As much as U.S. militarism and imperialism should be criticized, it has to be acknowledged that in Eastern Europe it is not the U.S. or NATO who have been an existential threat. In the twentieth century the formative experience for the countries of the region was direct and indirect Soviet control. States like Hungary, Czechoslovakia, or Poland, although nominally independent, were not free to pursue their own policy—either domestic or foreign. Hungary and Czechoslovakia were invaded by the Soviet Union when they tried to steer off the Moscow-prescribed course. Poland’s Soviet-imposed authorities brutally repressed popular protests in 1956, twice in the 1970s, and in 1981. Ukraine didn’t even have the luxury of formal independence and for their opposition to forced collectivization, Ukrainians paid a dear price: Holodomor, the deliberately engineered famine, killed between three and 12 million people. Eastern European calls for NATO and EU membership stem from this historical experience of oppression. Any analysis that does not acknowledge it is doomed to be incomplete at best and false at worst.
This leads us to the second point: NATO did not expand into “Eastern Europe.” Czechia, Poland, and Hungary in 1999 and the Baltic countries among others in 2004 actively sought membership in the alliance. This is not just semantics. For the historical reasons mentioned above, the West has been a desired political direction associated with prosperity, democracy, and freedom—despite the limitations of Western liberal capitalist democracies and the implementation of that model in Eastern Europe. Being at the receiving end of Russian imperialism, many Eastern Europeans looked forward to membership in NATO as a means of securing their sovereignty. NATO, in other words, would not have “expanded” into Eastern Europe if the Eastern European nations had not wanted it and actively pursued it.
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