Executive director of the Pakistan-China Institute Mustafa Hyder Sayed says that the prospective admission of Sweden and Finland into NATO is all but inevitable because the actions by the United States have started a domino effect in the Baltic Region and the larger Europe. In 1990, James Baker, then Secretary of State of the United States, committed to Mikhail Gorbachev, that the U.S. would not expand NATO eastwards. That commitment was not kept, and as we know it, NATO expanded slowly and gradually eastwards towards Russia.