"One of the ironies of Nato enlargement was that it was opposed most strongly by establishment intellectuals and military historians. George Kennan described the prospect as ‘a strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions’, which could destabilise Eastern Europe and resurrect Cold War hostilities. In 1998, John Lewis Gaddis bemoaned that the decision to admit Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic was taken with almost no public debate and that ‘with remarkably few exceptions’ historians saw it as ‘ill-conceived, ill-timed and above all ill-suited to the realities of the post-Cold War world’. Enlargement violated the principle of magnanimity in victory, and risked driving Russia to forge an anti-hegemonic alliance with China. From the left, Peter Gowan argued in 1999 that rhetoric about spreading democracy was cover for a desire to eliminate Russian political influence from the region. That entailed significant risk of future conflict, since Russia wouldn’t always be weak. More than two decades before the event, Gowan predicted that the presence of Nato infrastructure on Poland’s borders could ‘very rapidly’ lead to crisis in Ukraine."
Link here.
