NATO, Russia and the Ukraine Crisis

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)

This paper seeks to answer the theoretical question: Do international organizations (IOs) bring peace and stability to international relations? The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) serves as a case study which can help answer this query. Initially, it is important to explore what realist and liberal scholars broadly argue on the matter of IOs, peace and stability. NATO as an organization is then examined, followed by the case study of the role it played in the Ukraine crisis. Many international organizations exist today which deal with a wide variety of issues. The League of Nations, though it failed to fulfill its mandate of maintaining worldwide peace, can be considered the first modern international organization and served as the model for its successor, the United Nations. Realists—who argue that states are the principal actor in international relations (IR) and that they are self-interested and mainly concerned with security and power—look upon IOs skeptically. Liberals, though, believe in cooperation among states and promote the proliferation of international organizations, extolling their virtues. The heated debate between these two ideologies is evident in the case of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) eastward expansion. NATO was originally designed to curb the Soviet threat and protect Western Europe from communist expansion. When the Cold War ended and NATO’s original mandate had therefore expired, liberals championed the continued existence and expansion of the organization. Realists, on the other hand, warned of negative repercussions, as they foresaw that eastward expansion of the alliance would be perceived as a threat by Russia. The 2014 Ukraine crisis provides a good case study which can help determine whether liberals or realists were right. Liberals have claimed that Russian aggression in the region justifies NATO expansion. Realists, however, have argued that it is the very fact of actual and prospective NATO expansion which has caused this aggression in the first place.