Pearls and Irritations

“… the Americans in, the Russians out and the Germans down”, as Lord Ismay, NATO’s first Secretary General, is said to have put it.

Suspicious minds

The end of WWII was an uneasy time for East-West relations. Grateful as they were for Stalin’s help, the U.S. and its allies remained wary, as Churchill’s 1946 “iron curtain” speech, showed. NATO officially came into being in April 1949. After Stalin’s death, the U.S.S.R sought NATO membership, but was rebutted for fear that it would undermine it from within.

Subsequent security measures by each side appeared suspect or menacing. Thus, the U.S.S.R reacted to West Germany’s 1955 accession to NATO by forming the Warsaw Pact, later suppressing the Hungarian revolution and repressing Czechoslovakians’ protests up to the 1968 Prague Spring. In 1961, the Berlin Wall went up.

Mounting mutual mistrust inevitably led to debilitating arms and space races, punctuated by some frightening near-misses. A period of détente ensued.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet empire, eastern European states, which had suffered Soviet aggression and repression, sought NATO membership. A weakened Russia sought its own security assurances, agreeing to united Germany’s NATO membership against assurances that it would host no foreign troops or nuclear weapons, even soliciting western advice on developing a market economy. Optimists in the West hoped for East-West friendship. But others remained wary.

Among the cautious were Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton’s second Secretary of State, and Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s National Security Adviser and then Secretary of State. Both had personal experience of authoritarian states, having fled Nazism and/ or communism. The West would attempt a middle path, encouraging and helping Russia modernise, while safeguarding its own security interests.

The 1990 Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe aimed to reassure by materially reducing European members’ defence spending and diluting NATO military functions with new political and humanitarian missions. The 1991 Rome Summit included Russia in European security and the 1994 Partnership for Peace promoted cooperation, becoming the 1997 Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security. These friendly gestures nevertheless fell well short of formal security guarantees against further NATO expansion.

Promises meant to be broken?

But there were no shortages of informal undertakings, as now-declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents show:

At the December 1989 Malta Summit, President George H.W. Bush assured President Mikhail Gorbachev that the U.S. would not use these developments to harm Soviet interests (“I have not jumped up and down on the Berlin Wall”).

A January 1990 cable from the U.S. Embassy in Bonn informed Washington that West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher proposed leaving East German territory out of NATO military structures and had stated publicly that “the changes in Eastern Europe and the German unification process must not lead to an ‘impairment of Soviet security interests’”.

A few days later, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker famously declared to President Gorbachev, “not one inch eastward”.

But the pull of western “soft power” and the push of Russia’s renowned “hard power” were hard to resist; and in 1997, overwhelmingly popular demands of Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia for NATO membership were granted. Slovenia would follow in 2004.

George Kennan in 1997 criticised it as “the most fateful error of American policy in the post-cold-war era … (that would) … impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.” the University of Chicago’s John Mearscheimer would write in 2014 that NATO expansion provoked Russia’s President Putin to annex Crimea to pre-empt a NATO naval base there.

History may seem to vindicate Kennan, Mearscheimer et al, but does it corroborate their reasons? Kaarel Piirimäe, in his 2024 article published in Diplomacy & Statecraft, contends that Kennan, despite his claims to be a “realist”, was influenced by his almost romantic attachment to Russia and its imperial history. Mearscheimer’s 2014 article, “Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West’s Fault: The Liberal Delusions that Provoked Putin”, says that global security is best served by a small number of hegemons, each with an exclusive sphere of influence. Both see in black and white a picture that on closer inspection is more nuanced.

For others, broken promises were more damaging than NATO expansion itself. Robert Gates, United States Secretary of Defence from 2006 to 2011, would criticise “pressing ahead with expansion of NATO eastward (in the 1990s), when Gorbachev and others were led to believe that wouldn’t happen.”

 Compounding the error

The 1999, illegal NATO air strikes on Kosovo affronted Russia as attacks on fellow Slavs, as French President Jacques Chirac had warned, even as they were presented as humanitarian interventions to protect ethnic Albanians from mainly Serbian aggression.

Yet, on becoming Russia’s President, Putin in 2000 still sought to normalise relations with NATO, and the 2002 Rome Declaration created the NATO-Russia Council to address the common threat of terrorism.

Still, trust was fragile: the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 also went unpunished and would critically undermine the UNSC’s role as global policeman.

Tension mounts and trust rides into the sunset

Closer to home, Georgia elected westward-leaning President Eduard Shevardnadze, prompting Russia’s intervention in 2008. Worse, Ukraine, even more valuable to Russia as a transit for its hydrocarbons, seemed to be following suit, in 2014 ousting Viktor Fedorovych Yanukovych with apparent Western encouragement, waving a giant orange flag in Russia’s face.

Whether events in Georgia and Ukraine were merely an excuse to do what he wanted to anyway, Putin declared in 2005 that the collapse of the Soviet empire was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”. He would also echo NATO and U.S. claims of “… protecting the local population from genocide, stopping an out-of-control nationalist government, affirming human rights, preventing atrocities worthy of the Nazis…”. Putin now looked south to a receptive China for diplomatic and economic support, and Hillary Clinton’s 2009-2013 “reset” fig-leaf went nowhere.

So?

Was NATO expansion responsible for Putin’s aggression in Ukraine and elsewhere, as Kennan and Mearsheimer contend? Certainly, it didn’t help, but events from 1990 to 2022 describe something more subtle: a promising reconciliation sullied by mutual suspicion, aggravated by the West’s broken promises, cavalier disregard for international law, and disregard for Russia’s sensibilities as a global power.

The powerful attraction of the West was always bound to appeal to those who had lived with Soviet authoritarianism, and Russia’s hard-power reflexes only strengthened that attraction.

Putin’s 2005 remark suggests that by then he felt the need to reassert Russia’s position as a world power, confident that the emasculated UNSC would present no real obstacle.

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