In an essay by the historian Mary Sarotte published by Yale University Press it emerges that there were only verbal commitments, never formal, not to expand the alliance in that direction
But what if you were in favor of German reunification and we agreed not to move NATO’s jurisdiction one inch to the east? James Baker said to Mikhail Gorbachev, who looked at him surprised and curious. The interview took place in the Kremlin on February 9, 1990. These were the crucial days when the future of European security was being decided. The Berlin Wall had fallen three months earlier. The Soviet empire was shaken to its foundations and Helmut Kohl had already launched his ten-point plan, which would lead to the end of the division of Germany in October. The American secretary of state had come to Moscow, to test once more the intentions of the Soviet leader, who was determined to sell dearly the few cards that remained in his hand.
Engaged in a whirlwind diplomatic circumnavigation, too often far from Washington to be in tune with the continuous evolution of White House thinking in those months where history underwent constant accelerationsBut Baker could not have known that the hypothesis he advanced no longer reflects reality. Indeed, on the same day, President George Bush Sr. sent a message to the German Chancellor, in which he proposed a special statute for East Germany in a reunified Germany as a full member of NATO, but avoided any mention of future enlargements.
Yet the conversation with Baker was probably decisive in convincing an already faltering Gorbachev. The next day, February 10, Helmut Kohl flew to Moscow for the famous meeting, in which the Soviet leader gave his green light to German reunification, obtaining verbal reassurance from the chancellor, that naturally NATO will not expand to the territory of East Germany, therefore nothing in the name and on behalf of the whole Alliance.
More than thirty years have passed since the end of the Cold War. But the misunderstanding that still today feeds insecurity and instability in the European quadrant dates back to those days. How did it really go? Was there a formal commitment not to expand the Alliance to the East?
Not just an academic debate. As George Orwell wrote in 1984, who controls the past controls the future. And in fact, the entire narrative of Vladimir Putin on the alleged betrayal of the Soviet Union by the West, which would have violated the commitment not to expand the borders of NATO, hangs from that sentence. You are not reliable partners, you renounce any previous agreement and have deployed your military infrastructure at our borders, the Kremlin head repeated several times, asking for long-term guarantees for Russia’s security, not least the exclusion of any hypothesis of Ukraine’s entry into NATO.
Few scholars have analyzed the end of the Cold War with more accuracy and rigor than Mary E. Sarotte. In Not One Inch, her third book on the subject just released for Yale University Press, the American scholar reconstructs those fatal moments, thanks also to the personal and recently accessible archives of Bill Clinton, George Bush sire, Helmut Kohl and even Mikhail Gorbachev, in addition to the notes personal and letters from James Baker, Hans-Dietrich Genscher and the then Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze. The basic thesis demonstrated by Sarotte that there was no written commitment from NATO, no Soviet leaders ever asked for anything like this. However, a gray area remains, in which everyone and above all Putin reconstructs that passage to your dome. Which does not exclude, so Sarotte, that the United States made serious mistakes, which could also have changed the course of events.
The heart of the story – explains the scholar – how during the 1990s the meaning of “not a single inch” changed dramatically, passing from Baker’s vague concession to full American awareness of not only being able to win but overwhelm the strategic match with the USSR. In reality, the change was already underway. a fact that just 14 days after Gorbachev’s s, when President Bush met Kohl at Camp David, he cleared the field of any doubts about possible mortgages on the future of NATO: In hell, in the end we won, not them.
The mistake, however, was not in the choice to leave the road open to a future enlargement of NATO, but in the way in which the enlargement was done. The problem, according to Sarotte, is thathubris American definitively put aside an alternative strategy, supported by a part of the administration, which would have allowed Ukraine to join the Atlantic Pact acceptable even to Moscow. The model of reference was Norway, the only founding member of NATO to share a border with the USSR, which while remaining protected by Article 5, never allowed Alliance bases, troops or nuclear weapons on its territory.
Unwise and far-sighted, the author explains, it was to enlarge NATO without taking into account the geopolitical reality: The more the Alliance brought its entire infrastructure (bases, troops and especially nuclear weapons) closer to Moscow, the more the damage to the new cooperation relationship with Russia increased. Some in the United States understood the problem and proposed an expansion in contingent phases in order to minimize its impact. Instead, the proponents of a single good-for-all model triumphed. Washington’s mistake was not to enlarge NATO to Eastern and Eastern Europe, but to have done so in a way that maximized the irritation of Moscow and gave a voice to the Russian reactionaries. It is no coincidence that Vladimir Putin, in 2014, justified the annexation of Crimea by saying that it was a necessary response to the deployment of NATO infrastructure on our borders. And it continues to do so today, while amassing troops on Ukraine’s borders.
In the backstage of the book, a tasty part also dedicated to Bill Clinton and the geopolitical consequences of his case con Monica Lewinsky. At the 1997 NATO summit in Madrid, the one in which the first enlargement was decided, the American president moved like a sleepwalker and appeared completely disconnected from what was happening. It seems that, before he left Washington, the girl threatened to reveal everything and there was a big fight. In the months that followed, which would lead to his impeachment, the situation worsened: Clinton was distracted, revelations limited his political room for maneuver, in the end he spent more time with lawyers than with foreign policy advisers, to the utter desperation of the Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. When testosterone and state affairs come into conflict. Sounds familiar.
January 5, 2022 (change January 5, 2022 | 21:47)
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