UKRAINE CRISISDid the West Promise Moscow NATO Would Not Expand? It's Complicated.
Did the United States, thirty years ago, promise Russia that if Russia agreed to Germany’s unification, NATO “would not expand one inch eastward”? The belief that the United States made that promise, and then betrayed it, continues to form a central grievance in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s narrative about Moscow’s ties with the West.
Some myths go back millennia.
This myth, if it is one, goes back to 1990 — and just over three decades later, it continues to form a central grievance in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s testy narrative about Moscow’s ties with the West.
It’s the question of NATO expansion — an unhealed scab that, with Russian-Western relations at their lowest ebb since the Cold War, has been picked off yet again and is now bleeding into public view.
Casting the issue into the spotlight this time was not an angry tirade from Putin but a report by the London-based think tank Chatham House, which, in a May 13 publication, aimed to dispel a host of what it called “myths and misperceptions” that have shaped Western thinking and kept it from establishing “a stable and manageable relationship with Moscow.”
One “myth” in particular kicked off a furious debate in e-mail threads, chat rooms, listservs, and on Twitter: “Russia was promised that NATO would not enlarge.”
“The U.S.S.R. was never offered a formal guarantee on the limits of NATO expansion post-1990,” John Lough, the research associate who authored the section, wrote. “Moscow merely distorts history to help preserve an anti-Western consensus at home.”
Nikolai Sokov, a former Russian diplomat who served in the Foreign Ministry in Moscow between 1987 and 1992, disagrees. “The Chatham House piece is very bad — it sounds to be as a piece produced by the Ideology Department of the Central Committee” of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he told RFE/RL.
“We didn’t have to come to this, though, and the issue could have remained a small script in history that does not need to be resolved,” he said. “It is more about the manner of NATO enlargement and the arguments used to promote enlargement.”
And so, more than two decades after NATO’s original 16-member Cold War composition was first enlarged to take in three former Warsaw Pact states, and with Putin poised to potentially stay in office into the 2030s, the past is very much present.
“We are still debating it because the proponents of enlargement believe they acted honorably and helped millions of people who had been under Soviet domination achieve their freedom,” said Jim Goldgeier, who served on the National Security Council under President Bill Clinton in the 1990s.
