By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Question: What did you do as a KGB case officer in Dresden? Answer: We were interested in any information about the “main opponent,” as we called them, and the main opponent was considered NATO-Vladimir Putin, 2000 1.

The main issue highlighted by the crisis on the Ukraine borders over the past few months has predominantly focused on the role of Nato and the friction over the eastward expansion of the alliance. This has been a constant message emerging from the Kremlin: that the Nato membership of many parts of the old Soviet Bloc, and the prospective membership of Ukraine in the alliance, poses a threat to Russian sovereignty.

But the decision to accept former members of the Warsaw Pact, the defensive alliance which included the USSR and several eastern European countries, is subject to revisionist history. This perpetuated a myth that Nato promised not to expand eastwards after the Soviet Union dissolved.

Putin’s twenty-year tenure in power has had a cumulative effect on his worldview. His assertiveness has grown in step with his strengthened grip on domestic power and his growing perception that he faces only limited international pushback. His resentment of geopolitical slights has grown and fed back into Russia’s national security dialogue. The influence of other forceful national security leaders has also increased. Putin has responded to internal challenges by seeking foreign policy distractions. The direction of his aims has always been consistent, even if the vigor and rancor with which they are pursued has increased.

The Kremlin’s increasingly assertive foreign policy, including its illegal occupation of Crimea in 2014, came unexpectedly to many in the West. These events were nonetheless mere extensions of the worldview held by Russian President Vladimir Putin. This worldview was built on more than two decades of compounded dissatisfaction with the West, as well as Putin’s cumulative experiences in his ongoing global campaigns to achieve his core objectives: the preservation of his regime, the end of American hegemony, and the reinstatement of Russia as a global power. Some of these ambitions were tamed, and others expedited by external events, yet their core has remained the same and often at odds with the West. The US believed that a brief period of non-assertive foreign policy from the mid-1980s  to the mid-1990s had become the new norm for Russia. This period was not the norm but an anomaly. Putin’s foreign policy has always been assertive, similar to Russia’s historic foreign policy. The US may thus find itself once again surprised by Putin. 

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) headquarters lies in a leafy northeastern suburb of Brussels, a futuristic set of buildings flying the flags of the twenty-nine member states. The organization was founded in 1949 to create a common defense against the Soviet Union, ensuring that the United States would remain committed to that defense—and equally ensuring that Western European countries would eschew conflict with each other. One of NATO’s founding fathers, Lord Hastings Ismay, 1949 explained that the collective defense alliance had three main purposes: to “keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down.” 2 The first two remained constants, but the third changed once West Germany joined NATO in 1955. It was clear that NATO was designed both to deter any possible future Soviet attack on Europe and to reassure Western Europeans that the United States would protect them.

The foundation of NATO represented a radical transformation of US foreign policy, away from its previous isolationist inclinations, which reached back to George Washington’s admonition in his Farewell Address: “Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor, or caprice?” 3 But in the mid-twentieth century, after the war, it was a very different world. Secretary of State Dean Acheson, responding to skepticism from senators who wanted the United States to resume its historic isolationism after World War Two, made both a moral and a practical case for US membership in NATO: 

We were decent people, we could keep our promises, and our promises were written out and clear enough. They were to regard an attack on any of our allies as an attack on ourselves and to assist the victim ourselves and others, with force if necessary, to restore and maintain peace and security. Twice in twenty-five years, there had been armed attacks in the area involved in this treaty, and it was abundantly clear what measures had been necessary to restore peace and security.4

What might have reassured the Europeans had the opposite effect on the Soviets. NATO was the first tangible embodiment of George Kennan’s policy of containment, which he had enunciated in his famous “Mr. X” article in 1947, amid the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe. Kennan, then head of the Department of State’s Office of Policy Planning, argued that the USSR would continue to expand its international reach if unchecked. His prescription was clear: containment of the USSR. However, he opposed the creation of NATO. 

The Soviet takeover of Czechoslovakia in February 1948 was the final act in the consolidation of Moscow’s control over Eastern Europe—and was the event that galvanized the United States and Western Europe into forming NATO. On April 4, 1949, the foreign ministers of twelve countries gathered in Washington to sign the agreement establishing NATO. The US Marine Band—perhaps presciently—played two songs from the popular musical Porgy and Bess: “I Got Plenty of Nothin’” and “It Ain’t Necessarily So.” 5 Joseph Stalin, apparently with a straight face, complained about NATO’s aggressive character, contrasting it with the ostensibly benign nature of Moscow’s intentions.6

For the first forty years of its existence, NATO proved itself one of the most successful alliances. 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 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 enduring. 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. They spent four decades seeking to exploit rifts between the Europeans and the Americans and between the Europeans themselves, hoping to weaken the alliance.

 

What did Bush promise Gorbachev?

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 joined the alliance and stationed 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 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 was the USSR 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. It 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, 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 see NATO as the “main opponent,” and 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. In hindsight, it is clear that the United States and its allies in the 1990s could not 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?

In Putin’s world, NATO expansion is presented as one of the main reasons for the discord with the West. But does Putin see NATO as the “main opponent,” and 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. In hindsight, it is clear that the United States and its allies in the 1990s could not 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 no bloc.11 In January 1990, West German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher gave 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 former East Germany.12 

The Soviet and US records of this conversation are mainly 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.13 During 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.14 He 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.15 Former 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.” 16 Since 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. Still, 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.” 17 Yet myths about what was promised persist, and claims about broken commitments have become more elaborate and extravagant as the relationship between Russia and the West has deteriorated.18

 

The decision to enlarge NATO – an extension of containment?

Was the enlargement of NATO “the most fateful error of American policy in the post-Cold-War era,” as George Kennan claimed?19 The original architect of containment had changed his mind about Russia after the Soviet collapse, urging its inclusion in the European security order, warning that its exclusion would have unforeseen, dangerous consequences. In 1992, the Warsaw Pact had gone out with a whimper. The George H. W. Bush administration faced a significantly weakened Russia and a security vacuum in Central and Eastern Europe. The Bush administration’s solution was to create the North Atlantic Cooperation Council, a NATO-led forum that included all the post-communist states. It met between 1991 and 1997 and discussed issues related to Russian troop withdrawals, but it had a large membership and diffuse agenda. In 1997, it became the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council with fifty members. But it was soon apparent that the sizeable multilateral body with so many members, even though it met the test of inclusiveness, was not coherently planned, nor did it have any real strategy. It was a temporary solution for a far more challenging issue: was it possible to create a new Euro-Atlantic security architecture in which Russia and Eastern Europe would have a role—and a firm stake?

The countries of Central and Eastern Europe, newly liberated from Soviet control and facing daunting domestic political and economic problems, were beginning to consider the security challenges they would face in the new post-Soviet world. Meanwhile, Russia was facing even more significant domestic challenges, together with adjusting to the loss of the Soviet empire. The Russian state emerged in 1992 smaller than it had been in four centuries, and without the defense perimeter provided by the other Soviet republics and the Warsaw Pact countries; it had lost the buffer states the Kremlin believed were vital for the security and safety of the Russian state—and which protected it from NATO.

 

Conclusion Part One

Putin’s public tone has mirrored this evolution. In 2000, Putin “did not see reasons that would prevent … cooperation with NATO under the condition that Russia would be treated as an equal partner” with the West.20 By 2007, he was openly attacking the unipolar world order of the post-Cold war: “It is a world in which there is one master, one sovereign … This is pernicious not only for all those within this system but also for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within … The model is flawed because at its basis, there is and can be no moral foundations for modern civilization.” 21 By 2014, Putin was justifying action against this system: “There is a limit to everything … and with Ukraine, our Western partners have crossed the line.” 21 The core concepts of his policy remained stable even as his rhetoric shifted from cautious outreach to direct criticism. 

Putin’s worldview is Russia’s foreign policy. The Kremlin’s foreign policy views largely predate the rise of Putin. However, Putin’s two decades in power have enshrined his worldview as Russia’s. Putin’s Russia—unlike its predecessors—has no state machine or elite capable of balancing out his instincts and narratives. The Soviet Politburo typically served as a counterbalance to the rulers of the Soviet Union, except for Joseph Stalin. Imperial Russia had a base of an influential elite that frequently shaped policy ideas, with notable exceptions such as Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible. Putin’s intimate circle of advisors is comparatively small, with a contingent of military and security service leaders who have climbed with him for twenty years. Not all Russians accept (let alone support) all of these foreign policy ideas, but their disagreement matters little among a population by and-large focused on day-to-day issues. Putin’s and Russia’s foreign priorities are the same, at least for the moment.

The line between narrative and belief has blurred over the last twenty years. The Kremlin’s talking points are propaganda, and it is easy to dismiss them as such. However, these narratives have been repeated and amplified for two decades. They have become self-sustaining and rebounded back into the national security debate. Even if Putin’s inner convictions differed from his rhetoric, he has imbued an entire generation—indeed, an entire national psyche—with a sense of grievance against the West. These narratives will thus inform the overall arc of the Kremlin’s foreign policy for years to come.

This started when  Yeltsin resigned and appointed Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin as Acting President on December 31, 1999. According to Yeltsin’s memoirs, he confided to Putin on December 14, 1999, that he would make the younger man acting president on the last day of the year. However, Putin had to keep that information to himself until then.

Later that same month, December 20, 1999, Vladimir Putin addressed senior officials of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) at its Lubyanka headquarters near Moscow’s Red Square. The recently appointed 47-year-old prime minister, who had held the rank of lieutenant colonel in the FSB, was visiting to mark the holiday honoring the Russian security services. “The task of infiltrating the highest level of government is accomplished,” Putin quipped.

His former colleagues chuckled. But the joke was on Russia. 

 

1. Vladimir Putin, First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait by Russia’s President (New York: PublicAffairs, 2000), 6. 

2. Lord Hastings Ismay, NATO.org, https://www.nato.int/cps/us/natohq/declassified_137930.htm. 

3. The Avalon Project, “Washington’s Farewell Address 1796,” Yale Law School website, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/washing.asp. 

4. Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), 283. 

5. Acheson, Present at the Creation, 284. 

6. Vojtech Mastny, The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity: The Stalin Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 74–75. 

7. Frederick Kempe, “Colin Powell Looks Back—And Ahead,” Atlantic Council blog, December 14, 2009, http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/colin-powell-looks-back-and-ahead. 

8. Julij A. Kwizinskij, Vor dem Sturm: Erinnerungen Eines Diplomaten (Berlin: Siedler, 1993), 34. 

9. http://static.kremlin.ru/media/acts/files/0001201612010045.pdf. 

10. John J. Mearsheimer, “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault,” Foreign Affairs, September/October 2014, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russia-fsu/2014-08-18/why-ukraine-crisis-west-s-fault. 

11. Angela E. Stent, Russia and Germany Reborn: Unification, the Soviet Collapse and the New Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), chap. 5. 

12. James Goldgeier, “Promises Made, Promises Broken? What Yeltsin Was Told About NATO in 1983 and Why It Matters,” Commentary, War on the Rocks, July 12, 2016, https://warontherocks.com/2016/07/promises-made-promises-broken-what-yeltsin-was-told-about-nato-in-1993-and-why-it-matters/. 

13. Mark Kramer, “The Myth of a No-NATO-Enlargement Pledge to Russia,” Washington Quarterly 32, no. 2 (2009): 39–61. 

14. Kramer, “Myth of a No-NATO-Enlargement Pledge,” 39–61. 

15. Michail S. Gorbatschow, Erinnerungen (Berlin: Siedler, 1995), 716. 

16. US Policy Toward NATO Enlargement: Hearing Before the Committee on International Relations, 104th Congress, 2nd Session (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, June 20, 1996), 31, https://archive.org/details/uspolicytowardna00unit. 

17. Maxim Korshunov, “Mikhail Gorbachev: I Am Against All Walls,” Russia Beyond, October 16, 2014, https://www.rbth.com/international/2014/10/16/mikhail_gorbachev_i_am_against_all_walls_40673.html. 

18. “Razshirenie NATO: Obmanuli li Zapad Gorbacheva?Radio Free Europe/ e rest.thor name and date (in russian)nozine” BBC News (Russian edition), 2017, https://www.bbc.com/russian/features-42483896. 

19. George F. Kennan, “A Fateful Error,” op-ed, New York Times, February 5, 1997, https://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/05/opinion/a-fateful-error.html. 

20. Nataliya Gevorkyan, Natalya Timakova, and Andrei Kolesnikov, [First Person: Conversations with Vladimir Putin] (Moscow: Vagrius Press, 2000), http://lib(.)ru/ MEMUARY/PUTIN/razgowor.txt. 

21. Vladimir Putin, “Speech and Following Discussion at the Munich Security Conference,” Kremlin, February 10, 2007, http://en.kremlin(.)ru/events/ president/transcripts/24034.

22. Vladimir Putin, “Address by the President of the Russian Federation,” Kremlin, March 18, 2014, http://en.kremlin(.)ru/events/president/news/20603. 

 

 

 

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