Russia’s menacing of Ukraine is unlikely to induce NATO to retreat

AS THE COLD war reached its denouement three decades ago, the West was careful to temper its elation with magnanimity. “I have not jumped up and down on the Berlin Wall,” President George H.W. Bush pointed out to Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, at a summit in Malta in 1989. Months later James Baker, America’s secretary of state, delivered an assurance to Mr Gorbachev in Moscow: “If we maintain a presence in a Germany that is a part of NATO…there would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction…one inch to the east.” Even as the Soviet Union crumbled in 1991, John Major, Britain’s prime minister, repeated the pledge. “We are not talking about strengthening of NATO,” he said.