Many people criticized Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul yesterday for allegedly making comments supportive of Russian President Vladimir Putin during a Senate hearing. The comments came during an exchange between Paul and Secretary of State Antony Blinken about the crisis in Ukraine. Paul argued that NATO expansion had provoked Moscow, which led to the invasion, and that Russia has attacked only former Soviet republics. Paul’s critics claimed this echoed Putin’s propaganda. It didn’t, and they are wrong. Furthermore, such criticism reveals a startling lack of knowledge of facts.
I am somewhat familiar with those facts, having majored in Russian and Eastern European history before taking an internship at the State Department.
Paul stated that Putin has only attacked countries that were once part of the Soviet Union. (He initially said Russia by mistake before correcting himself.) That is true. He invaded Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 and 2022. This is not propaganda. It does not justify Putin’s invasion of Ukraine — something that Paul also emphasized yesterday, which was ignored by many of his left-wing critics.
“While there is no justification for Putin’s war on Ukraine,” Paul said, “it does not follow that there’s no explanation for the invasion.” For any intelligent person, this is not too complicated to understand.
One explanation for the invasion pertains to NATO expansion. The idea that eastward expansion of NATO and the admission of former Soviet republics would antagonize Russia has been the subject of discussion since the 1990s. The origins of this stem from an alleged promise the United States made to Russia during negotiations for the reunification of Germany in 1990 that NATO would expand “not one inch” eastward from Germany.
There is some controversy over whether this promise was actually ever offered. But historical precedent warned that the eastward expansion of NATO might provoke Russia into military conflict. None of the experts who issued this warning years ago are considered Putin apologists.
Renowned American diplomat George Kennan spoke of the dangers of any NATO eastward expansion. Kennan was the author of the famous “Sources of Soviet Conduct” article in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs. At the time, to protect his identity, Kennan used the pseudonym “Mr. X.” Kennan was also the creator and brains behind the policy of containment that the U.S. adopted during the Cold War.
Writing in 1998, Kennan noted, “It is my understanding that Gorbachev on more than one occasion was given to understand, in informal talks with senior American and other Western personalities, that if the USSR would accept a united Germany remaining in NATO, the jurisdiction of that alliance would not be moved further eastward.” (His words are published in the Congressional Record.) “We did not, I am sure, intend to trick the Russians; but the actual determinants of our latter behavior — lack of coordination of political with military policy, and the amateurism of later White House diplomacy — would scarcely have been more creditable on our part than a real intention to deceive.”
Kennan also wrote in a 1997 New York Times op-ed that “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era. Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion … to restore the atmosphere of the Cold War to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”
Another example is that of former Sen. John Warner of Virginia, who opposed NATO expansion eastward for several reasons — one being his concerns that it would antagonize Russia. In 1998, he warned that doing so would be equivalent to taking a “red-hot poker and sticking it in [Russia’s] ribs and saying we’re going to bring these nations closer and closer to their borders.” Moreover, he compared such expansion to the Soviet Union’s Iron Curtain but instead dubbed NATO expansion an “iron ring.”
“I do believe this replaces, symbolically, the Iron Curtain that was established in the late forties, which faced west, with now an iron ring of nations that face east to Russia,” Warner said. His concerns drew bipartisan support at the time.
Former U.S. Ambassador to Russia William J. Burns was another credible voice to warn repeatedly against NATO’s eastward expansion. In 1995, Burns wrote in a memo while serving as counselor for political affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, “Hostility to early NATO expansion is almost universally felt across the domestic political spectrum here.”
In 2008, Burns wrote in a memo to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players … I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”
Burns is also far from being a Putin apologist. In fact, President Joe Biden selected him to lead the CIA.
The truth of the matter is that Paul brought up valid points to Blinken — points that many Democrats refuse to acknowledge only now that the situation has changed. Such criticism is nothing more than willful ignorance by uninformed people without knowledge of facts or history. Any criticism that Paul’s comments were Russian propaganda is political theater that should not be taken seriously.
