In “Deal or No Deal,” Joshua Itzkowitz Shifrinson sheds new light on an important case.1 At the article's core is a clear historical question: Did U.S. leaders offer to limit NATO expansion in 1990? Shifrinson provides substantial evidence that they did, proposing a quid pro quo that convinced Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to accept German reunification within NATO. The article frames its modern relevance by conflating that historical question with distinct causal and moral questions, however, distorting its contribution and undermining its policy recommendations.
First, the article claims that verifying the existence of the NATO-limitation offer resolves the debate over whether recent Russian aggressions were “responses to the broken non-expansion agreement” or “adventurism” using the offer as “pretext” (p. 7). In doing so, it neglects that a pretext need not be factually incorrect. Pretexts are claims that leaders use to justify an action that are not the true reasons...