A FINAL OBJECT of my indignation is mainstream American attitudes and policies towards Russia and China. Those attitudes appear to hold serious dangers since they seem to be shared by the Western press in general and probably the majority of politically interested people, and even of the ben pensanti of Europe.

THE ENDING OF THE COLD WAR

There were those who saw the end of the Cold War as being also the end of large-bloc divisions in world politics. John Mearsheimer, at a Ditchley conference in 1990, convened by the British, French, American and German prime ministers/presidents predicted a dismemberment of the now- no-longer-needed NATO as Europeans, no longer afraid of those massed Russian tanks became reluctant to fund it, and a probably dangerous return to nineteenth century national jostling more likely than the Cold War years to be prone to violence.

What he did not account for was the American missionary zeal to spread the American way of life to the whole world, and to use the maintenance and expansion of NATO as one of its main instruments. After much uncertainty and debate in the early 1990s this became explicit in 1998 when the Senate, by a vote of eighty-three to nineteen, endorsed the Clinton administration's decision to expand NATO. It would, said Clinton, ‘help to erase the Cold War dividing line and contribute to our strategic goal of building an undivided and peaceful Europe’. Russia saw this, obviously, as a threat, but Yeltsin was so much in awe of the United States that he allowed himself to be mollified by the establishment, also in 1998, of the NATO-Russia Permanent Joint Council.

At the ending of the Cold War, Gorbachev had been promised that, even though the Warsaw pact was doomed to disintegration by its inability to prevent the unification of Germany, NATO, in exchange for Russia's agreement to accept that unification, would not seek to expand ‘one inch to the east’.

Never was a promise so handsomely broken. Wikipedia has a good summary of NATO's expansion: