The 1990s were a weird time. The economy boomed and, in the wake of the Cold War, no one could seem to agree on what was actually important in international relations. Yet decisions taken in the 1990s shape today’s international environment and many of them have generated a fair amount of retrospective debate, maybe none more so than the decision to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to include a range of former Soviet states. In the next two Deep Dives, we’ll look at some recent scholarship on NATO expansion and its consequences, positive and negative.

In the latest issues of “International Security,” M.E. Sarotte has an article that draws on recently declassified documents from the Clinton administration to break down how the internal American debates over NATO expansion actually went down at the time. What was actually on the table and how close did we come to a radically different European security arrangement than the one we have now?

Sarotte’s research narrows the key disagreement down to two broad groups: people who supported the quick inclusion of a few, strategically important countries into the alliance, and people who supported a longer process that would include all of Europe, along with Russia, and had the potential to eventually supplant NATO altogether. The latter group had a program lined up to enact their plan, the Partnership for Peacekeeping (PfP).

The PfP, now basically forgotten, was an effort to create a middle ground between NATO expansion and the early-'90s status quo. It would be open to all European states, and would initially involve much more limited requirements and commitments from member states than those demanded by NATO. Early on, the idea was very popular within the Clinton administration, as it offered a way to pursue security engagement in post-Soviet Europe without appearing to threaten Russia.

Yet PfP ultimately floundered. Though it solved a number of problems for American policymakers, it did little to address the concerns of post-Soviet states like Poland, which were actively seeking NATO membership as a security guarantee against Russia. Russia itself also undermined the PfP approach with diplomatic and military machinations that made other Europeans wary about sharing an alliance with them. Most of all, Sarotte argues, it was American domestic politics that killed PfP. When Republicans won a decisive congressional victory in 1994, part of their Contract With America platform was an explicit commitment to NATO expansion, which the Clinton administration found difficult to ignore. After the 1994 midterms, bureaucrats in favor of narrow NATO expansion were in the ascendancy and PfP withered on the vine.

Like all great articles drawing from archival research, Sarotte’s work includes some great anecdotes. Russian president Boris Yeltsin drunkenly agreeing to support Poland’s accession into NATO and then trying to walk back his statement when he woke up the next morning is a classic, as is Tom Donilon’s observation about the relative power of Secretary of State Warren Christopher and the ambassador to former Soviet states (and Clinton confidante), Strobe Talbott: “There’s only one person in this building the President calls Sunday night to see how he’s doing, and that person isn’t Warren Christopher.” The money quotes, though, are from policymakers looking back at the NATO expansion process and lamenting the death of PfP. Even by 1997, then-Sen. Joe Biden was wondering if “continuing the Partnership for Peace … may arguably have been the better way to go.”

Arun Venugopal accompanied an FBI informant as the informant told the bureau that he would no longer be spying on American mosques for them. The informant, an Uzbek man who overstayed his tourism visa in the US and agreed to provide information about the Muslim community in New York indefinitely to keep from being deported, enlisted the help of activists and lawyers to extricate himself from the bureau’s deal. So far, the FBI has not punished the informant and he remains in the US.

Tyler Bellstrom highlighted a key tension in trying to evaluate the Trump administration’s foreign policy record: prioritizing policy versus prioritizing process. When President Donald Trump recently ousted bombing enthusiast John Bolton as national security adviser, many progressives cheered the exit of a figure who consistently advocated for a foreign policy rooted in violence. Others, however, saw Bolton’s firing as evidence of a decaying policy process within the White House — even bad policy, they seemed to argue, is preferable to policy arrived at without consideration through proper channels.
 

Tara Smith examined the question of whether, as the former Brazilian environment minister, Marina Silva, alleged, the ongoing Amazon rainforest fires constitute a crime against humanity. Extending the legal definition to include environmental crimes would be unprecedented, but there has been movement in that direction. The chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court has pledged to take on crimes that result in major environmental damage, but so far only within the ICC’s existing legal framework.

If you ever need a reminder about what people actually mean when they say “selecting on the dependent variable,” here you go.

The internet has ushered in a golden age of reading white boards in the backgrounds of photos (just ask the Sacramento Kings), but this thread might have the best example ever. What is up with Taylor’s calves?

Take off your pants, jacket and tinfoil hat.

It’s become fashionable to complain about pumpkin spice latte season’s gradual encroachment into summer, but to the arms tracking community, the PSL’s popularity has a different connotation.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last week joined the astonishingly long list of white politicians who, at one point in their lives, thought it was cool to dress in blackface. Never slow to turn a racism sandwich into a double-decker, a Fox News producer looked at one of the photos of Trudeau in blackface and apparently said to themself, “Yup, that’s what a Hezbollah operative looks like!”

The US Defense Department’s tweet threatening to kill any 22-37-year-olds who dare step into Area 51 was stupid for a lot of reasons, but chief among them has to be the content of the photo itself. Is the US Air Force really trying to intimidate the generation that revolutionized open-source intelligence with a photo of a bunch of unarmed airmen and a plane ill-equipped for close air support?

The State Department stays winning.