NATO gets bigger

last updated 8 January 2015

Washington, D.C.

President Bush this week formally welcomed seven former Soviet-bloc states into the NATO alliance. In a ceremony on the White House lawn, Bush said the new members—Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia—needed NATO’s protection so they would never again suffer as they did under Soviet domination. “They endured bitter tyranny,” he said. But the absorption of the ex-communist nations into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has alarmed Moscow. When NATO announced recently that it would station four F-16 fighter jets near neighboring Lithuania, Russian lawmaker Konstantin Kosachyov complained that the alliance had adopted “an unfriendly character toward Russia.”