Well, I don’t think so if NATO made a commitment not to expand in order to obtain Russia’s consent to German reunification. Here’s what George F. Kennan, America’s premier Cold War diplomat had to say about the first round of NATO expansion per the NYT in 1998
‘’I think it is the beginning of a new cold war,’’ said Mr. Kennan from his Princeton home. ‘’I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves. We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way. [NATO expansion] was simply a light-hearted action by a Senate that has no real interest in foreign affairs.’’
‘’What bothers me is how superficial and ill informed the whole Senate debate was,’’ added Mr. Kennan, who was present at the creation of NATO and whose anonymous 1947 article in the journal Foreign Affairs, signed ‘’X,’’ defined America’s cold-war containment policy for 40 years. ‘’I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe. Don’t people understand? Our differences in the cold war were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.
http://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/02/opinion/foreign-affairs-now-a-word-from-x.html
The Myth of a No-NATO-Enlargement Pledge to Russia,
Here's what George F. Kennan, America's premier Cold War diplomat had to say about the first round of NATO expansion per the NYT in 1998.
George Kennan, starting in the late 40's Kennan was a critic of the US in the Cold War.