9. “Not One Inch”: The NATO Expansion Debate
What actually drove the post-Cold War expansion of NATO?
The decisions to expand NATO into the post-Soviet space in the late 1990s and early 2000s were hotly debated at the time in the US and NATO allies. There were some prominent critics, including Mearsheimer, and the secretary of defence in the Clinton administration, William Perry.
But none were more distinguished than George F. Kennan, the post-war American ambassador to Moscow, whose 1946 "long telegram" back to Washington argued for the policy of "containment" of the Soviet Union that dominated American policy during the Cold War. This is one of the “go to” sources for critics of NATO expansion to the present day, including Professor Mearsheimer in his 2014 article in Foreign Affairs Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West’s Fault
In an article Kennan penned for the New York Times in 1997, and a subsequent interview with journalist Thomas L. Friedman, Kennan strongly opposed NATO expansion, then being supported by the Clinton administration, arguing it would seriously aggravate relations with Russia and restore Cold War tensions.
Has he been vindicated? It is important to note that he also contended that the policy was completely unnecessary, saying in the interview:
… there was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else … Russia's democracy is as far advanced, if not farther, as any of these countries we've just signed up to defend from Russia.
This claim, made during the Yeltsin years when relations with the West were at their most apparently benign, has not aged well, to put it mildly. It is interesting to note also that Kennan opposed the decision to create NATO in the first place on the ground it would promote authoritarianism in the US as well as conflict abroad.
To what extent did the Russian leadership feel militarily threatened by NATO expansion? Professor Kimberly Martin of Columbia University conducted a study that considered this question in 2020. From her conclusion:
There is no question that Russia—its leaders, expert analysts, and public—reacted negatively to NATO enlargement right from the start. But there is little evidence that NATO's enlargement per se was the primary cause of Russia's concerns or fears about the West. There is no evidence of a direct Russian military reaction, and Russian experts knew that enlargement actually made NATO harder to defend.
If instead the claim is that NATO enlargement indirectly caused the downturn in Russia's relationship with the West, there are too many confounding factors, none directly related to enlargement and most centred on a loss of Russian influence over security decisions. NATO enlargement was a blunt instrument to harangue the West, including in a propaganda campaign…
Putin himself, when asked in 2002 about the Baltic states joining NATO, indicated he was not too fussed about it, that while he was sceptical it would produce benefits, it was “no tragedy”. This is confirmed by Michael McFaul, who as a senior adviser on Russia policy to the Obama administration was the architect of the Russian reset policy and went on to serve as US Ambassador to Russia from 2011 to 2014, attended numerous meetings with Putin and senior Russian officials. According to McFaul “I can’t recall a single time when NATO expansion came up.”
A recurring claim from the Russians, and their Western apologists, is that the US and its NATO allies violated an agreement with the Soviet government in 1990 that, as a trade-off for Soviet acquiescence to the reuniting of Germany, there was an undertaking that NATO would expand “not one inch” to the East.
In a speech on14 June 2024 Putin repeated this claim:
They responded to our justified questions with excuses, claiming that there were no plans to attack Russia, and that the expansion of NATO was not directed against Russia. They effectively forgot about the promises made to the Soviet Union and later Russia in the late 1980s and early 1990s that the bloc would not accept new members. Even if they acknowledged those promises, they would grin and dismiss them as mere verbal assurances that were not legally binding.
James Baker, the US secretary of state at the time of the 1990 negotiations was James Baker, who denies that any such undertaking was given. Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he, you might reply. However, in an interview in October 2014, the Soviet leader at the time Mikhail Gorbachev effectively confirms this. Gorbachev was asked:
One of the key issues that has arisen in connection with the events in Ukraine is NATO expansion into the East. Do you get the feeling that your Western partners lied to you when they were developing their future plans in Eastern Europe? Why didn’t you insist that the promises made to you – particularly U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s promise that NATO would not expand into the East – be legally encoded? I will quote Baker: “NATO will not move one inch further east.”
To which Gorbachev replied:
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. Not a single Eastern European country raised the issue, not even after the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist in 1991. Western leaders didn’t bring it up, either. Another issue we brought up was discussed: making sure that NATO’s military structures would not advance and that additional armed forces from the alliance would not be deployed on the territory of the then-GDR after German reunification. Baker’s statement, mentioned in your question, was made in that context. Kohl and [German Vice Chancellor Hans-Dietrich] Genscher talked about it.
Everything that could have been and needed to be done to solidify that political obligation was done. And fulfilled. The agreement on a final settlement with Germany said that no new military structures would be created in the eastern part of the country; no additional troops would be deployed; no weapons of mass destruction would be placed there. It has been observed all these years. So don’t portray Gorbachev and the then-Soviet authorities as naïve people who were wrapped around the West’s finger. If there was naïveté, it was later, when the issue arose. Russia at first did not object.
The outcome of these negotiations was an agreement, the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany, signed in September 1990. This treaty makes no reference to restrictions on future NATO expansion. At the time of these negotiations, the breakup of the Soviet Union seemed only a distant possibility (it happened on 26 December 1991), and the Warsaw Pact was still extant. As Gorbachev notes, an undertaking was given as part of the treaty that no non-German NATO forces, or nuclear weapons, would be deployed on the territory of the old GDR (East Germany). As Gorbachev acknowledges in the same interview, these undertakings were scrupulously adhered to.
It should be added that in the same interview, Gorbachev expresses the view that the expansion of NATO was a serious mistake and was “definitely a violation of the spirit of the statements and assurances made to us in 1990.”
So, a violation of the spirit of the assurances given, says Gorbachev. What was the nature of such assurances, especially the one that NATO would not advance “one inch” to the east?
The definitive book on the expansion of NATO following the demise of the Soviet Union is a 500-page tome titled Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate (2021), by Mary E. Sarotte. Sarotte is a post-Cold War historian at the Institute of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.
Echoing Gorbachev, Sarotte concludes that “while Moscow’s claim was wrong in substance, it had psychological weight.” She contends that “the expansion of NATO was a justifiable response to the challenges of the 1990s and the entreaties of new Central and Eastern European democracies.”
In her view, the problem was how it happened. In the conclusion to the book she describes an approach, based on a program called Partnership for Peace launched by NATO in 1994, which would give the new members a transitional status that would enable them to gain experience working with NATO and receive the full protection of Article 5 of the NATO treaty over time. This, she thought, would have been less provocative to the Russians, but secure the same ultimate result.
In his 14 June 2024 speech cited in Chapter 2, Putin implies that the “not one inch” assurances were real enough, though verbal and not confirmed in the final German reunification agreement. If that were true, why on earth would it not have been put into black letters in the final agreement?
In reality, there was no such agreement. The not-one-inch statement was expressed as a hypothetical that Baker put to Gorbachev at an early stage of the German negotiations that stretched from January through to July 1990, with the agreement finally being signed in September. Here is Sarotte’s description of the framing:
Would you prefer to see a unified Germany outside of NATO, independent and with no U.S. forces,” he [Baker] asked, presumably framing the option of an untethered Germany in a way that Gorbachev would find unattractive, “or would you prefer a unified Germany to be tied to NATO, with assurances that NATO’s jurisdiction would not shift one inch eastward from its present position?”
According to Baker, Gorbachev replied as follows: “Certainly, any extension of the zone of NATO would be unacceptable.” This included the eastern part of Germany. That is the context in which the not-one-inch language was used by Baker and was initially endorsed by German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and foreign minister Hans-Deitrich Genscher.
That however was not the end of the story. When these discussions were reported back to staff members of the National Security Council in Washington, concerns were raised about the practicality of having NATO’s jurisdiction restricted to one part of the country—it was thought to be unworkable. A letter was prepared for President George H. W. Bush that proposed a special military status for eastern Germany as an alternative to keeping it out of NATO.
As to the broader issue of NATO expansion, President Bush put the definitive kibosh on the no-expansion position at a meeting between US and German leaders at Camp David on February 24-25, saying:
To hell with that! We prevailed, they didn’t. We can’t let the Soviets clutch victory from the jaws of defeat.
The discussion then turned to the question: How to placate Gorbachev, to achieve his acquiescence to the prospect of NATO expansion?
The solution, proposed by Kohl and agreed by Bush, was to offer Gorbachev a substantial financial assistance package, at a time when Russia was facing severe financial problems. The package included 12 billion Deutsch marks notionally to cover the cost of rehousing Soviet troops withdrawn from East Germany, plus an addition 3 billion in interest-free credit. As Robert Gates, then US deputy national security adviser rather colourfully put it, the goal was to “bribe the Soviets out.” And it worked.
Here is Sarotte’s summation:
Bush and Kohl had guessed correctly: Gorbachev would, in fact, eventually bow to Western preferences, as long as he was compensated. Put bluntly, he needed the cash.
…
Contrary to the view of many on the U.S. side, then, the question of NATO expansion arose early and entailed discussions of expansion not only to East Germany but also to eastern Europe. But contrary to Russian allegations, Gorbachev never got the West to promise that it would freeze NATO’s borders.
Rather, Bush’s senior advisers had a spell of internal disagreement in early February 1990, which they displayed to Gorbachev. By the time of the Camp David summit, however, all members of Bush’s team, along with Kohl, had united behind an offer in which Gorbachev would receive financial assistance from West Germany—and little else—in exchange for allowing Germany to reunify and for allowing a united Germany to be part of NATO.
Recall also that, as Gorbachev understood it, the 1990 negotiations were solely concerned with the status of the territory of the old GDR. This was shared by the Soviet foreign minister at the time, Eduard Shevardnadze, who stated “the idea of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact dissolving and NATO taking in former Warsaw Pact members was beyond the imagination of the protagonists at the time.”
This process calls to mind Otto von Bismarck’s famous quotation likening legislation to sausages—the less you know about how they are made, the more you will like them. But that was the outcome of the 1990 negotiations: There was no undertaking by the US and NATO to refrain from expanding NATO eastwards.
Moreover, the Soviet Union had already agreed, as a signatory to the Helsinki Final Act of 1975 that states:
… have the right to belong or not to belong to international organizations, to be or not to be a party to bilateral or multilateral treaties including the right to be or not to be a party to treaties of alliance; they also have the right to neutrality.
This right was reaffirmed when Russia, the recognized successor state to the Soviet Union, ratified the NATO-Russia Founding Act of 1997, which endorses:
Respect for [the] sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of all states and their inherent right to choose the means to ensure their own security, the inviolability of borders and peoples' right of self-determination as enshrined in the Helsinki Final Act.
This act was one of a number of measures designed to provide reassurance to Russia. In 1996, NATO declared it had “no intention, and no reason to deploy nuclear weapons on the territory of new members.” The NATO-Russia Founding Act incorporated these statements, as well as similar undertakings in regard to substantial combat forces and infrastructure.
And, far from the West setting out to humiliate Russia in its weakened post-Cold War state, important steps were taken to integrate it into the international community, including entry to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organisation. In 1998 Russia was admitted to the Group of Seven (G7) of the world’s top market economies, only being excluded in 2014 after its first act of direct military aggression against Ukraine.
Annoying and uncomfortable that might have been to Russia—maybe even a tad humiliating—but the idea that NATO expansion posed an existential threat to the Russian state has only surfaced recently in the context of Ukraine, to serve as a justification for Russia’s invasions of that country in 2014 and 2022.
Here is the irony. In 2014, prior to the Russian annexation of Crimea and incursion into the Donbass that started in February of that year, the issue of Ukraine joining NATO was pretty much dead. Public sentiment was clearly against it. At the Bucharest NATO summit in 2008, six member nations opposed admission for Ukraine and Georgia, with both France and Germany strongly opposed. Bear in mind admission requires unanimity of all NATO member states.
The weakly worded statement envisaging Ukraine’s eventual admission at some unspecified time was generally viewed as a sop to the Americans. The former US ambassador to NATO, Robert Hunter, summed up the position in a comment on an article in Foreign Policy magazine:
Even when the alliance in an accidental miscue in 2008 said that Ukraine and Georgia "will become members" of the alliance, the words were to forestall a US effort to move them rapidly into the alliance. Most Europeans were horrified at bringing either country into NATO and giving them security pledges, hence a form of words that in good European diplo-speak, meant "never.”
The trigger for the Maidan revolution (aka the Revolution of Dignity), which began in late 2013 and came to a violent culmination the following February as Russian-trained police snipers killed over one hundred demonstrators and President Viktor Yanukovych fled the country in disgrace rather than face the parliament (which voted 326 to 0 to remove him), was not NATO membership but Ukraine’s impending signing of an accession agreement to join the European Union.
Indeed, up until December 2014 Ukraine’s written constitution prohibited Ukraine from allowing foreign troops to be stationed on its territory, and from joining a military alliance. Russia’s aggression provoked an immediate change in sentiment on the part both of the population and the political leadership.
The vote to remove these provisions and pursue NATO membership was approved by 303 votes of the 450 member Rada (parliament). An explanatory note to the legislation, moved by the new President Petro Poroshenko, explained the change of position:
…the Russian Federation's aggression against Ukraine, its illegal annexation of Crimea...its military intervention in eastern regions" and other forms of pressure created the need for "more effective guarantees of independence, sovereignty, security, and territorial integrity.
So, we see, the main driver of Ukraine’s interest in joining NATO was—as with Finland and Sweden—Russia’s aggressive behaviour. And can anyone reasonably blame the Ukrainians?
There is a broader point to be made here. According to Russian propaganda, echoed by Mearsheimer, NATO was intent on pushing its frontiers eastward into the former Soviet/Warsaw Pact space. More colourfully, Mearsheimer says “we’re the United States, we’re super powerful and we’re going to shove it down their throat.” So, once again, the United States is the super-powerful agent, indeed the only power that genuinely has agency, the driving causal factor behind NATO’s expansion.
There are several problems with this. For a start, unlike the Warsaw Pact, an alliance into which previously independent states were coerced into membership, NATO is a voluntary association. The newly sovereign democratic states of central and eastern Europe had to apply for membership and had to meet a range of exacting criteria before they could be admitted.
And apply they did, with alacrity. According to Brookings scholar and former Russia adviser to the National Security Council during the Trump administration Fiona Hill, they needed no shoving, desperate as they were to get under the umbrella of Article 5 of the NATO Charter which states “an attack on one is an attack on all”:
[Putin] claims that NATO compelled eastern European member countries to join the organization and accuses it of unilaterally expanding into Russia’s sphere of influence. In reality, those countries, still fearful after decades of Soviet domination, clamored to become members.
Or, as Mary Sarotte puts it in Not One Inch, “the expansion of NATO was a justifiable response to the challenges of the 1990s and to the entreaties of new central and eastern European democracies” (she does go on to argue it could have been done better, however).
So, a response to the entreaties of the new democracies, rather than “shoving” from the United States. Recall that Mearsheimer does not accept that these states have the sovereign right to join a protective military alliance, despite Russia having signed an agreement, the NATO-Russia Founding Act of 1997, that explicitly acknowledged that they do have such a right. Sovereign rights, in Mearsheimer’s view, are the prerogative of great powers only, and hence these entreaties should have been ignored. And, as noted earlier, Mearsheimer holds this true not just for military alliances but economic arrangements and a country’s system of political governance—he sees promotion of liberal democracy as an equally illegitimate activity.
Why were they so desperate? What were they worried about enough that, having gotten free of coerced membership of one military alliance, they would be so anxious to join another? After all, things seemed fairly benign back in the 1990s when President Yeltsin was running things. Recall George Kennan’s puzzlement about this, expressed in his 1997 interview with the New York Times:
… there was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else … Russia's democracy is as far advanced, if not farther, as any of these countries we've just signed up to defend from Russia.
If things were going that well in Russia, why would they think they needed protection against it? What did they see about developments in Russia that Kennan, the veteran diplomat and author of the Cold War containment strategy, did not?
There were some disturbing indications, even in the early Yeltsin years. In 1993 Russian troops were illegally inserted into the Transnistrian region of Moldova, ostensibly to protect the ethnic Russian population. They have remained there since, despite Moldova having declared a policy of non-alignment since 1994.
Russia raised the stakes in Moldova following the annexation of Crimea in 2014, accusing the country of violating the rights of Russians in Transnistria. Dmitry Rogozin, Russia’s minister for military industry tried to collect a petition of citizens in the contested region calling for Transnistria to join Russia as an enclave (on the Kaliningrad model). When he was prevented from doing this Rogozin threatened to return in a TU-160 bomber aircraft.
Then there was the outcome of Russia’s first free legislative elections in December 1993, in which the party led by nationalist extremist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the farcically named Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, scored the highest percentage of the vote at 22.92 percent, winning 64 seats in the Duma.
But most significantly, there was the First Chechen War launched in 1994 to suppress Chechen separatists. According to Sarotte in Not One Inch:
Yeltsin initiated what he thought would be a “high-precision police action” against those separatists. But the movement of troops into Chechnya on December 11 instead started a protracted, bloody conflict that horrified leaders of countries near Russia.
Volker Rühe [then German foreign minister] was particularly disgusted when he learned that the Russian army sent recently drafted, poorly trained, “half-drunk soldiers into Grozny,” who committed unspeakable acts of brutality. The gruesome start to what became the First Chechen War revealed, in the words of the US embassy in Moscow, “the weaknesses of the Russian state and the tragic flaws of its first democratically elected president.”
The bloodshed had far-reaching consequences. Despite the military’s mistakes in Chechnya, Yeltsin nonetheless came increasingly to rely on the “power ministries,” meaning the military and the heirs to the KGB, all of whom opposed cooperation with the West.
The final and most important point: Yeltsin’s growing reliance on the power ministries, the security services and law. In an important new book, From Red Terror to Terrorist State: Russia’s Secret Service and its Fight for World Domination from Felix Dzerzhinsky to Vladimir Putin (November 2023) by the Russian-American historian and former KGB colonel Vladimir Popov (who defected to the West in the 1990s), the authors give an account of an ongoing contest for power between the communist party elites and the KGB and its predecessor organisations of various initials starting with the notorious Cheka founded in 1917 by Felix Dzerzhinsky (the authors use the synecdoche Lubyanka for these variously named entities).
This conflicts with the conventional wisdom in the West that the security agencies were always subordinate to the party. This contest was definitively resolved with Putin’s rise to power in 2020.
By Felshtinsky and Popov’s account, the fall of the Soviet Union and the demise of the communist party finally cleared the way for the security agencies to assert complete supremacy. In the 1990s, every significant political figure, especially the main “reformers”, were assigned a former KGB (now FSB) officer shadow to monitor, influence and if possible, control them.
Putin was assigned to Anatoly Sobchak, the Governor of Saint Petersburg, a well-known reformer who died in mysterious circumstances in February 2000. Putin subsequently took up duties at the Kremlin, and then became head of the FSB before being appointed as Prime Minister in August 1999.
The authors claim that, as the inevitable day of Yeltsin’s retirement approached, the Lubyanka provided a troika of potential successors as Russian president: Yevgeny Primakov, Sergei Stepashin, and Vladimir Putin, all with strong security state links. The rest, as they say, is history, and with Putin’s ascendancy, a historically unique construct came into being:
This book is intended to set out that the state headed by Putin—based on the omnipotence of the intelligence services and personal loyalty—has no analogies in world history and is a result of the Chekists’ struggle for power since 1918.
No other country in the world has ever been led by their intelligence services and utilizes a mafia-style relationship between the State and the business world. Putin is without doubt the primus inter pares, but he is not the source of the Kremlin’s ideas and attitudes.
The wellspring of those in power, no matter what you call them—Chekists, mafia, clan, junta, organized crime(?)—are the Russian intelligence services, located next to the Kremlin in the FSB building known as Lubyanka.
This is the Russian state entity that was taking shape during the 1990s, when people in the West optimistically hoped that Russia’s transition to democratic rule was secure and permanent. Those with long histories under the Russian heel, in some cases going back centuries as with Poland and the Baltics, would have been warily observing these developments. Can anyone blame them for wanting to join NATO?
And what would have been their fate had they not, and been left in the same security grey-zone as Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova?