Next week, leaders of NATO member states will gather for the alliance’s 75th-anniversary summit in Washington, D.C. In a recent essay for Foreign Affairs, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg writes that Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping “hate the bloc because it has what they do not: great strength in the unity of 32 allied countries.” But Putin may also be holding a grudge. In a 2014 essay, the historian M. E. Sarotte argued that Putin resents NATO for “what he sees as the West’s broken pact over NATO expansion.” This week, we’re featuring her piece on what, in the waning days of the Cold War, Washington really promised Moscow about NATO.
The year was 1990; NATO had only 16 members. The Berlin Wall had fallen; the United States, the Soviet Union, and West Germany were “engaged in fateful negotiations over the withdrawal of Soviet troops and the reunification of Germany.” Russian officials assert that Washington formally promised the Soviet Union that the NATO alliance would not expand eastward as part of a German reunification deal—and then betrayed that promise by adding over a dozen other eastern European countries in the subsequent decades.
Secret documents from 1989 and 1990 shed new light on this controversy, wrote Sarotte. “Put simply, there was never a formal deal, as Russia alleges—but U.S. and West German officials briefly implied that such a deal might be on the table, and in return they received a ‘green light’ to commence the process of German reunification.” West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl reassured the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO’s borders would not change. “But no written agreement emerged.”
“The dispute over this sequence of events has distorted relations between Washington and Moscow ever since,” Sarotte wrote. “By design, Russia was left on the periphery of a post–Cold War Europe”—and a young KGB officer stationed in East Germany would return to Moscow “full of bitterness” at the Soviet Union’s dissolution. “His name was Vladimir Putin,” wrote Sarotte, “and he would one day have the power to act on that bitterness.” |
