans-Atlantic cooperation on a variety of fronts. In principle, this can be done within a reconfigured NATO or, eventually, without it.