>it was agreed following and as an negotiated component of the unraveling of the Soviet Union that NATO would not expand east That's an absurd re-writing and r

>it was agreed following and as an negotiated component of the unraveling of the Soviet Union that NATO would not expand east That's an absurd re-writing and re-ordering of events. In 1990 the US secretary of state and the USSR foreign minister agreed to allow NATO troops to be stationed in East Germany but no further east. This was a verbal understanding. At the time the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact still existed and it was in that context. Once the Soviet Union dissolved and the former eastern bloc countries applied to join, that discussion was irrelevant. It was never a treaty, just an agreement based on the situation at the time in the context of German unification. As a matter of policy NATO has always had an open door and has a standing set of criteria for any nation to join that chooses to apply. That was in force then and is in force now. In fact in 2000 Putin suggested Russia join NATO, apparently not as a joke. If Russia's treatment of Georgia and Ukraine isn't enough to fully and completely justify and vindicate Eastern European nations joining NATO, I don't know what does. Fortunately it seems Finland and Sweden have also woken up to what Russia has become.