Not One Inch Eastward? Bush, Baker, Kohl, Genscher, Gorbachev, and the Origin of Russian Resentment toward NATO Enlargement in February 1990

Extract

One of the biggest sources of tension between the United States and Russia today is the enlargement of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), to countries that were either Moscow's allies in the Warsaw Pact or part of the Soviet Union itself. During the Cold War, Leningrad was roughly twelve hundred miles away from the edge of NATO; now (as St. Petersburg) it is less than a hundred, thanks to the membership of Estonia.1 Present-day Russian officials insist that the United States, by enabling and supporting this expansion, has broken promises made during the era of the George H. W. Bush presidency and German unification, when the Soviet Union came to an end.

Ron Asmus, a Clinton State Department official who helped to enlarge NATO, remembers being continually confronted by these claims; Moscow firmly believed that it had “received assurances from the United States, France, and the United Kingdom that NATO enlargement would go no further than eastern Germany.” This view has become conventional popular wisdom. In The New York Review of Books, security analyst George Friedman argued that the Russian invasion of Georgia in the summer of 2008 was a reaction to the fact that “George H.W. Bush … had promised the Russians that NATO would not expand into the former Soviet empire.” Russian leader Vladimir Putin was trying to push back and reestablish a sphere of influence, he argued. Similarly, Bill Keller told readers of The New York Times that the invasion was Putin's “existential payback” because the United States had “charm[ed] away his neighbors.”2