Joining NATO is not only about the conflict today, it's due to pretty much all generations in the area suffering due to their aggressive neighbor further to the east.
Joining NATO is not at all only up to the countries which apply. The US is more or less the game maker, with big countries like Germany, France, the UK etc. also having an important voice.
It’s not unexpected that the former Warsaw Pact countries would want to join. It is surprising to see the US being so short-sighted to allow these expansions considering that several of its own diplomats and foreign policy experts were warning against it.
Which was horrendously destructive, and the two World Wars fought using more modern weaponry were particularly awful. In fact, avoiding similar wars in Europe was part of the original justification for creating the EU, Europe has benefited tremenously from the almost a century of near-peace it's experienced, and this makes Russia's recent actions basically an existential threat to the rest of Europe.
It seems to me that the EU and US didn’t know when to stop and only looked at the potential economical and respectively geopolitical gains, while not giving enough weight to the risk of conflict when it was known what Russia’s red lines were.
This was a policy blunder. Looking at it from a moral or international law perspective is a dead end when the primary driver of the chain of events leading to today was geopolitics.
Russia has consistently been a bad neighbor that keeps on threatening or playing weird tricks against other countries. They have invaded multiple neighbors in the last 100 years, where the rest of Europe has become more peaceful.
There is a clear danger to peace in Europe, and that's why countries want to join NATO.
Why do you think that letting Eastern European countries join NATO is misguided? So far, it has been the number one reason that Russia hasn't invaded any other countries in the region.
I assume you’ve led with Germany to address the very obvious WW2, when Germany turned the entire continent into a bloodbath. Ok, let’s skip that one :-)
There were the Cod Wars, which were mostly boat ramming affairs, if it weren’t for the fact that Iceland threatened to leave NATO, expel US forces and broke diplomatic relations with the UK at some point.
There was the Turkish Cypriot conflict, which continues to smolder until the present day.
Quite a few civil wars and uprisings.
Then the big Yugoslav war, where a defensive alliance oddly decided to go on the offensive.
The next big war was the current one in Ukraine.
Rather quiet given Europe’s bloody past. But if we look outside Europe, we see that the warfare just moved to other places. Falklands, Iraq twice, Syria, Libya. Not to mention the French and British colonial empires.
Core NATO are no slouches at invading and making war. So what’s the point in trying to make Russia seem irredeemable? We measure with very different standards what we do vs. what they do. Makes it easier to justify militarization, spending enormous amounts on weapons, reducing civil liberties, etc if you have an evil enemy.
Edit: forgot to answer your question about expansion. Because the likely outcome of not expanding would have been Belarus, Georgia or Ukraine in the 00’s, not invasions and war. This is not some far-fetched theory, Russian and ex-USSR leaders were repeatedly advocating for it and US and German/French politicians were obviously aware of it and in agreement. Post Bush the 1st the US changed its policy and went on a NATO expansion quest.
We don't need to go into that long history. Most of these CEE countries have been invaded by Russia in the last 100 years.
> It’s not unexpected that the former Warsaw Pact countries would want to join. It is surprising to see the US being so short-sighted to allow these expansions considering that several of its own diplomats and foreign policy experts were warning against it.
It actually worked out well. Not letting e.g. Baltics into NATO/EU would almost certainly mean they have been already absorbed back into Russia. The rest of CEE would be vassalized.
Why?
That sounds reasonable to me, just like the neighboring countries doing likewise - joining a pact to defend against Russia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_Security_Treaty_Org...
