On our minds: The truth about a famous moment in history that supposedly explains 30 years of Russian-American enmity. |
The Story of the Broken Promise |
 | | President George H.W. Bush, left, and President Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Union in Helsinki, Finland, in 1990.Liu Heung Shin/Associated Press |
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If you have read even one article about Russia's threatening military buildup on the border with Ukraine — or, really, about any confrontation of any kind between Russia and the West since the Cold War — you will have encountered a pivotal bit of history. |
Vladimir V. Putin, Russia' s president, repeated it himself at a news conference on Thursday: "'Not one inch to the East,' they told us in the '90s. So what? They cheated, just brazenly tricked us." |
The story is that, in 1990, then-President George H.W. Bush pledged that the NATO military alliance, which encompassed most of Western Europe, would never admit Eastern countries that had been under Moscow's sway. A neutral Eastern Europe was to be the basis of the post-Cold War peace. But NATO went back on its word, admitting over a dozen Eastern European member states, including two former Soviet republics, Estonia and Latvia, right on Russia's border. The expansion forced Russia into a defensive crouch, priming Europe for 30 years of tension, right up through today. |
It's a history so often repeated that it's practically conventional wisdom. |
Except that, according to research by the Johns Hopkins University historian Mary Sarotte, no such promise was ever actually made. |
There were, in 1990, negotiations between Washington and Moscow over Europe's future. And the question of NATO expansion was discussed. James Baker, then the U.S. secretary of state, raised, as a hypothetical term, that NATO could promise to "not shift one inch eastward from its present position." |
Mr. Baker floated this term, he suggested, in exchange for a full Russian withdrawal from East Germany, over which Moscow held military and legal authority, so that Germany could reunify under West German control. |
But contemporaneous notes taken by both U.S. and Soviet negotiators, as well as archives from and interviews with participants on both sides, show that Moscow and Washington reached a different set of terms. The Americans never formally offered to halt NATO expansion, and the Soviets never demanded it. Moscow even implied that it accepted this likely outcome. |
Still, Mr. Baker's speculative offer took on a life of its own, misunderstood and misportrayed, in ways that still influence both sides' perceptions of their ongoing contest over Europe's future. |
In the 1990 meeting, Mr. Baker presented Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, with a hypothetical question: Would Moscow prefer to see a neutral Germany, free of American forces, or a NATO-allied Germany that also came with an American promise not to expand NATO farther east? |
Mr. Gorbachev expressed ambivalence, according to both his notes and Mr. Baker's, but did not take the implied offer. |
Instead, over the next several months, Washington and Moscow reached a different arrangement. |
Soviet forces would fully withdraw from East Germany, allowing Germany to reunify under NATO-allied West German control, in exchange for significant financial support from the West. The Soviet Union was in dire economic straits at the time, and Mr. Gorbachev under intense domestic political pressure. |
Mr. Gorbachev understood, and according to his own notes conveyed, that this meant accepting NATO eastward expansion. |
"I told Baker: We are aware of your favorable attitude toward the intention expressed by a number of representatives of East European countries to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact in order to join NATO later," he wrote in his notes from a May 1990 meeting, according to Dr. Sarotte's translation. |
A few months later, the treaty he signed with Washington over Germany's future included only one provision around NATO expansion: to permit it, albeit under certain restrictions, into East Germany. |
"Gorbachev sowed the seeds of a future battle, once NATO offered membership to countries east of Germany," Dr. Sarotte wrote on Twitter this week, reflecting on the episode's continued role in Russian-Western tensions. |
Mr. Gorbachev himself holds some responsibility for the confusion. In subsequent years, apparently sensing that he would be blamed for surrendering Eastern Europe, he muddied the history, telling interviewers, falsely, that the question of expansion had never come up. |
And a long series of interlocutors, American and Russian, have misportrayed those negotiations ever since, either out of confusion or in pursuit of some agenda, or both. |
The narrative of Western betrayal certainly serves Mr. Putin's agenda today. It allows him to portray his country's aggression toward Ukraine as defensive, meant to forestall an untrustworthy West that is the real aggressor. |
Whatever his agenda toward Ukraine and Europe — a matter of deep debate and uncertainty among even leading experts of the region — he has long sought to portray himself at home as defender against an implacable West. This lets him tell Russians that he is essential to their very national survival, and so must be accepted, even embraced, whatever his other failings. |
So expect to hear this story, of the broken American promise that set Europe toward conflict, many times in the coming months and years. But now you know what actually happened, and how both the reality and distortion really shape today's events. |
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