How US-Russian relations fractured in the 1990s | HistoryExtra
""‘There were a whole host of negotiations over what the new order would be. And a big part of the new order is the question of the future of Germany, because Germany was, of course, divided during the Cold War. And it was clear with walls coming down, the Germans wanted to unite. But, and this is a big but, as a result of the second world war, Germany still had occupying forces on its territory. Nazi Germany had, of course, surrendered unconditionally to the victors in World War Two. And they still had, as I said, not only occupying troops, but also the legal right to keep them there. There had been some modifications, but but to simplify, Germany was still technically an occupied country. So Germany could not unify until those countries agreed to let it do so. Most importantly, Moscow, the Soviet Union still had nearly 400,000 troops and the legal right to keep them there.
So in order for Germany to unify, it had to convince Mikhail Gorbachev the leader of the Soviet Union to give up both those troops in his legal right to keep them there… as part of a hypothetical bargain… you let your part of Germany go. And we agree that NATO will not shift one inch eastward from its present position… there's nothing that's formalized, right. And then, when James Baker gets home from this trip to Moscow, he finds out from his boss, President George HW Bush, that what he said was not quite right. Because if that happens, if NATO stays frozen on the Cold War line, then divided Germany is going to be half in and half out of NATO, which makes no sense, right? Sorry, that united Germany is going to be half in and half out of NATO, which makes no sense. So that is obviously a problem.
So a separate, President George HW Bush says, you know, I actually, I’m thinking of a different strategy, which is that we're going to keep NATO. And we're going to keep NATO's ability to expand because, of course, NATO had expanded before during the Cold War. And what we're going to do, instead of promising that NATO won't shift one inch eastward, what we're going to do is we're going to offer concessions, as NATO moves in the direction of Moscow, in particular, we’ll limit what we can do on Eastern German territory. And the end result of this actually, still to this day, is that the former territory of East Germany is the only part of Europe that is guaranteed by treaty to be nuclear free...
Baker then has to backpedal quietly… The problem is it takes Gorbachev and Moscow a while to notice... by about the spring of 1990, Gorbachev starts to get very bitter... but he doesn't have anything in writing’...
‘I think that NATO expansion is an understandable policy. My book, not one inch isn't an anti NATO book. The states of Central and Eastern Europe wanted to join NATO, their leaders and their people had bravely thrown off the Soviet yoke. They had the right to choose their own security alliances. They wanted to join NATO. This is very much a demand driven phenomenon. Also, the Western response to expand NATO, that was neither unprecedented nor unreasonable. NATO had expanded multiple times during the Cold War and, you know, it had that precedent, it could keep expanding. So I think the NATO expansion was a reasonable policy. The problem was how it happened.
For too long, the discussion about NATO expansion has been too simplistic and binary, the discussion has been roughly as follows. NATO expansion was bad. No, NATO expansion was good... NATO expansion was not one thing, there were a lot of different ways that NATO could have expanded. And, in fact, in the very beginning, that they kind of at the end of the George HW Bush presidency, and definitely the very beginning of the Clinton presidency, some savvy policymakers figured out a way to expand NATO, that was, if not popular, at least minimally acceptable to all the stakeholders. And that was called the Partnership for Peace. That organization has kind of been forgotten now.
But as I argue in the book, that would have been, I think, a more sustainable way to expand NATO, that would have caused less aggravation. Basically, the idea behind that, as expressed by President Clinton himself, was to, as he put it, avoid drawing a new line across Europe. Alright, as President Clinton put it, we've just had the end of the Cold War that the wall, the Berlin Wall has come down, why are we going to draw a new line across Europe? Ah, President Clinton said in particular, we need to think not just about Central and Eastern Europe, so not just Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, we also need to think about the post Soviet states and in particular, Ukraine.
Ukraine turns out to be hugely important to the story. Clinton says, you know, look, Ukraine is a country with more than 50 million people, it's on the size of Britain or France, it's becoming a democracy. Ukraine was born nuclear, it was born the third largest nuclear power in the world. We can't just ignore that country. But it's also unreasonable that we're just gonna put it in NATO, right? It's, you know, shares a huge border with Russia, extensive cultural ties. What we need is some kind of intermediate organization. And then various countries, including post Soviet states like Ukraine can affiliate with an immediate, intermediate organization, and then gradually gain membership in phases.
Now, again, this is not popular, right? Because on the one hand, the central and eastern Europeans, they want to be in NATO right away, so they don't like it. And the Russians don't want it to happen at all. So they don't like it either. But that's that's kind of the nature of a compromise, right? Not everybody gets what they want. Everybody gives a little bit, and it was at least minimally acceptable. Clinton personally went to Poland. He also sent his Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General John Shalikashvili, who had been born in Poland. He's he went to Poland, John Shalikashvili. To to Poland, he said, you know, we understand, we understand Lech Walesa, Nobel laureate, President of Poland, we understand your concerns, but you Poles should understand the importance of not drawing lines across Europe, right. You, the Yalta summit after World War Two tragically left you behind the line, we can't do the same thing to Ukraine. And so even though they don't like it to gritted teeth, the Poles agree to it, and the Russians agree to it.
And the Partnership for Peace, it starts doing its work. This is not a counterfactual, this actually happens. But then for reasons as I described in my book, which we can get into, if you want, Clinton changes his mind, the Americans change their mind. They're partly inspired to do that, because of some very tragic choices by the Russian President Boris Yeltsin. Most importantly, his decision to shed the blood of his political opponents in Moscow, in Chechnya, because suddenly that makes everyone start to recalibrate and think, oh, maybe the new Russia isn't so different from the old Soviet Union’"
Putin promised to join NATO, so they're long even