The confrontation between Russia and the West is fueled by many grievances, but the greatest is Moscow’s belief that the West tricked the former Soviet Union by breaking promises made at the end of the Cold War in 1989 and 1990 that NATO would not expand eastward. In his now famous 2007 speech to the Munich Security Conference, Russian President Vladimir Putin accused the West of forgetting and breaking assurances, leaving international law in ruins.
The betrayal claim matters desperately to Russia since it fuels distrust, feeds Russia’s cynicism about international law and is the central motive behind Russia’s draft security treaties calling for a reversal of NATO’s extension, discussed on Wednesday at the NATO-Russia Council. The betrayal theory is not confined to Putin, but was supported by former Russian president Boris Yeltsin, and since mid-1995 right across the Russian political elite.
Historian Mary Elise Sarotte’s book Not One Inch: America, Russia and the Making of the Cold War Stalemate charts all of the private discussions within the Western alliance and with Russia over enlargement and reveals Russia as powerless to slow the ratchet effect of the opening of NATO’s door. The author concludes that the charge of betrayal is technically untrue, but has a psychological truth.
At one level, the basis of the complaint narrowly focuses both on verbal commitments made by then-US secretary of state James Baker under then-US president George H.W. Bush and the terms of a treaty signed on Sept. 12, 1990, setting out how NATO troops could operate in the territory of former East Germany.
Putin claims that Baker, in a discussion on Feb. 9, 1990, with then-Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, made the promise that NATO would not expand to the east if Russia accepted Germany’s unification.
The following day then-German chancellor Helmut Kohl, ambiguous about Germany remaining in NATO after unification, also told Gorbachev that “naturally NATO could not expand its territory to the current territory of the GDR [German Democratic Republic, commonly known as East Germany].”
The promise was repeated in a speech by then-NATO secretary-general Manfred Worner on May 17, 1990, a promise cited by Putin in his Munich speech. In his memoirs, Gorbachev described these assurances as the moment that cleared the way for compromise on Germany.
The promise were never written down in a treaty, primarily because Bush felt that Baker and Kohl had gone too far, or in Baker’s words, that he had “got a little forward on his skis.”
The final agreement signed by Russia and the West in September 1990 applied only to Germany. It allowed foreign-stationed NATO troops to cross the old cold war line marked by East Germany at the discretion of the German government. The agreement was contained in a signed addendum.
NATO’s commitment to protect, enshrined in Article 5, had for the first time moved east into former Russian-held territory.
Russia saw the implications of the 1990 agreement for Warsaw Pact countries. Many Russian policymakers opposed the concessions being made at the time by Gorbachev, in part because of the implications for eastern Europe. Russia was given verbal assurances about the limits of NATO’s expansion, but no written guarantees.
For example, in March 1991, then-British prime minister John Major was asked by then-Soviet minister of defense Marshal Dmitry Yazov about eastern Europe’s interest in joining NATO.
Major, according to the diaries of then-British ambassador to Moscow Rodric Braithwaite, told him that “nothing of that sort will ever happen.”
Russia has repeatedly complained about the “betrayal.” In 1993, Yeltsin, angling for Russia to join NATO, wrote to then-US president Bill Clinton to argue that any further expansion of NATO eastward breached the spirit of the 1990 treaty.
The US Department of State, undecided at the time about Poland’s call to join NATO, was so sensitive to the charge of betrayal that Clinton-era officials even asked the German Federal Foreign Office to formally report on the complaint’s merits.
The German foreign minister’s top aide replied in October 1993 that the complaint was formally wrong, but that he could understand “why Yeltsin thought that NATO had committed itself not to extend beyond its 1990 limits.”
The deceit narrative has poisoned relations. In 1997, at the time of the NATO-Russia Founding Act, a treaty designed to create a new relationship between the alliance and Russia, then-Russian minister of foreign affairs Yevgeny Primakov again raised Baker’s “double dealing” six years earlier, which prompted then-US secretary of state Warren Christopher to commission an internal report into the claim.
The report drew a distinction between side comments made by German politicians, such as then-German vice chancellor Hans-Dietrich Genscher, ruling out NATO expansion, and what was agreed in the treaty text.
Russia has sanctioned NATO expansion. In August 1993, Yeltsin, in talks with then-Polish president Lech Walesa, conceded Poland’s right to join NATO, a concession that left his colleagues thunderstruck. More formally, Russia did the same in the NATO Russia Founding Act in 1996.
Some have said that there was an alternative.
Sarotte has said that the US government won its power battle over enlargement, but in a way that led to confrontation, not cooperation, with the Kremlin.
Russia throughout presented itself as a potential NATO member, but the US always saw this as a fantasy that would paralyze the alliance.
The US often preferred to deflect rather than reject. The US administration in 1993 could have delayed NATO expansion, but supporters who saw it as a democratic right of the former Warsaw Pact countries defeated those who said that it would weaken Russian support for arms control and the forces of reform inside Russia.
Russia was not in a true position to negotiate as its economy and politics were in ruins.
Sarotte’s Not One Inch details how Russian openness to NATO’s expansion often turned on the level of financial support provided by the US or Germany, support neither side described as bribes.
Such were the levels of Russian corruption that much of this money just went missing as soon as it was transferred.
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