First came the "peace dividend." With the disintegration of the Soviet Union that began in 1989 and climaxed at the end of 1991, Western European nations and the United States felt they had no reason to fear Russian conventional land forces again. The Soviet Union, before it collapsed, had agreed to stringent reductions in its troop levels in Central Europe anyway in the 1990 Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty, and the Russian Federation, as the main successor state to the Soviet Union, honored those commitments.

Second, the tough leaders in the United States and Britain who led the West and the NATO alliance to victory in the Cold War were soon replaced with milder, gentler figures who were eager to reap the so-called peace dividend.

Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush in the United States were succeeded by Democratic President Bill Clinton, and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Britain was replaced by the far less forceful John Major. In the United States, the dramatic reduction in conventional forces began under the first President Bush and continued under Clinton.

Third, as the confidence of the West grew, more forceful and less cautious leaders of a new generation eagerly abandoned the first President Bush's commitment to last Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that the United States would never allow former Soviet satellite allies to join NATO. Every member nation of the old Soviet-led Warsaw Pact military alliance eventually joined NATO, expanding the Atlantic alliance eventually to its current record number of 28 nations.

But this huge expansion did not make NATO stronger -- as it appeared to do. It made the alliance, on the contrary, far weaker in direct military terms. For all of the former Soviet satellite states and even the three former Soviet republics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia that eventually joined the alliance did so to receive security, not to give it.

Their military establishments without Soviet support and direction were so old and decrepit anyway that they all counted on the United States to come to their aid if they were ever threatened by Russia or anyone else.

In the terms used by the great British historian Correlli Barnett to describe the dilemma facing a strategically overextended British Empire as the global hyper-power of the 1930s, the new member states of NATO were consumers of security rather than suppliers of it. Whenever they sent military forces to signify their support of the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq, the forces were usually non-combatants and were always, with the exception of Britain, sent in such small number as to be negligible in their impact.

The expansion of NATO in the decades following the collapse of communism therefore resembled a Ponzi scheme, or the unwise expansion of credit in a strategic rather than financial way. The United States and the Brussels-based NATO alliance were increasing their commitments to provide security without increasing the military forces at their disposal that could actually provide it.

On the contrary, in the long years after the collapse of communism, the NATO nations virtually all ran down their military establishments in both numbers and power-projection capabilities.

Part 4: How the wars in Afghanistan and Georgia called NATO's bluff

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