Abstract
President Trump has repeatedly stated that the United States would abandon NATO, yet outside analysts have few means of tracing the rationale behind such a choice. A better understanding of the past impulses underpinning Washington's behaviour towards the Alliance could help inform that debate, and to this end the paper seeks to explain why the United States favoured Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic joining NATO in 1999. After the Cold War, many scholars thought Washington's desire not only to retain but to expand the Alliance puzzling; existing explanations emphasised personal beliefs, normative aspects, domestic politics, or hedging against Russia. Drawing on recently declassified American and British archives and numerous interviews with former officials, the paper finds these accounts insufficient and proposes instead that the Clinton Administration sought enlargement to safeguard European stability and enhance US influence over the continent, two goals deemed necessary for furthering US prosperity. Constructing its explanation inductively from thousands of declassified Bush-era documents and then testing it against Clinton-era evidence, the paper shows that a healthy, enlarged Alliance was seen as the best instrument to contain European instability and protectionism while sidestepping regional security mechanisms that could render NATO obsolete.
Panel: Session II
Joint Policy Workshop 2019 programme
Cite this presentation
@inproceedings{eiss-JPW2019-explaining-the-us-decision-to-enlarge-nato,
author = {Liviu Horovitz and Elias Götz},
title = {Explaining the US Decision to enlarge NATO},
booktitle = {European Security Studies Conference 2019},
year = {2019},
url = {https://eiss-europa.com/papers/JPW2019-explaining-the-us-decision-to-enlarge-nato.html}
}