FACTS / CHRONOLOGY
What are the facts?
One question that comes up repeatedly – did the US promise not to expand NATO eastwards? The “not one inch” point.
Genesis of “Not One Inch”
In 1990, as the Cold War was ending and the Berlin Wall fell, the US and USSR were discussing how to reunify Germany.
One question that was raised was whether NATO would then expand into the territory of East Germany, and perhaps beyond, at the expense of the then-Warsaw Pact countries.
Western leaders anticipated Soviet opposition to NATO’s expansion.
And records show that Western leaders had broached, in various formulations, the concept of Non-Expansion of NATO.
This would be a quid pro quo. In exchange, Moscow would agree to East Germany’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, and the withdrawal of Soviet troops from East Germany.
In a speech on 31 January 1990, West Germany’s then-Foreign Minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, acknowledged the USSR’s security interests and said that in the process of reunification, NATO should rule out eastward expansion.
Less than two weeks later, then-US Secretary of State, James Baker, also raised this with the Soviet Foreign Minister, and President Gorbachev.
According to declassified records from the US State Department, and from Germany, and from the Gorbachev Foundation, Baker proposed several times, that NATO would not expand “one inch to the east”.
Though, it appears that the Bush administration in Washington DC may have had different views about this.
In separate discussions between Mr Gorbachev, German Chancellor Helmut Kohland, and French President Francois Mitterran, both acknowledged that NATO expansion would be a problem for the USSR, which would need to be addressed.
However, notwithstanding these discussions, non-expansion – both as it applied to East Germany, and Eastern Europe as a whole – was not set out into the Treaty on the Final Settlement which the USSR signed in September 1990 with East and West Germany, France, the UK, and the US.
Nothing was in writing, but the historical records suggest that Russia was given basis to believe that there would be no eastward expansion of NATO.
I quote an extract from the memoirs of the current Director of CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) William Burns, who was then a Political Officer in the US Embassy in Moscow. Burns said Yeltsin and the Russians assumed, with considerable justification, that the US’s assurances of non-expansion would continue to apply, post-USSR.
So, if you look at what the Americans themselves at a very senior level have said, together with what the Chancellor in Germany and the President in France said.
But the Clinton Administration, which came after the Bush Administration, saw the not one inch eastward as “fairly ambiguous” because it had not been precisely defined.
And so, the year after the USSR collapsed – in 1992 – Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary jointly declared their long-term objective to attain full-fledged membership in NATO.
In the decade or so after that, there were two rounds of NATO enlargement. The first round in 1999 – which is Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary. The second round, in 2004 with seven other Eastern European countries – Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia.
Russia protested these expansions. Before the first round of enlargement, Yeltsin told Clinton in 1995, that this would be a new form of encirclement and Russians feared this. Russia’s legislature also voiced concern in 2004 that NATO expansion was damaging to stability and security in Europe.
If we pause there and reflect: Could Russian concerns have been better handled? If you lived in the Baltics, Poland, or any of these countries, it is entirely understandable that you might want to be part of NATO. They have bitter history which justified their fears. But I think it is also fair to say that there was a significant responsibility to deal with Russia’s security concerns, even as NATO decided on enlargement.
Should such concerns be taken seriously by others?
In April of last year, when China signed a security agreement with the Solomon Islands, there was considerable alarm in Australia about a possible Chinese military presence in the Pacific islands – 2,000km away from Australia. I think Kiev is about 500km away from Moscow.
Sixty years ago, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the US ordered a “naval quarantine” around Cuba on 22 October 1962, to intercept “all offensive military equipment under shipment to Cuba”.
America wasn’t keen on Russia’s military at its doorstep, notwithstanding that Cuba had the sovereign power to decide.
And Australia wasn’t – and isn’t – keen on Chinese military presence in the Pacific Islands.
But NATO’s presence in all of these countries is much closer or much less than 2,000 km.
This is not an argument that NATO should not expand. But it is a point that Russian concerns need to have been dealt with. It cannot simply be dismissed. Otherwise, it will look like double standards are being applied.
In February 2008, Mr Burns – who was by then, the US Ambassador in Moscow – wrote to his Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice. He said that Ukraine joining NATO is the “brightest of all redlines” for Russia. Not just for President Putin, but for all Russian elites. Ukraine in NATO would be nothing but a “direct challenge to Russian interests”.
Mr Burns is now the Director of the CIA, and a serious man. The implications of his views don’t seem to get discussed much in the current discussions.
What did he mean? That Russian concerns are real, and that these concerns are shared by a significant elite in Russia.
How were the Russian concerns dealt with? We don’t know.
But two months later, in April 2008, NATO held a summit in Bucharest, welcoming Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations and for NATO membership, and they agreed that “these countries will become members of NATO”.
The next day, President Putin responded quite bluntly. He said that the appearance of NATO at Russia’s borders is a “direct threat to the security” of Russia.
We may agree or disagree with what he said, but Russia made its position quite clear that the expansion or further expansion of NATO was seen as a direct threat to Russia.
After that, from 2009 to 2020, NATO continued to expand – Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, North Macedonia. But, not yet Ukraine.
