by Benn Steil
“We were interested in any information about the main opponent,” Vladimir Putin explained. “NATO.”10
ON NOVEMBER 24, A FEW weeks before Kohl’s Dresden speech, nikolai Portugalov, acting as a back channel to Soviet Central Committee expert and former ambassador to West Germany Valentin Falin, met privately with Teltschik in Bonn. The Russian gave Teltschik a handwritten document titled “Unofficial Position,” positing that the time had come to free East and West Germany from “relics of the past.” The document suggested Soviet willingness to accept German unification. But if the Kohl government were preparing to pursue unification, the paper continued, it also needed to prepare for leaving both the European Community (as the EU was then called) and NATO.11
Gorbachev had privately accepted that the East German Communists, imploding under the weight of popular revulsion and infighting, were a spent political force, and had begun to reconcile himself to German unification. What he still demanded, however, was assurances that a united Germany would be neutral or nonaligned. Right up to the critical, historic East German elections on March 18, 1990, he would insist publicly that continued German membership of NATO was “absolutely ruled out.”
Washington and Bonn, however, refused to contemplate Germany leaving the alliance. Kohl sought the quickest means possible to unify Germany and embed it in NATO. The 1949 West German Basic Law provided a legal vehicle to do so simultaneously. Article 23 allowed for wholesale extension of the Basic Law to other parts of Germany upon their accession. East Germany could effectively be made part of West Germany overnight. Angry Soviet critics denounced the plan as “Anschluss,” a western annexation of the east.
Just before leaving for a meeting with Gorbachev off the coast of Malta on December 2–3, Bush consulted with former president Richard Nixon. Nixon thought Ronald Reagan had been misguided in getting too chummy with Gorbachev, given the yawning gap in strategic interests between Washington and Moscow. Gorbachev wanted “the withdrawal of all foreign troops from Western and Eastern Europe,” which was unacceptable. Bush should therefore not “negotiate German reunification or the future of NATO.” State Department counselor Robert Zoellick advised Baker to seek a “New Atlanticism and a New Europe that reaches farther East.”
Such an objective was bound to meet resistance from Gorbachev. Ending the American military presence near Russia’s borders had been a strategic priority of Stalin’s, and—in spite of glasnost, perestroika, and Gorbachev’s genuine desire for cooperative relations with the West—little in this regard had changed in forty years.
Yet when Baker met with Gorbachev in Moscow on February 9, 1990, the Soviet leader showed signs of flexibility. Baker told Gorbachev he agreed with the latter’s insistence that, following a hypothetical unification of Germany, “any extension of the zone of NATO would be unacceptable.” In a letter to Kohl summarizing the discussion, Baker indicated that Gorbachev was taking the position that Germany could unify but that “NATO’s jurisdiction would not shift one inch eastward from its present position.” This formulation suggested that Germany might keep its western part in NATO and its eastern part, somehow, outside it. Alarmed by Baker’s statement, Bush’s National Security Council staff drafted a letter, which the president sent to Kohl, clarifying that the administration would accept only cosmetic restrictions on NATO’s ability to operate in the east of the country. Such restrictions would, the NSC hoped, help Gorbachev to save face with his hard-liners without allowing Russia to control the parameters of NATO membership.12
State Department Policy Planning adviser Harvey Sicherman argued that if East Germans backed Kohl’s center-right “Alliance for Germany” coalition in the March elections, Gorbachev would ultimately have no choice but to accept full German NATO membership.13 Yet at this point the center-left SPD, which opposed early reunification and NATO membership, was widely expected to prevail. Kohl, however, still had a powerful political weapon to wield in the campaign. In 1949, the western Allies’ “currency blockade” in Berlin, declaring the deutschmark the sole legal tender, had split the city even more effectively than the Soviet goods blockade. Now, the West German chancellor would use the deutschmark to force the pace of unification.
“If the Deutschmark does not come to us, we will come to the Deutschmark!” read protest signs in the East, a month before the vote. Kohl’s allies made rapid economic and monetary union a prominent plank in their electoral platform there.14 This was good politics, practically and electorally. It would staunch the flood of westward migration, while appealing to voters anxious for the same opportunities as Germans in the Federal Republic. Among those campaigning under this banner was a thirty-five-year-old Hamburg-born chemist raised in the East near Berlin. Angela Merkel would later go on to join Kohl’s cabinet.
Kohl also thought that quick replacement of the ostmark with the deutschmark was a means to hasten the departure of Soviet troops. Gorbachev was already pulling troops out of eastern Europe, where some were selling weapons on the black market. The chancellor reckoned that the coming of West German money and consumer goods to the East would fuel resentment among ruble-holding Soviet soldiers, increasing the urgency of repatriating them. What Kohl did not know was that the soldiers had accumulated huge stocks of ostmarks. Their exchange for DM at an overvalued rate would become part of Gorbachev’s demands for withdrawing them.
On March 18, turnout for the historic election was staggering: 93 percent. And the results surprised even the ever-confident Kohl. His Alliance for Germany coalition took 48 percent of the vote, with the SPD polling only 21.9 percent. The reformed Communist SED took only 16.4 percent, and the many smaller parties split the remaining 13.7 percent. Political unification was now all but assured.
As a preliminary step, the two governments set July 1 as the date for economic and monetary union. One month after the election, on April 18, Kohl and Mitterrand issued a joint statement calling for a conference to be held in Italy before the end of the year to push forward with European economic and monetary union. A Dublin summit in June would also prepare the way for political union. Much as the Marshall Plan had envisioned in 1947, historic German economic and political reforms were serving as a catalyst for wider European integration.
His leverage collapsing, Gorbachev flailed about for ways to stop or neutralize East Germany’s absorption into NATO. In a May interview, he blasted NATO as “an organization designed from the start to be hostile to the Soviet Union.” It was “a symbol of the past, a dangerous and confrontational past.” He proposed a new pan-European security institution to replace it, a vision Baker complimented dismissively as “an excellent dream, but only a dream.” His preferred option rejected, Gorbachev tried to sell him on the idea of a united Germany belonging to both NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Baker called it “schizophrenic.” As a last resort, Gorbachev reasoned, if he couldn’t beat NATO expansion he would join it. Since the alliance was allegedly no longer directed against the Soviet Union, why not allow his country to become a member as well? Again, Baker demurred, urging that they focus on the immediate issue of Germany’s status in NATO.15
Desperate to secure concessions for his acquiescence, Gorbachev entered into a summer of difficult negotiations with Kohl. On September 10, they struck a deal acceptable to Washington. Soviet forces would transition out of eastern Germany over a period of up to four years, during which NATO forces would (subject to technical exceptions) stay out. Germany would, in spite of howls from its Finance Ministry, pay Moscow DM 12 billion ($7.43 billion), and lend it another DM 3 billion interest-free, to support the removal of its 400,000 troops.16
A few weeks later, on October 3, 1990, Germany became, once again, one country. The Warsaw Pact shrank by one member. NATO moved eastward, filling the gap. Gorbachev worried it would not stop there.
ON THE AFTERNOON OF JUNE 5, 1997, to warm applause from amidst a sea of caps and gowns, the secretary of state rose to approach the podium. An immigrant whose family had fled the Czechoslovak Communist coup
in 1948, whose father had been a diplomat under foreign minister Jan Masaryk, Madeleine Albright had chosen the time and place for her message carefully. For it was “on this day 50 years ago,” she told the young men and women, that George Marshall had addressed the graduating class at Harvard.17
Marshall’s “words were plain, but his message reached far beyond the audience assembled in this yard.” He spoke to “an American people weary of war and wary of new commitments, and to a Europe where life-giving connections between farm and market, enterprise and capital, hope and future had been severed.” It was here that he planted the seeds of his plan.
Unlike in Marshall’s day, however, Washington was not now offering Europe aid or a path to economic and political integration. This role had been left to a reluctant European Union, itself in part an outgrowth of the Marshall Plan. Instead, it was offering something Marshall had hoped economic assistance could avoid: extending American military commitments.
Albright had come to Harvard to tout NATO enlargement. In one month’s time, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary—three former Warsaw Pact members—would be invited to begin accession talks. Numerous others, including former Soviet republics, were also queuing up. Yet “this will not, as some fear,” Albright insisted, “create a new source of division within Europe. On the contrary, it is erasing the unfair and unnatural line imposed half a century ago.”
Marshall’s “vision,” she stressed, “was inclusive, leaving the door open to participation by all, including the Soviet Union.” This statement was true, though disingenuous. The only part of Marshall’s speech that drew interruptive applause was that warning indirectly against Soviet obstruction. Whereas Marshall had indeed left the door to participation open to Moscow, he did so on the basis of George Kennan’s assurance that Stalin would slam it shut. The State Department framed the invitation, in Chip Bohlen’s words, so to “make it quite impossible for the Soviet Union to accept.”18 Moscow would then bear the blame for dividing Europe. Kennan was right; Stalin took the bait, denouncing the plan and forbidding participation from eastern Europe.
Albright’s task was trickier. Russian president Boris Yeltsin hated the new American plan, just as Stalin had hated Marshall’s plan. But he also knew Russia was not strong enough, this time around, to stop eastern Europe from joining. And so he insisted, like Gorbachev before him, that if NATO were going to move eastward—which he denounced as “a mistake and a serious one”19—Russia, too, must have the right to join.
Washington’s new friends in the Visegrád countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia), however, not to mention the U.S. Congress, would never abide Russia’s inclusion. Eastern Europe had struggled too long, and at too great a cost, to escape Russia’s grasp. “To tame the bear, you must put him in a cage and not let him run free in the forest,” insisted former Polish president Lech Wałęsa. And so Albright struggled to convey a confusing message: that Russia was a friend, against whom NATO would protect Europe.
IN TRYING TO ASSURE THEIR Russian counterparts that NATO was not a threat, State Department officials took it for granted that legitimate Russian interests, in an era following glasnost and perestroika, should not clash with NATO interests. But this view presumed that the problem of the Cold War had been driven by Marx, and not Mackinder. Ideology and not geography.
It was a view George Kennan had sought to dispel half a century ago. “At bottom of [the] Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs is [a] traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity,” he wrote in his Long Telegram. Vast, sparsely populated, and with huge transport challenges, Russia’s natural tendency was to fracture. Looking outward, Russia was a “land which had never known a friendly neighbor.” Its defining characteristic was indefensibility. No mountain ranges or bodies of water protected its western borders. In consequence, it suffered repeated invasions over centuries. These features encouraged the emergence of a highly centralized and autocratic leadership obsessed with internal and external security. Communists had been just one variety of such leadership, peculiar to the age in which they emerged.
The country’s western borders are a particular source of inherent vulnerability. The European landmass up to Russia’s borders constitutes a large peninsula surrounded by the Baltic and North Seas to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, and the Black Sea to the south. Russia, in contrast, has few maritime outlets. The Arctic Ocean is remote from its population centers. The country’s few ports are largely unusable in the winter. Turkish waters to the south, like Danish waters to the north, can be blocked easily. During the Cold War, Norwegian, British, and Icelandic airbases also hindered Russian access to the sea.
Situated on a vast European plain with few natural barriers against enemies to the west (see Map 5), Russia has never been comfortable within its borders. It had been contained by France and Britain in the latter half of the nineteenth century—in the Balkans, the Middle East, India, and China—well before Kennan made “containment” a household word. Its defensive options being limited, its military doctrine has historically been offensive. It has sought to dominate its neighbors as a means of preventing the borderlands from being used against it by other powers. In the words of Truman State Department official Louis Halle, Russia manifests a “historic impulse to push back” against “the encircling danger” through “the enlargement of its empire.”20 Whereas the West sees Russian fear of invasion as groundless, history has shown Russian leaders that foreign intentions are typically hidden or fluid.21 There would always be Napoleons and Hitlers. Each age brings new existential threats. After World War II, the threat was, from the Kremlin’s perspective, capitalist encirclement led by Washington and its West German puppet regime.
The incorporation of Ukraine and Belarus (1922)22 and the Baltic countries (1940) into the Soviet Union, and the creation of buffer states further east after the war, bolstered Russian security at the expense of that of the West. Splitting control of Germany created the only stable equilibrium, one that survived four decades. Once Moscow lost control of Berlin in 1989, however, Russia’s defensive frontier collapsed, back to borders further east than they had been since the eighteenth century.23
No longer able to control his country’s rebellious neighbors, Gorbachev presided over the dismantling of the Warsaw Pact’s integrated military structure on February 1, 1991. He tried to sustain the grouping as a political entity, yet found no takers. It was dissolved on July 1. He pressed the outgoing members for commitments that they would not join NATO or the EC, but this plea also failed.24
Soon after, top members of his government, including Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov and Defense Minister Dimtry Yazov, determined to prevent the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself, decided to take radical action. Yazov, who had virulently opposed East Germany’s absorption into NATO, told Bush’s national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, on July 31, that “NATO was the threat” which now concerned Russia.25 On August 19, he and his fellow conspirators detained Gorbachev and took power. But the coup collapsed in three days, dramatically boosting the authority of newly elected Russian president Boris Yeltsin and undermining that of Gorbachev. Ten Soviet republics, including Russia, declared independence in the four months that followed. Subjectless, powerless, Gorbachev resigned on Christmas Day. Before the year was out, the Soviet Union would be no more.
The new democratically elected leaders of eastern Europe saw NATO membership as a vital guarantee against future threats from Russia. “We are all afraid of Russia,” Lech Wałęsa told Bush’s successor, Bill Clinton, at the White House on May 4, 1993. “If Russia adopts an aggressive foreign policy, that aggression will be directed against Poland and Ukraine.”26 Providing such guarantees was, in turn, valuable to Washington in tamping down a threat perception that, left unchecked, might give rise to authoritarian nationalism in newly democratic states.
Yeltsin’s aides, however, were no more accepting of NATO expansion than Yazov had been under Gorbachev. They stre
ssed to the United States that it would be a historic error. Russian defense minister Pavel Grachev warned that his countrymen saw the alliance as a “monster directed against Russia.” Deputy Foreign Minister Georgy Mamedov told Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott that “NATO, in Russian, is a four-letter word.” Foreign Intelligence Service head Yevgeny Primakov, who would later become foreign minister and prime minister, argued that NATO expansion would necessitate a more robust Russian defense posture and budget. “This is not just a psychological issue for us,” he insisted. “It’s a security question.” Moscow’s Council on Foreign and Defense Policy27 warned that NATO enlargement would make “the Baltic states and Ukraine . . . a zone of intense strategic rivalry.”28 Yeltsin himself said that the United States was “sow[ing the] seeds of distrust.” For a Russian leader to “agree to the borders of NATO expanding toward those of Russia,” he told Clinton, “would constitute a betrayal of the Russian people.”29
“Did those who so advocated NATO expansion give any thought to the configuration of political forces in Russia at that time?” Gorbachev asked rhetorically, years after leaving power. “Was the West really blind to the kind of sentiments NATO expansion aroused among influential circles in Russia?” These plans were “seized on by those in favour of confrontation with the West, and [those] intent on using the ‘external threat’ to their own advantage.”30
Many American observers had foreseen the problems NATO expansion would create. “The result may stimulate hostile Russian responses,” warned historian and political scientist Ronald Steel. “This would be particularly likely if the accommodationist Yeltsin government is succeeded by a more nationalistic and self-confident one.”31
Russian concerns were authenticated by U.S. ambassador to Moscow Thomas Pickering, who insisted that Russians would, whatever the administration’s intentions, interpret NATO expansion as being directed against them. It could, he argued, produce the very Russian actions it was presumably designed to guard against.
