The Digital India Will Soon Get The Digital Rupee

 The NATO Expansionism.

~Preet

When Russia launched a military invasion of Ukraine, the ostensible motive for this act of territorial aggression was the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's eastward expansion (NATO). NATO's expansionism threatened to enable Ukraine to join the alliance as a treaty partner at some unspecified moment in the future, bringing this transatlantic security coalition within striking distance of Russia's western frontiers. Earlier, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) held an emergency special session to consider a resolution calling for Russia to remove its troops unconditionally.

NATO is a military alliance founded in April 1949 by the United States, Canada, and several Western European states to guarantee collective protection against the Soviet Union under the North Atlantic Treaty (also known as the Washington Treaty). The alliance presently has 30 members, with North Macedonia becoming the newest to join in 2020. When NATO was founded in 1949, its self-declared objective was threefold: 

• Dissuading Soviet expansionism. 
• Through a robust North American presence on the continent, preventing the return of nationalist militarism in Europe. 
• Encouraging political union throughout Europe. 

The memory of the Nazi (Hitler) affilction and World War II clearly weighed strongly on the minds of NATO's founding members. Although NATO says that it was only "partially true" that its very premise was to address the danger posed by the former Soviet Union, its provisions placed a major focus on military cooperation and collective defence. Article 5 of the treaty, for example, states that "an armed assault on one or more of them (NATO members) shall be regarded an attack against them all," and that in response, each ally will take "such measures as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force." The larger background at the time was that the Soviet Union signed up communist nations of Central and Eastern Europe to the Warsaw Pact (1955), including Albania (which left in 1968), Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania. The Pact, a political-military partnership, was seen as a direct strategic counterbalance to NATO. Its emphasis at the time was the fact that, while East Germany remained a Soviet controlled portion of Germany, the Federal Republic of Germany had joined NATO by May 1955, and Russia began to be concerned about the ramifications of a reinforced and rearmed West Germany on its border. 

The Warsaw Pact was a cohesive, multilateral, political and military alliance aimed at linking Eastern European cities more firmly to Russia, which it effectively accomplished for several decades during the Cold War's harshest conflicts. Indeed, the Pact offered the Soviet Union the option of suppressing civic movements and opposition in European satellite republics, such as Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Poland in 1980-1981. All of that began to unravel in the late 1980s, when the sheer downward pressure of the inevitable economic decline in most Eastern European Pact (Warsaw Pact) members limited the capacity for military cooperation to make a genuine strategic impact throughout the region. As a result, it was scarcely surprising when East Germany left the Pact in September 1990 to be reunited with West Germany, and Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland quickly withdrew from all Warsaw Pact military exercises. Following the breakup of the Soviet Union, the Pact was officially abolished in early 1991.

Even as the Soviet Union disintegrated into Russia and former Soviet republics, NATO proceeded on a path of growth, encouraged by circumstances and the belief that the global balance of power was shifting in its favour. During the US presidency, NATO began to bring former Warsaw Pact states into the fold through several rounds of negotiation and enlargement. While Germany remained a member of NATO after reunification, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland joined the alliance in 1999. However, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia joined the treaty organisation in 2004. Albania and Croatia joined in 2009, Montenegro joined in 2017, and North Macedonia will join in 2020.

In the week preceding NATO's Bucharest Conference in 2008, NATO Allies applauded Ukraine's and Georgia's Euro-Atlantic ambitions for membership and agreed that both nations will join NATO. 

They went on to announce a period of intense engagement with both countries at a high political level to address the outstanding questions about their Membership Action Plan applications. 

This sounded the alarm in Russia, because the entire idea of Ukraine, a country with strong historical links to the Soviet Union, was contrary to Russian ideology.  This development led Russia to issue a warning to the US that no Russian leader could remain silent in the face of Ukraine's progress toward NATO membership.  That would be an act of hostility. This is only the most recent in a long list of NATO leaders' actions that Russia regards as a political betrayal.

In 1990, the United States warned Russia that NATO's authority would not be extended one inch to the east. While Russia used this remark to amplify its seeming displeasure at NATO's advance into the Baltic nations region. It is true that in early 1990, the focus of negotiations for the Two Plus Four agreement – which included East and West Germany as well as the United States, France, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom – was whether a united Germany would be a member of NATO. The United States intended to persuade Russia that NATO command structures and soldiers would not be relocated to the former German Democratic Republic's territory.

Domestically, it was a tough time in Russia because, following the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a failure to institutionalise democratic processes, a stable market economy, and a strong law and order system. Faced with domestic upheaval, former Russia began to view the Two Plus Four Treaty (Treaty on the Final Settlement with Regard to Germany, 1990) as a prohibition on NATO expansion east of Germany. Russia notified the United States that it had ruled out "extending NATO territory eastward." Throughout the 2000s, Russia continued in similar vein, expressing increasing anxiety and fury at NATO's gradual expansion into Eastern Europe, and declaring in Munich, Germany in 2007 that it is evident that NATO expansion has nothing to do with modernising the alliance or maintaining European security. On the contrary, it is a major provocation that undermines mutual confidence. Russia invaded Georgia and took control of several of its territorial regions in 2008, following NATO's announcement of its intention to admit Georgia and Ukraine to its alliance, and Russia marched into Ukraine and seized Crimea in 2014, as Ukraine moved closer to an economic alliance with the European Union.