Sarotte's research explores why a new European security framework failed to emerge after the Cold War and how decisions made during that period planted the roots of today’s geopolitical tensions.

Her analysis connects the lack of cohesive cooperation at the time to ongoing rivalries and unresolved conflicts in modern international relations, illustrating how historical choices continue to shape global challenges.

Among the turns, she counts Bush's refusal to Baker to give Russia an assurance about non-enlargement, the failure of the Partnership for Peace and the NATO summit in Washington in 1999.

Sarotte describes how Helmut Kohl and George H. W. Bush pushed ahead with NATO expansion into East Germany in order to secure the achievements of the Cold War, while Moscow was struggling for power.

With his ten-point plan, Helmut Kohl had preempted Russia's demand that a united Germany must "withdraw from NATO" so that the USSR could agree to reunification.

In an article for the Financial Times in 2023, she highlighted and interpreted this element once again:What is crucial for any accurate account, however, is the knowledge that this discussion was speculative and highly contingent – and that Baker's boss, US President George H. W. Bush, made it clear at the end of February that he did not consider a limitation of NATO's future desirable or necessary.

According to Sarotte, "skilled bureaucratic fighters" such as Antony Lake and Richard Holbrooke had immediately launched a full-scale attack on this proposal, which was supported by Madeleine Albright.

For Russia, NATO's military action in Kosovo, which was not approved by the UN, came as a shock, which Yeltsin's critics commented on with the words: "Today Belgrade, tomorrow Moscow."

In his September 2022 review,[2] drawing upon Mary Elise Sarotte’s historical analysis, Professor Emeritus Branko Begovic of the University of Belgrade Faculty of Law argues that NATO’s post-Cold War eastward expansion critically weakened pro-Western liberal reformers in Russia while emboldening nationalist hardliners, ultimately leaving Russia in a more disadvantageous strategic position.

He posits that the absence of an institutional framework comparable to the Yalta Conference, which historically delineated spheres of influence, underscores the reduced significance of raw military power in shaping contemporary international outcomes.

For the other, the American side, it was a matter of "business as usual" – the preservation of what the political elite considered to be the strategic interests of the United States vis-à-vis the other side.The way in which the US helped Russia obtain loans from the IMF "against the rules", similar to what it later did with Ukraine, ruined international institutions and their credibility, according to Begovic.

[4] Matthias Dembinski, a researcher at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF) and contributor to the Portal für Politikwissenschaft, identifies one of the central arguments in Mary Elise Sarotte's work as the proposition that a "balancing act" between integrating Russia into the post-Cold War order and stabilizing Central and Eastern European states might have been feasible with greater diplomatic attention to Russian interests and sensitivities.

Dembinski clarifies that Sarotte’s critique does not oppose NATO enlargement per se but rather emphasizes the lack of strategic foresight in its execution, particularly the failure to mitigate perceptions of marginalization in Moscow.

He further contends that Sarotte’s analysis may understate the significance of the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act, a key diplomatic framework aimed at fostering transparency and cooperation in European security.

Dembinski posits that Russian opposition to enlargement stemmed less from immediate military concerns than from fears of losing political influence over former Warsaw Pact allies and Soviet republics, coupled with anxieties about exclusion from critical decisions shaping Europe’s security architecture.

In his opinion, the book's overwhelming evidence suggests that George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton slowed down NATO expansion in order to try to stabilize the government of Russian President Boris Yeltsin in the short term, waiting as long as he still seemed viable.

He said the book had a "great narrative and analytical flair, admirable objectivity", he praised the details and said it was a riveting account of NATO enlargement.

[8] Bradley Reynolds' review (2021) emphasizes Sarotte's understanding that, due to the "ongoing negotiation aspect of NATO's role" in the 1990s, the statement not an inch was more an expression of a multifaceted, fluctuating process of "common complicity" than a singular promise between Baker and Gorbachev in 1990.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the emerging threat of nuclear proliferation in the New Independent States had prompted NATO to reconsider enlargement beyond a reunified Germany.

However, he emphasizes that the author did not see her work as a "final word" but as a starting point for further research and agrees with Marc Trachtenberg's judgment that historical scholarship cannot judge the political value and worthlessness of events.

"[11] In his review of December 1, 2022, Marcin Waldoch (Uniwersytet Kazimierza Wielkiego w Bydgoszcz) criticises Sarotte's implicit view that NATO's eastward expansion had been harmful to the world order.

Waldoch does not see NATO membership for countries like Poland as a geopolitical decision by the West, but as an existential need to ensure their own sovereignty and security after decades of Soviet dominance.

Nevertheless, he acknowledges the quality of research and the analytical strength of Sarotte's work but sees the need to focus more strongly on the perspective of the Eastern European countries concerned.

Joshua Jaffa judged in The New Yorker in January 2022, a month before the start of the war, that Sarotte's new findings both fill in and complicate the established narratives on both sides.

Sarotte told him that she wanted to write a "non-triumphalist history" of the end of the Cold War, the opposite of the version "that most of us know: a story of victory, freedom and opportunity."

[13] In his May 17, 2022 review for H-Soz-Kult, Andreas Hilger acknowledged the strengths of Mary Elise Sarotte’s Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate but critiqued its limited exploration of how NATO’s post-Cold War expansion intersected with broader U.S. strategic interests in regions such as China, Central Asia, and the Middle East.

Hilger argued that Sarotte’s analysis only briefly addresses these global linkages, leaving the role of China and non-military factors (e.g., economic aid programs) underexamined.

He further noted that the book insufficiently connects NATO enlargement to Washington’s broader geopolitical calculus, which included countering emerging powers and securing influence beyond Europe.

Sarotte contends that NATO expansion and mutual misperceptions entrenched a structural stalemate: Western policymakers underestimated Russian sensitivities to the alliance’s eastward growth, while Moscow increasingly retreated into Soviet-nostalgic narratives.

James Baker, the US Secretary of State at the time, had actually sounded out the possibility in 1990 in a conversation with Mikhail Gorbachev whether Moscow would agree to German unity in exchange for the promise that NATO would not expand eastwards.