NATO — the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — is discussed across three episodes of The Bob Zadek Show, though only two of them treat it as a subject in its own right. The March 2020 episode with Jacob Sullum concerns pandemic statistics and does not address NATO at all. The substantive treatment comes in the February 2022 episode with Chris Preble and the March 2022 episode with Justin Logan, both recorded around the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
What the alliance is
Justin Logan, identified in the episode as a scholar at the Cato Institute, gives the institutional basics: NATO is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, named after the North Atlantic Treaty of 1949. It began with twelve countries, centrally in North America and Western Europe, and has since expanded to thirty, including three that border Russia — the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, admitted in 2004. Logan notes that there were two rounds of expansion, one before that round and some after it. Justin Logan on Ukraine (2022)
Chris Preble describes the same alliance from the standpoint of its members’ expectations. For Ukrainians who wish their country to be in NATO, he says, the core is the defensive article of NATO, Article 5, which provides that an attack on any one member will be treated as an attack on all of them. The presumption is that the collective military capability of all thirty member states serves as a deterrent to attacks by Russia or other foreign powers. Other members near or along the Russian border — Poland, the Baltic states, Romania — look upon NATO membership as a key deterrent and defense mechanism. Chris Preble on Ukraine (2022)
Bob Zadek presses the point that membership is not a benign affiliation: to be a member of NATO, he says, does not mean free lunches; it means a defense pact. Preble agrees with the framing and supplies the Russian side: from a Russian perspective, an alliance of foreign actors up to and including the United States could be a staging ground for military forces, missiles, rockets or radar equipment useful in a missile defense program, and Russians worry about this as encroaching along their border.
The expansion question
Logan dates the Russian complaint precisely. Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia, has been saying fairly consistently — probably hundreds of times since the speech he gave in Munich, Germany in 2007 — that further expansion of NATO, an alliance founded to confront the then-Soviet Union in Europe, is a threat to Russia. Logan characterizes the expansion graphically: comparing an image of NATO when it was founded with NATO today, it is like someone spilled a pot of ink. Justin Logan on Ukraine (2022)
Zadek raises the geographic objection himself: the most recent entrants to NATO are pretty far from the North Atlantic. He asks whether, absent NATO today, one would be needed, given the size and strength of Russia compared with Western Europe. Logan answers no. Western Europe, he says, has a GDP many times larger than Russia’s and a population many times larger, and its military power in a notional defensive war against Russian invasion is more than adequate. He adds that a world without NATO would not make Russia a cute, cuddly teddy bear; it would act like most major powers, tending to bully its neighbors. He invokes Thucydides — the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must — calling that a little severe for his taste but fundamentally true.
Logan also describes NATO as Janus-faced. On one hand it is a military alliance formed to confront the USSR and now confronting the Russian Federation; on the other, policymakers in the West in the 1990s and 2000s talked about it as a democracy club, a place to talk about liberal ideas, freedoms and market economies. He calls this a bait and switch: when hard questions are asked, such as how NATO would defend Estonia if Russia attacked it, those questions are waved off as impolitic and rude. On the admission of the Baltic states — geographically and population-wise very small, on the Russian border, therefore vulnerable — there was no defense plan until the Baltic states lobbied NATO to draw one up after Russia invaded Georgia in 2008. He adds that every state on the frontline of NATO has an incentive to want further expansion, because that makes someone else the frontline.
The crisis of early 2022
Preble sets the immediate stage. The present crisis, he says, was created by the Russians’ decision — Vladimir Putin’s decision — to station over 100,000 Russian troops near Ukraine’s border and along the border to the north in Belarus. Russia drew forces even from its Far East, and by some estimates as much as 70% of Russian military power was concentrated on the crisis. The pressure is on Ukraine itself and indirectly on the United States, Europe and the NATO countries to commit that Ukraine not be admitted into the alliance. This is a long-standing complaint of the Russians, not a new concern. Chris Preble on Ukraine (2022)
Preble states the American position and attributes its most eloquent statement to Secretary of State Blinken: countries are entitled to the right to choose what alliances they make and who they align with, and if the government in Ukraine wishes to be a NATO member it should be able to apply like any other country. Preble immediately qualifies this — the other member states have to agree, so it is not an open door in the truest sense; countries can express interest, but existing members must invite them and let them in.
Logan, by contrast, treats the question of Ukrainian membership as one the West never seriously negotiated. He asks on what principle Ukraine was sacrificed, and proposes armed neutrality as an alternative: a normal military and no alignment with the West, alongside assurances that nuclear weapons would not be placed in Ukraine — an idea he attributes to Putin as fanciful. Logan says there were hints from Putin in his more direct and lucid moments where such a deal looked very much doable and could have forestalled the whole war. He also notes that Ukraine’s non-membership was a fact before the war and will be a fact after it. Justin Logan on Ukraine (2022)
Logan describes the invasion in concrete terms: Russia massed almost 190,000 troops on Ukraine’s borders and invaded from the north, the east and the south; it had already annexed Crimea in 2014 and there were two fledgling breakaway regions in the Donbas, in far southeastern Ukraine. He calls the invasion reprehensible and clearly a violation of international law, while insisting the analyst’s question is how to deal with reality rather than what Russia should feel.
Across episodes
The February 2022 Preble episode and the March 2022 Logan episode treat the same question — whether NATO expansion caused the war — with a shift in emphasis rather than a change of position. Preble, speaking before the invasion, lays out the Russian complaint and the American counter-principle of free alliance choice without endorsing either; Logan, speaking after the invasion, argues that the West failed to test Ukrainian neutrality and that NATO’s expansion, including the 2004 Baltic admissions, was undertaken without serious military planning. The excerpts show no development beyond this: the earlier treatment is descriptive, the later one prosecutorial.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state NATO’s founding date beyond the 1949 treaty name, do not name the twelve original members, and do not describe the alliance’s command structure or budget. They do not cover the Cuban Missile Crisis parallel that Zadek proposes to Preble, because the excerpt breaks off before Preble responds. They do not report any Ukrainian or Russian government statement directly, and they do not say how the war ended or what settlement, if any, followed.