Summary:
- US foreign policy has increasingly relied on political assumptions rather than observable facts, departing from traditional reality-based governance.
- The post-Cold War era offered an opportunity to balance Eastern European NATO integration, Russian nuclear disarmament, and Ukrainian security. Instead, Washington replaced the flexible Partnership for Peace framework with direct NATO expansion.
- Current European instability stems from three sequential US decisions: preserving NATO as the primary European security framework, expanding the alliance country by country, and placing no geographic limits on expansion into former Soviet territory.
- Extended conflict in Europe directly affects Asian nations through supply chain disruptions, energy and food volatility, and elevated nuclear risk, giving Pacific states a direct interest in regional stability.
In One Hundred Years of Solitude, a novel by Nobel Prize-winning Gabriel García Márquez, characters go about their everyday lives while coping with ghosts, premonitions, levitation and other seemingly impossible events. The book is a prime example of magical realism, a literary style where characters calmly accept supernatural elements that, surely, must not be real.
This ‘magical thinking’, argued Professor Mary Elise Sarotte, is exactly what is happening in the White House, where Cabinet members and advisors simply believe that the Strait of Hormuz is open or the Iranian regime has changed despite observable evidence to the contrary. She said this explains the current behaviour of the United States compared to previous bouts of cold, reality-based geopolitics, and has implications for the future.
Prof Sarotte, Director of the Brady-Johnson Programme in Grand Strategy, Yale University, traced the threads from the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union to the war in Ukraine today. This session, as part of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy’s S.T. Lee Distinguished Lecture series, was chaired by Associate Professor Chin-Hao Huang, Director of the Centre on Asia and Globalisation, and focused on the topic “From Post-Cold War Peace to Magical Realism: America, NATO, and Ukraine, 1989 to Today”.
To uncover how Europe arrived at its current crisis, Prof Sarotte spent years filing thousands of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, successfully declassifying transcripts of private conversations between U.S. President Bill Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin. “My takeaway was if the Kremlin is complaining about my documents, they must be good,” Prof Sarotte remarked.
Not One Inch and the Post-Cold War Settlement
After the Berlin Wall fell, the future of NATO and the Warsaw Pact was uncertain. US Secretary of State James Baker met Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and tentatively raised the idea of NATO not moving ‘one inch to the east’ – but only as speculation. President George H.W. Bush immediately told Baker to walk it back.
Yet West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl continued making similar assurances to Gorbachev. Bush urged Kohl to stop at a private Camp David meeting, arguing the West could offer cash instead. The strategy worked: the Soviets accepted a large sum of Deutschmarks in exchange for withdrawing their nearly 400,000 troops from East Germany, allowing unification. Gorbachev, however, was left bitter, feeling cheated.
Missed Opportunities
“One of the skills you have to develop to become a historian is to understand that from any given moment there are multiple timelines to the future,” Prof Sarotte said, referring to alternative possibilities of historic developments.
In 1992, Russia was at its most open to cooperation with the US. Boris Yeltsin, who had risen to power after a failed coup against Gorbachev, was eager to forge a new relationship with the West. But at this crucial moment, when Russia was most willing to engage, the US was consumed by its own domestic presidential election. By the time the Clinton administration was fully in place by late 1993, some of the momentum had been lost.
When Clinton attended his first NATO meeting as president in January 1994, he was besieged by Central and Eastern European countries desperate to join the alliance. They feared Russia had not truly changed. But Clinton argued that simply drawing a new dividing line farther east would leave Ukraine in a perilous position – alone and exposed with Russia.
And Ukraine mattered immensely. After the Soviet collapse, Ukraine had briefly become the third-largest nuclear power on earth, inheriting over a thousand strategic nuclear warheads, all aimed at American cities. American officials, including James Baker, made urgent visits to Kyiv to secure the removal of that arsenal. Ukraine's denuclearisation in exchange for security assurances from Russia, the US, and the UK was a high priority. But once Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons, it became strategically less important in Washington's calculations.
Clinton's alternative vision was the Partnership for Peace, a programme designed to allow countries to work towards NATO interoperability without immediately granting membership. It had a low barrier to entry and gave nations time to reform their militaries and establish civilian control. The goal was to avoid creating a new dividing line by building overlapping organisations: NATO, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, and the Partnership for Peace. Countries could remain just short of membership until a crisis pushed them over – exactly the path Finland would later follow. This, Prof Sarotte argued, represented a timeline to a far better future than the one we now inhabit.
The Decisive Reversal
“This period, the early 1990s, was the greatest moment of nuclear disarmament since the invention of the atomic bomb,” Prof Sarotte observed. The US and Russia were not merely taking missiles out of service – they were dismantling and destroying them. Maintaining this cooperative disarmament was in the interest of the entire planet. Any policy that risked derailing it, Clinton was warned, was dangerous.
Yet by December 1994, factors aligned that caused Clinton to abandon his careful approach. The First Chechen War broke out. Soviet troops finally withdrew from Germany, removing the last constraint on German support for enlargement. Republicans won the midterm elections on a platform calling for aggressive NATO expansion, and Clinton realised there were votes to be had among Polish and other Central Eastern European communities. And with Ukraine having denuclearised, leaving it on the far side of the line suddenly seemed less consequential.
At a pivotal meeting on 21 December 1994, Clinton changed his mind. He decided to expand NATO simply by adding countries one after another, drawing a new line across Europe. Secretary of Defense Bill Perry was so dismayed he nearly resigned. He later wrote in his memoirs that, in hindsight, he wished he had.
Squaring the Triangle
“Unlike circles, triangles can be squared,” Prof Sarotte pointed out. “This real big play would have been to square the triangle of post-Cold War peace.” The US could have pursued three goals simultaneously: allow Central and Eastern Europeans to fulfil their aspiration of joining NATO; maintain the crucial bilateral process with Russia of disarming and destroying nuclear weapons; and provide a safe berth for Ukraine in the emerging European security order. Instead, only one outcome was achieved – Central and Eastern Europe joined NATO, but at the cost of damaging US-Russian relations at a critical phase and leaving Ukraine exposed.
The US pursued a path that was maximally destructive to relations with Russia during a period of extraordinary nuclear cooperation. Putin would come to power on 31 December 1999 and eventually plunge Europe into the largest land war since World War II.
To prevent further escalation today, Prof Sarotte highlighted creative historical models for Ukraine’s eventual integration into NATO: the West German Model – entering NATO without formally recognising the legal loss or partition of occupied territories; and the Norwegian Model – joining NATO while voluntarily restricting foreign troops and nuclear infrastructure on its soil to minimise military friction with Moscow.
Implications for Asia
In the discussion that followed, Assoc Prof Huang raised the question of leadership accountability: “How much of what we are seeing today is directly attributable to those key decisions made by political leaders at the time?” Prof Sarotte pointed to three path-dependent choices, each narrowing the futures still available: first, Bush's choice to preserve NATO rather than build a new European order; second, Clinton's choice to enlarge the alliance country by country; and third, Clinton's choice to set no geographic boundaries on that expansion.
Fresh from a Taipei trip, she also weighed how comparable Ukraine and Taiwan really are. Materially, she cautioned, the two are too different to equate. Yet she saw parallels in spirit: both sit in the aggressor's mental ‘real estate portfolio’; both share the heritage that makes them a challenge to the legitimacy of Moscow or Beijing; and in both, the defining divide is not left versus right, but how to relate to the aggressor.
Given that US foreign policy is increasingly prone to ‘magical realism’, Prof Sarotte concluded, the result will not be a Nobel Prize, but rather the widening of an already devastating hybrid conflict in Europe, the continued diminishment of American leadership, and the reordering of the world ever farther from that peaceful timeline that once seemed within reach.
Though Singapore is geographically remote from the battlefields of Ukraine, this history shapes the world in which Asian states must function. Extended conflict in Europe means extended uncertainty, with far-reaching impacts on food and energy supplies and the ever-present risk of nuclear escalation. It is therefore in the interest of states on both the Atlantic and the Pacific to engage in efforts to end this conflict and try to return to a timeline that looks more like the peaceful one hoped for at the end of the Cold War.
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