Lockheed Martin, lamb chops, and landlocked navies: the real story of NATO expansion and how this Yale historian tried to stop it

In 1998, the historian John Gaddis warned the US Senate that enlarging the bloc would backfire. He was dismissed... weapons makers weren’t.

History rarely shouts at us, instead, more often, it mutters cautions in the margins; waiting to be ignored. In April 1998, John Lewis Gaddis (Yale’s Robert A. Lovett Professor, Pulitzer Prize biographer of the legendary George Kennan, and the man the New York Times itself once called the “Dean of Cold War Historians”) wrote one of those warnings.

His op-ed, “The Senate Should Halt NATO Expansion,” now reads less like commentary and more like a prophecy.

“Peace settlements work best when they include, rather than exclude, former adversaries… Within six years of their surrender in 1945, Germany and Japan were firmly within American-designed security alliances. Both settlements survived for decades. The post–World War I settlement, however, excluded Germany.” — Gaddis, NYT, 1998

“Why exclude the Russians?” he asked bluntly. “The lessons of history on this point seem obvious.”

Indeed, it should have been obvious. But Bill Clinton's administration, desperate to keep NATO on life support after the Soviet Union’s collapse, chose the opposite road and instead of binding Russia in, it made Moscow the indispensable enemy. After all, what is a military bloc without a foe to justify the payroll?

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The State Department’s line at the time was that Russia would accept NATO’s march eastward and suck it up, but Gaddis, with the dry wit of a historian long inured to official delusions, skewered it: “The State Department assures us… that the Russians view this process with equanimity… Perhaps it will next try to tell us that pigs can fly.”

A quarter of a century later, those pigs are still grounded, and all of Europe lives in the long echo of that choice.

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This has nothing to do with security, and Gaddis knew it. Indeed, in 1997, the New York Times itself, back when it still had a streak of steel in its spine, laid bare what NATO expansion really meant.

“Arms Makers See Bonanza in Selling NATO Expansion,” read one headline.

“Defense contractors are acting like globe-hopping diplomats to encourage the expansion of NATO, which will create a huge market for their wares.”

Lockheed Martin, reeling from a post–Cold War drought, had spotted its rainmaker. Billions of dollars in sales of fighter jets, helicopters, radar systems, and spare parts were suddenly within reach; provided Congress could be persuaded to open the gates.

Weapons makers poured millions into lobbying and nonprofits with respectable names but defense cash in their veins sprang up, or expanded, chief among them the US Committee to Expand NATO. Its president, Bruce Jackson, spent his days as Lockheed’s director of strategic planning and his nights hosting senators at private dinners, plying them with lamb chops and red wine while Czech-born Madeleine Albright made the case for expansion.

It worked and as one senator joked at the time, the arms makers were so overeager for NATO’s march east that “we’ll probably be giving landlocked Hungary a new navy.” Making NATO bigger was the kind of crock of gold that could make a leprechaun orgasmic.

Poland alone talked of buying 150 F-16s at $20 million a pop while Joel Johnson of the Aerospace Industries Association spelled it out: “Whoever gets in first will have a lock for the next quarter-century.”

The potential market for fighter jets alone was $10 billion, which was big money at the time. Add in spare parts, electronics, radars, helicopters, computers, and the whole machinery of modern war, and the sums made a mockery of the moral language being used in Washington and Brussels, and Moscow itself under Boris Yeltsin.

All of this had nothing to do with "values."

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Gaddis found himself part of a group of lonely voices because outside his own guild, consensus was hardening: “I can recall no other moment when there was less support in our profession for a government policy,” he wrote, bewildered by how isolated he and a handful of others had become.

The Clinton administration’s failure, he insisted, was not tactical but intellectual because it hadn’t answered the most basic questions:

Who exactly would be included? How much would it cost? What was the real objective?

The answers, when they came, were evasions and the administration went on to admit that expansion wouldn’t stop with Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. The Baltics and Romania were already being penciled in as costs were downplayed; the official line was $1.5 billion over ten years, a figure so risible that the Congressional Budget Office put the real tab at $125 billion. And as for the objective, well, the talk was vague, alternating between democratization and integration, while privately, one official from a new member state admitted the real point was to show “once and for all that the Russians never have been and never will be part of European civilization.”

And there it was in all its raw xenophobia... not inclusion, but exclusion elevated into principle with the kind of sneer that should have been buried after the 1940s.

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History doesn’t offer counterfactuals, but it does taunt us with roads not taken advantage of and we can ask what if the West had followed the model of 1945 rather than 1919? What if Russia, like Germany or Japan, had been offered a stake rather than a snub?

Gaddis spelled it out plainly enough in 1998: “Peace settlements work best when they include rather than exclude former adversaries.” Instead, sadly, Clinton and Albright built a new dividing line, and NATO contractors cashed the cheques.

The consequences were foreseeable, and foreseen, it’s just that nobody with power wanted to listen. Defenders of expansion would later insist it stabilized fragile democracies and deterred aggression, but the loudest of those have long been on the payroll of the weapons companies usually through lucrative roles in the think tank racket.

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This may sound heretical with BRICS and the SCO grabbing headlines all around, but it isn’t too late even now. The West could still change course and bring Russia back into the fold, but it would require honesty and not the empty sloganeering about “values” that has long papered over a lucrative business model.

Here’s the awkward truth: Russians remain hooked on the West and pub talk in Moscow is still more about Real Madrid than Shanghai Port FC. Meanwhile, Sydney Sweeney makes a bigger splash than any Bollywood star and when it comes to taste, a German car still trumps a Chinese one. This may be anecdotal, of course, but it matters.

For all the conferences where the “Global South” is invoked like a prayer, it isn’t the language of the street where the cultural and historical pull westward is still there, buried under the media and political hysteria. If the psychosis lifted, on both sides, it's fair to say that a normalization of ties could tilt the pendulum back quickly.

Donald Trump and J.D. Vance seem to sense this, but the problem is with liberal elites who have made Russia their bête noire, a unifying cause to cover their own failures.

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Western Europe, meanwhile, is being hollowed out by the very alliance meant to defend it and you can see Germany stumbling in plain sight, stripped of the energy and markets it once took for granted. Welfare budgets are being gutted as NATO circles with its the next demand, such as talk of up to 5% of GDP; the figures keep climbing like a bar tab nobody remembers opening and it’s all mind boggling stuff for countries that are built on a totally different model.

And all the while, the same people who ask for this spending, such as Mark Rutte, keep ridiculing Russia. Only this week, the NATO boss dismissed Vladimir Putin as "the governor of Texas." Thus, implying that the country's economy was so weak that it wasn't really a threat to the West. But if Russia is really just “a gas station in a fur hat,” as the clichés go, why are we building arsenals fit for Armageddon and why the endless calls for more battalions, more shells, and more jets?

The answer lies in the same place it did in 1997: in the boardrooms of Lockheed and Raytheon.

Around the same time, John Gaddis saw the fork in the road, but the tragedy is that Washington chose the direction that served defense contractors, not peace. Of course, it doesn’t have to stay that way, however, the question is whether the West is prepared, even now, to take the path it once ignored.