On February 28, 2014, Russian troops effortlessly seized control of Crimea.
Two days later, Congressman Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan and
chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, denounced the Obama
Administration’s weak response to the crisis. “Putin is playing chess and I
think we are playing marbles, and I don’t think it’s even close,” Rogers
said on *Fox News Sunday.* Not long afterward, as the crisis escalated,
Rogers hosted a breakfast fund-raiser in downtown Washington.

As befitted an overseer of the nation’s almost $70 billion intelligence
budget, Rogers attracted a healthy crowd, largely composed of lobbyists for
defense contractors. Curious as to how the military-industrial complex was
reacting to events abroad, I asked a lobbyist friend who had attended (but
was loath to reveal his identity and thus his communication with a liberal
magazine) about the mood at the meeting. “I’d call it borderline euphoric,”
he said.

Just a few months earlier, the outlook for the defense complex had looked
dark indeed. The war in Afghanistan was winding down. American voters were
regularly informing pollsters that they wanted the United States to “mind
its own business internationally.” The dreaded “sequester” of 2013, which
threatened to cut half a trillion dollars from the long-term defense
budget, had been temporarily deflected by artful negotiation, but without
further negotiations the defense cuts were likely to resume with savage
force in fiscal 2016. There was ugly talk of mothballing one of the Navy’s
nuclear-powered carriers, slashing the Army to a mere 420,000 troops,
retiring drone programs, cutting headquarters staffs, and more.

Times had been dark before, sometimes rendered darker in the retelling.
Although defense budgets had actually increased in the post-Vietnam 1970s,
for example, veterans of the era still shared horror stories about the
“hollow” military in the years following the final withdrawal from Saigon.
That cloud had lifted soon enough, thanks to sustained efforts — via the
medium of suitably adjusted intelligence assessments — to portray the
Soviet Union as the Red Menace, armed and ready to conquer the Free World.

On the other hand, the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet
Union had posed a truly existential threat. The gift that had kept on
giving, reliably generating bomber gaps, missile gaps, civil-defense gaps,
and whatever else was needed at the mere threat of a budget cut,
disappeared almost overnight. The Warsaw Pact, the U.S.S.R.’s answer to
NATO, vanished into the ash can of history. Thoughtful commentators
ruminated about a post–Cold War partnership between Russia and the United
States. American bases in Germany emptied out as Army divisions and Air
Force squadrons came home and were disbanded. In a 1990 speech, Senator Sam
Nunn of Georgia, revered in those days as a cerebral disperser of military
largesse, raised the specter of further cuts, warning that there was a
“threat blank” in the defense budget and that the Pentagon’s strategic
assessments were “rooted in the past.” An enemy had to be found.

For the defense industry, this was a matter of urgency. By the early 1990s,
research and procurement contracts had fallen to about half what they’d
been in the previous decade. Part of the industry’s response was to circle
the wagons, reorganize, and prepare for better days. In 1993, William
Perry, installed as deputy defense secretary in the Clinton Administration,
summoned a group of industry titans to an event that came to be known as
the Last Supper. At this meeting he informed them that ongoing budget cuts
mandated drastic consolidation and that some of them would shortly be out
of business.

Perry’s warning sparked a feeding frenzy of mergers and takeovers,
lubricated by generous subsidies at taxpayer expense in the form of
Pentagon reimbursements for “restructuring costs.” Thus Northrop bought
Grumman, Raytheon bought E-Systems, Boeing bought Rockwell’s defense
division, and the Lockheed Corporation bought the jet-fighter division of
General Dynamics. In 1995 came the biggest and most consequential deal of
all, in which Martin-Marietta merged with Lockheed.

The resultant Lockheed Martin Corporation, the largest arms company on
earth, was run by former Martin-Marietta CEO Norman R. Augustine, by far
the most cunning and prescient executive in the business. Wired deeply into
Washington, Augustine had helped Perry craft the restructuring subsidies
for companies like his own — essentially, a multibillion-dollar tranche of
corporate welfare. In a 1994 interview, he shrewdly predicted that U.S.
defense spending would recover in 1997 (he was off by only a year). In the
meantime, he would scour the world for new markets.

In this task, Augustine could be assured of his government’s support, since
he was a member of the little-known Defense Policy Advisory Committee on
Trade, chartered to provide guidance to the secretary of defense on
arms-export policies. One especially promising market was among the former
members of the defunct Warsaw Pact. Were they to join NATO, they would be
natural customers for products such as the F-16 fighter that Lockheed had
inherited from General Dynamics.

There was one minor impediment: the Bush Administration had already
promised Moscow that NATO would not move east, a pledge that was part of
the settlement ending the Cold War. Between 1989 and 1991, the United
States and the Soviet Union had amicably agreed to cut strategic nuclear
forces by roughly a third and to withdraw almost all tactical nuclear
weapons from Europe. Meanwhile, the Soviets had good reason to believe that
if they pulled their forces out of Eastern Europe, NATO would not fill the
military vacuum left by the Red Army. Secretary of State James Baker had
unequivocally spelled out Washington’s end of that bargain in a private
conversation with Mikhail Gorbachev in February 1990, pledging that NATO
forces would not move “one inch to the east,” provided the Soviets agreed
to NATO membership for a unified Germany.

The Russians certainly thought they had a deal. Sergey Ivanov, later one of
Vladimir Putin’s defense ministers, was in 1991 a KGB officer operating in
Europe. “We were told . . . that NATO would not expand its military
structures in the direction of the Soviet Union,” he later recalled. When
things turned out otherwise, Gorbachev remarked angrily that “one cannot
depend on American politicians.” Some years later, in 2007, in an angry
speech to Western leaders, Putin asked: “What happened to the assurances
our Western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where
are those declarations today? No one even remembers them.”

Even at the beginning, not everyone in the administration was intent on
honoring this promise. Robert Gates noted in his memoirs that Dick Cheney,
then the defense secretary, took a more opportunistic tack: “When the
Soviet Union was collapsing in late 1991, Dick wanted to see the
dismantlement not only of the Soviet Union and the Russian empire but of
Russia itself, so it could never again be a threat to the rest of the
world.” Still, as the red flag over the Kremlin came down for the last time
on Christmas Day, President George H. W. Bush spoke graciously of “a
victory for democracy and freedom” and commended departing Soviet leader
Gorbachev.

But domestic politics inevitably dictate foreign policy, and Bush was soon
running for reelection. The collapse of the country’s longtime enemy was
therefore recast as a military victory, a vindication of past imperial
adventures. “By the grace of God, America won the Cold War,” Bush told a
cheering Congress in his 1992 State of the Union address, “and I think of
those who won it, in places like Korea and Vietnam. And some of them didn’t
come back. Back then they were heroes, but this year they were victors.”

This sort of talk was more to the taste of Cold Warriors who had suddenly
found themselves without a cause. The original neocons, though reliably
devoted to the cause of Israel, had a related agenda that they pursued with
equal diligence. Fervent anti-Communists, they had joined forces with the
military-industrial complex in the 1970s under the guidance of Paul Nitze,
principal author in 1950 of the Cold War playbook — National Security
Council Report 68 — and for decades an ardent proponent of lavish Pentagon
budgets. As his former son-in-law and aide, W. Scott Thompson, explained to
me, Nitze fostered this potent union of the Israel and defense lobbies
through the Committee on the Present Danger, an influential group that in
the 1970s crusaded against détente and defense cutbacks, and for unstinting
aid to Israel. The initiative was so successful that by 1982 the head of
the Anti-Defamation League was equating criticism of defense spending with
anti-Semitism.

By the 1990s, the neocon torch had passed to a new generation that thumped
the same tub, even though the Red Menace had vanished into history. “Having
defeated the evil empire, the United States enjoys strategic and
ideological predominance,” wrote William Kristol and Robert Kagan in 1996.
“The first objective of U.S. foreign policy should be to preserve and
enhance that predominance.” Achieving this happy aim, calculated these two
sons of neocon founding fathers, required an extra $60–$80 billion a year
for the defense budget, not to mention a missile-defense system, which
could be had for upward of $10 billion. Among other priorities, they
agreed, it was important that “NATO remains strong, active, cohesive, and
under decisive American leadership.”

As it happened, NATO was indeed active, under Bill Clinton’s leadership,
and moving decisively to expand eastward, whatever prior Republican
understandings there might have been with the Russians. The drive was
mounted on several fronts. Already plushly installed in Warsaw and other
Eastern European capitals were emissaries of the defense contractors.
“Lockheed began looking at Poland right after the Wall came down,” Dick
Pawloski, for years a Lockheed salesman active in Eastern Europe, told me.
“There were contractors flooding through all those countries.”

Meanwhile, a coterie of foreign-policy intellectuals on the payroll of the
RAND Corporation, a think tank historically reliant on military contracts,
had begun advancing the artful argument that expanding NATO eastward was
actually a way of securing peace in Europe, and was in no way directed
against Russia. Chief among these pundits was the late Ron Asmus, who
subsequently recalled a RAND workshop held in Warsaw, just months after the
Wall fell, at which he and Dan Fried, a foreign-service officer deemed by
colleagues to be “hard line” toward the Russians, and Eric Edelman, later a
national-security adviser to Vice President Cheney, discussed the
possibility of stationing American forces on Polish soil.

Eminent authorities weighed in with the reasonable objection that this
would not go down well with the Russians, a view later succinctly
summarized by George F. Kennan, the venerated architect of the
“containment” strategy:

Expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the
post cold-war era. Such a decision may be expected to inflame the
nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion;
to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to
restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel
Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.

In retrospect, Kennan seems as prescient as Norm Augustine, but it didn’t
make any difference at the time. When he wrote that warning, in 1997, NATO
expansion was already well under way, and with the aid of a powerful
supporter in the White House. “This mythology that it was all neocons in
the Bush Administration, it’s nonsense,” says a former senior official on
both the Clinton and Bush National Security Council staffs who requested
anonymity. “It was Clinton, with the help of a lot of Republicans.”

This official credits the persuasive powers of Lech Wa?e sa and Václav
Havel at a 1994 summit meeting with Clinton’s conversion to the cause of
NATO expansion. Others point to a more urgent motivation. “It was widely
understood in the White House that [influential foreign-policy adviser
Zbigniew] Brzezinski told Clinton he would lose the Polish vote in the ’96
election if he didn’t let Poland into NATO,” a former Clinton White House
official, who requested anonymity, assured me.

To an ear as finely tuned to electoral minutiae as the forty-second
president’s, such a warning would have been incentive enough, since Polish
Americans constituted a significant voting bloc in the Midwest. It was no
coincidence then that Clinton chose Detroit for his announcement, two weeks
before the 1996 election, that NATO would admit the first of its new
members by 1999 (meaning Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary). He also
made it clear that NATO would not stop there. “It must reach out to all the
new democracies in Central Europe,” he continued, “the Baltics and the new
independent states of the former Soviet Union.” None of this, Clinton
stressed, should alarm the Russians: “NATO will promote greater stability
in Europe, and Russia will be among the beneficiaries.” Not everyone saw
things that way; in Moscow there was talk of meeting NATO expansion “with
rockets.”

Chas Freeman, the assistant secretary of defense for international security
affairs from 1993 to 1994, recalls that the policy was driven by
“triumphalist Cold Warriors” whose attitude was, “The Russians are down,
let’s give them another kick.” Freeman had floated an alternate approach,
Partnership for Peace, that would avoid antagonizing Moscow, but, as he
recalls, it “got overrun in ’96 by the overwhelming temptation to enlist
the Polish vote in Milwaukee.”

In April 1997, Augustine took a tour of his prospective Polish, Czech, and
Hungarian customers, stopping by Romania and Slovenia as well, and affirmed
that there was great potential for selling F-16s. Clinton had spoken of
NATO being as big a boon for Eastern Europe as the Marshall Plan had been
for Western Europe after the Second World War, and many of the impoverished
ex-Communist countries, some with small and ramshackle militaries, were
eager to get on the bandwagon. “Augustine would look them in the eye,”
recalls Pawloski, the former Lockheed salesman, “and say, ‘You may have
only a small air force of twenty planes, but these planes will have to play
with the first team.’ Meaning that they’d be flying with the U.S. Air Force
and they would need F-16s to keep up.” Actually, Augustine had rather more
going for him than this simple sales pitch, including a lavish dinner for
Hungarian politicians he threw at the Budapest opera house.

Meanwhile, back in Washington, a new and formidable lobbying group had come
on the scene: the U.S. Committee to Expand NATO. Its cofounder and
president, Bruce P. Jackson, was a former Army intelligence officer and
Reagan-era Pentagon official who had dedicated himself to the pursuit of a
“Europe whole, free and at peace.” His efforts on the committee were
unpaid. Fortunately, he had kept his day job — working for Augustine as
vice president for strategy and planning at the Lockheed Martin Corporation.

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