Russia’s lies about NATO are endless. Millions of people have echoed its talking points for years. The failure of Western education systems, combined with the inability to fact-check or moderate fake information on the internet, has enabled Russian propaganda to poison public discourse in the West.

Moscow’s most infamous lies are that NATO promised it would not expand to Eastern Europe and that this supposed expansion now threatens Russia. These assertions are wrong for at least three reasons.

First, there was no promise.

Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev repeatedly stated that the topic of NATO expansion was never discussed before and after the Soviet Union collapsed. While a unilateral declaration may entail specific obligations for the declarant state provided certain conditions are met, no such pronouncement was ever produced. Even if a promise had been made, that declaration would’ve only bound the individual member state — not the........

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