3 NATO gambles that have played a big role in the horrors of war in Ukraine

Ukrainian emergency workers at a maternity hospital damaged by shelling in Mariupol, Ukraine, on March 9, 2022. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

For 25 years, experts warned that the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was risky. The leading voice among them was the late American diplomat and historian George F. Kennan, who wrote in 1997:

“Expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.”