Анджела Стент - Putin's World - Russia Against the West and with the Rest

For the first forty years of its existence, NATO proved itself one of the most successful alliances in history. The United States maintained a quarter of a million troops in West Germany at the height of the Cold War, with substantial deployments in other European countries. NATO and Warsaw Pact troops faced each other directly over the Fulda Gap near Frankfurt, the anticipated Soviet attack route into West Germany. Secretary of State Colin Powell recalled his formative years opposing the Soviets:

I was just a twenty-one-year-old second lieutenant out of New York, having just finished infantry school. We all knew our jobs. When the balloon went up, my job was to race to our positions at the Fulda Gap and beat the crap out of the Russians as they came through. That was it. We didn’t need to know much more. 7

Six years after the formation of NATO and two weeks after West Germany joined, Stalin’s successors met with the leaders of Eastern Europe in Warsaw on May 14, 1955, to sign on to the Warsaw Treaty Organization, their own “collective defense pact” with eight members. Warsaw Pact troops were never used against NATO, only against their own members, including the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 to crush the reformist Prague Spring movement. The pact persisted until Germany reunified and after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, when it was rendered obsolete. Indeed, the Soviet ambassador to West Germany Yuli Kvitsinsky described in scathing terms one of the pact’s last meetings in June 1990. It was “the most unpleasant negotiating session that I ever remember having to endure. A haze of insincerity lay over the negotiations: people were afraid to name things by their proper names and escaped by wording the document in ambiguous formulas. I felt as if I were participating in a meal where the guests were stealing silver spoons while the host was not looking.” 8

For the Soviets, NATO was the foe because it embodied the Western resolve to resist them, and they spent four decades seeking to exploit rifts between the Europeans and the Americans, and between the Europeans themselves, hoping to weaken the alliance.

The fixation with NATO did not end with the Soviet collapse. For a few years after 1991, Moscow modified its view of NATO, but that did not last long. Fast-forward to March 2014, when Putin made his speech announcing Russia’s annexation of Crimea. He highlighted the threat that NATO could pose to Russia were Ukraine to join the alliance and station troops in Crimea. Putin has also repeatedly said that NATO is an obsolete organization, so apparently it is seen as both a threat to Russia and irrelevant in the twenty-first century. Russia’s 2015 official Foreign Policy Concept cites NATO as a major threat to Russia and also out-of-date as a new global order takes shape. 9

Moscow has expressed a persistent complaint about NATO: the United States, so this argument goes, promised Gorbachev at the time of German unification that NATO would not enlarge were the USSR to assent to a united Germany remaining in NATO. This claim is repeated both in Russia and in the West, and the alleged violation of this promise is blamed for the deterioration of Russia’s relations with the West and is used to legitimize Russia’s seizure of Crimea. According to a US academic, “the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis. The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and integrate it into the West.” 10

More than any other issue, the enlargement of NATO to include former communist countries and republics of the Soviet Union has defined the widening split between Russia and the West since 1999. Russia and its supporters in the West put NATO expansion at the heart of the problems between Moscow and the United States and Europe. If only NATO had not expanded, so the argument goes, Russia and the West would have succeeded in working out a productive modus vivendi together. In this view, the West is responsible for the events that produced the war in Ukraine.

In Putin’s world, NATO expansion is presented as one of the main reasons for the discord with the West. But does Putin really see NATO as the “main opponent,” and if so, why? After all, at the end of the Cold War NATO explicitly modified its mission to promote a “Europe whole and free and at peace” and formed a partnership with Russia. It has sought to work with Russia in a number of fora, but most of these attempts have been unsuccessful. With hindsight, it is clear that the United States and its allies in the 1990s were unable to forge a Euro-Atlantic security order in which Russia had a stake. “Europe whole, free, and at peace” ended up excluding Europe’s largest country, Russia.

But did Russia want to be included in this architecture? Should the West have dismantled NATO in 1991 and worked with Russia to create a new security structure whose rules Moscow would have had an equal say in determining? If NATO were now to fade away, as both Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin have proposed, would that usher in a new age of improved relations between Russia and the West? What promises were—or were not—made to Gorbachev and Yeltsin, how has Russia’s view of NATO sharpened under Vladimir Putin, and how might the NATO issue be managed going forward?

Much of the controversy about what assurances Gorbachev received stems from a couple of conversations the Soviet leader had in February 1990, three months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the United States was discussing how negotiations on German unification would be organized and before East Germany’s first free election in March. At this point Gorbachev hoped that the Warsaw Pact might survive and that a united Germany might belong to both military blocs—or to no bloc. 11In January 1990, West German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher had given a speech declaring that a united Germany would be a member of NATO, but “there will be no expansion of NATO territory eastwards.” On February 9, Gorbachev met with US secretary of state James Baker, who assured him that the United States and its allies would guarantee “there would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east,” meaning no non-German NATO troops would be deployed on the territory of the former East Germany. 12

The Soviet and US records of this conversation are largely identical. But even though the participants were talking only about NATO troops not being stationed in the GDR, it is true that the concept of NATO “jurisdiction” not extending to part of the territory of a member state was in fact impractical. 13During Gorbachev’s talks with Chancellor Helmut Kohl the next day, Kohl elaborated on what Baker had said, assuring the Soviet leader that the eastern part of a united Germany could have a “special status” in NATO. Records from these conversations show that at no time did the subject of NATO enlargement beyond Germany ever come up. Gorbachev never received any assurances on this subject, nor did he ask for them. 14He finally conceded in July at a meeting with Kohl that a united Germany could remain in NATO. But enlargement was not on anyone’s mind at that point.

In his memoirs, Gorbachev’s subsequent recollection of the conversation with Baker is somewhat different. He recalls saying that any expansion of NATO would be unacceptable. 15Former US ambassador to the USSR Jack Matlock has also testified that Gorbachev received a “clear commitment that if Germany united and stayed in NATO, the borders of NATO would not move eastward.” 16Since these discussions involved oral, not written, promises, it is impossible to prove or disprove what participants thought they heard. Gorbachev may have subsequently believed he heard from Baker, Bush, Kohl, and Genscher that there would be no NATO expansion, but none of his Western interlocutors were thinking about enlarging NATO during the intense negotiations on German unity. Indeed, in 2014 Gorbachev gave an interview in which he said, “The topic of ‘NATO expansion’ was not discussed at all, and it wasn’t brought up in those years. I say this with full responsibility…. Another issue we brought up was discussed: making sure that… additional forces from the alliance would not be deployed on the territory of the then-GDR after German reunification.” 17Yet myths about what was promised persists, and claims about broken commitments have become more elaborate and extravagant as the relationship between Russia and the West has deteriorated. 18