Here is some more historical background on the promises made by NATO at the end of the cold war. One lesson Trump taught me is that U.S. Presidents don’t feel bound by promises made by their predecessors to foreign parties (examples: Trump pulling out of climate change and nuclear arms control agreements, the W. Bush overthrow of Iraq and Obama of Libya). And the U.S. Congress does not feel bound by promises made by Presidents (examples: the original Kyoto climate change pledge). But this has been going on for a lot longer than the Obama/Trump era, since at least the end of the cold war. And you could go back in history and look at promises made to Native Americans and Mexico among others and conclude that talk has always been cheap. It’s not just the U.S. of course – here is an article about promises made by Russia and others to Ukraine in exchange for giving up the nuclear arsenal it inherited at the end of the cold war. And of course you could go back to promises made by Hitler and Stalin that most likely neither ever intended to keep.

I guess a lesson that could be learned by the political class is that you don’t make deals in exchange for a promise of some future action beyond the political lifetime of the party you are making a deal with. You need something tangible in return in the short term in exchange for whatever you are giving up. It seems like a sad, cynical world sometimes.