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The new Cold War, which now grips Europe and the United States, is not all Russia's fault. A seed was sown in the American assurances broken by Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, who reversed verbal pledges to refrain from expanding the Atlantic military alliance toward Russia. Declassified documents tell the story of how American officials led the Russians to believe that no expansion would be undertaken by NATO, then later nearly doubled the size of the alliance. Russian and American transcripts and summaries of high-level meetings, posted in recent years by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, record multiple assurances in the early 1990s. The U.S. non-expansion promise was made several times during discussions in Moscow on February 9, 1990, according to a State Department "memcon," or memorandum of conversation. Secretary of State Baker told Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze that German reunification would be accompanied by "iron-clad guarantees that NATO's jurisdiction of forces would not move eastward." Meeting Gorbachev later that day, Baker reiterated the pledge. "We understand that not only for the Soviet Union, but for other European countries as well, it is important to have guarantees that if the United States keeps its presence in Germany within the framework of NATO, not an inch of NATO's present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction," Baker said. "Germany's unification will not lead to NATO's military organization spreading to the east." And then again: "If we maintain a presence in a Germany that is a part of NATO, there would be no extension of NATO's jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east." How America's Broken Promises May Lead to a New Cold War Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was given a host of assurances that the NATO alliance would not expand past what was then the East German border in 1990 according to new declassified documents. Indeed, Russian Presidents Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin have complained bitterly about the expansion of NATO towards their borders despite what they had believed were assurances to the contrary. "What happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today?" Putin said at the Munich Conference on Security Policy in 2007. "No one even remembers them. But I will allow myself to remind this audience what was said. I would like to quote the speech of NATO General Secretary Mr. Woerner in Brussels on 17 May 1990. He said at the time that: 'The fact that we are ready not to place a NATO army outside of German territory gives the Soviet Union a firm security guarantee.' Where are these guarantees?" As the newly declassified documents show, the Russians might have had a point. While it was previously understood that Secretary of State James Baker's assurance to Gorbachev that NATO would not expand "not one inch eastward" during a February 9, 1990, meeting was only in the context of German reunification, the new documents show that this was not the case. Gorbachev only accepted German reunification - over which the Soviet Union had a legal right to veto under treaty - because he received assurances that NATO would not expand after he withdrew his forces from Eastern Europe from James Baker, President George H.W. Bush, West German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, the CIA Director Robert Gates, French President Francois Mitterrand, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, British foreign minister Douglas Hurd, British Prime Minister John Major, and NATO secretary-general Manfred Woerner. Newly Declassified Documents: Gorbachev Told NATO Wouldn't Move Past East German Border |
