In reflecting on the disastrous consequences of NATO enlargement that followed on the heels of our victory in the Cold War—a decision that George F. Kennan characterized as the most fateful error of U.S. foreign policy in the post-Cold War era—it harkened back to March 12, 1947, the day that President Harry Truman urged Congress to provide economic and humanitarian assistance to Greece and Turkey, which was subsequently called the Truman Doctrine. The British government had informed our government that it lacked the resources to continue to provide aid to those two nations, which were on the front lines of the Cold War in the eastern Mediterranean. To convince Congress that the U.S. had to step in and provide help, however, Truman’s message went beyond assistance to Greece and Turkey by appealing to universal values: democracy vs. totalitarianism. “I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures,” Truman said. “I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.”  

When George Kennan heard Truman’s words, he shuttered at the thought of the potential disastrous consequences that would follow. In the first volume of his memoirs, Kennan wrote that Truman’s words “placed our aid to Greece in the framework of a universal policy rather than in that of a specific decision addressed to a specific set of circumstances.” “It implied,” Kennan continued, “that what we had decided to do in the case of Greece was something we would be prepared to do in the case of any other country . . .” There was danger, Kennan wrote, in the “sweeping language” Truman used to justify the policy of aiding Greece and Turkey. Not every country’s independence was important to U.S. interests. Nor should “democracy” be a criterion for aiding other countries.  

Kennan noted that this tendency to universalize American foreign policy—“to seek universal formulae or doctrines in which to clothe and justify particular actions”—would bedevil U.S. foreign policy for the next two decades, especially in Vietnam in the 1960s. It bedevils U.S. foreign policy even today. Kennan called this phenomenon an unfortunate American tendency that eschews prudence and erases important distinctions about diverse events. In other words, it is an ideology that rejects realism. 

Kennan was not alone in decrying the potential consequences of the Truman Doctrine. The influential columnist Walter Lippmann in a series of articles that were collected into a book titled The Cold War wrote about the “liabilities of the Truman Doctrine which must in practice mean inexorably an unending intervention in all countries that are supposed to ‘contain’ the Soviet Union.” The Truman Doctrine, Lippmann warned, set the stage for an “ideological crusade” to defend and spread democracy. It will lead, he explained, to “destructive and exhausting entanglements” that are not in the vital interests of the United States. 

The same ideological mindset and rejection of realism that framed the Truman Doctrine informed the supporters of NATO enlargement: the promotion of universal democracy. The roots of that ideology are found in the Wilson administration’s approach to World War I and the post-World War I peace settlement. Wilson fought the war and sought a peace based not solely on American national interests but to “make the world safe for democracy” and to force all other nations to abide by his Fourteen Points and agree to resolve disputes by submitting them to a League of Nations. It was the first real attempt at the universalization of American foreign policy. It failed miserably, disastrously, but the ideology persisted, especially, but not exclusively, within the leadership of the Democratic Party.  

President Franklin Roosevelt sought to revive this approach during the Second World War with the Atlantic Charter, his promotion of the Four Freedoms (freedom of speech and worship, freedom from want and fear), and the United Nations. FDR’s ideological vision failed, too, but his immediate successor Harry Truman and virtually every Democratic president thereafter took up the cause of universalizing American and democratic values. The most recent Democratic administration framed international relations as a universal struggle between democracy and autocracy.  

The push for NATO enlargement followed closely upon the end of the third global struggle of the 20th century, known as the Cold War. Instead of viewing our victory in the Cold War as the defeat of a specific adversarial empire, U.S. presidents of both parties beginning with Bill Clinton, continuing with George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden, made the same mistakes that Wilson and FDR had made following the two previous wars—they attempted to universalize democracy. After all, we were told by some members of the foreign policy establishment that history had ended, there was a “new world order” defined by America’s “unipolar moment.” All the major countries of the world, including Communist China, would become part of the “rules-based international order.”  

So, without an enemy to confront, NATO, instead of dissolving as alliances had in the past after wars, expanded from 16 members to 32 members, and its borders moved closer and closer to Russia. The predictable result was Russian aggressions in Georgia and especially in Ukraine (which Bush 43 publicly advocated for NATO admission), which have culminated today in a disastrous war between Russia and Ukraine and a heightening of tensions between NATO and Russia that could spiral out of control at any moment. That does not mean that Russia’s aggression was or is justified, but it should be viewed in the full context of U.S. and Western diplomacy between 1992 and today. Kennan’s and Lippmann’s warnings about the unintended consequences of the Truman Doctrine echo in the unintended consequences of NATO enlargement. This is what happens when you abandon realism in favor of universal crusades.