History Engine
An Inch to the West Marek Kobryń
According to Vladimir Putin, the Russian “special military operation in Ukraine” answers to broken assurances concerning NATO expansion. Is that indeed so? Did Western powers ever promise Russia to never move “an inch to the East”? And if so, what caused them to change their minds?
This attitude was certain to remain over the next few years, particularly in the U.S., as it was evidenced by the visit of Polish Prime Minister Hanna Suchocka to NATO headquarters in 1992. She then applied for Poland’s admission to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization only to hear from Wörner that NATO was not going to expand at that time.
NATO was founded shortly after World War II as a shield to protect its member states in case the Cold War ever went hot. However, in 1990 the Soviet Union was clearly past its glory days and it was dealing with the unforeseen consequences of political reforms brought by Mikhail Gorbachev. Suffice it to say that the diminishing power of the Soviet Union made the situation in Eastern Europe uncertain. Wanting to prevent the creation of a unified Germany under the auspices of another power, the United States agreed to talk with Soviet officials about a possible reunification of the Federal Republic of Germany, and the German Democratic Republic, and removing Soviet troops from East Germany.
Seeing what was happening in the Balkans in the early 1990s, Western politicians feared that Eastern Europe was sitting on the same powder keg. In line with this reasoning was a widespread opinion that if any new NATO members were to be eventually admitted, it should be after a sufficiently long transitional period. And then, the Polish and Czech Presidents, Lech Wałęsa and Vaclav Havel, entered the stage. At the 1993 opening ceremony of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in separate conversations with President Bill Clinton, the two heads-of-state convinced him to change his mind about Central-Eastern Europe.
As the recently declassified stenographic records of the talks revealed, such prominent figures as German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and United States Secretary of State James Baker tried to calm the Soviet Union’s fears about NATO admitting new members. Manfred Wörner, former NATO Secretary General, put it explicitly that the NATO Council and he are against the expansion of NATO. No official document prohibiting future NATO expansion was signed despite these assurances, though.
The efforts of both Poland and the Czech Republic continued beyond mere conversations. In August 1993, at the Prague Summit, President Lech Wałęsa threatened that he would not allow Poland to enter into the US-brokered Partnership for Peace program for the CEE countries if it did not include assurances of a future NATO membership.
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