In a ceremony in Independence, Missouri, the foreign ministers of the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland deposited their instruments of accession, formally entering NATO a decade after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. The expansion marked a historic reversal, bringing former Soviet satellite states into the alliance built to counter the USSR, and set a precedent for further eastward enlargement that Russia bitterly opposed.
Just ten years after the Berlin Wall fell, three nations that had spent over four decades as Soviet satellites, forced to host Warsaw Pact troops and align their militaries against the West, formally became members of NATO. The signing took place fittingly at the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, invoking the president whose Truman Doctrine had launched the Cold War containment strategy these countries were once arrayed against.
For Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, membership represented a hard-won guarantee against Russian domination, a security blanket sought urgently after witnessing Moscow's continued interventions in its near neighborhood. Polish leaders in particular had lobbied for years, citing centuries of being caught between German and Russian power.
Russia denounced the expansion as a broken promise, arguing that Western leaders had informally assured Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand eastward after German reunification. That grievance simmered for decades and became a central talking point in Vladimir Putin's later justifications for confrontation with the West, making this ceremony, celebrated as a triumph of freedom in 1999, look very different in hindsight.
Key people: Madeleine Albright