4 minute read
An Inch to the West
History Engine
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Attempts to ensure Poland’s membership in NATO did not end with Wałęsa’s presidency. When asked about the greatest opponents of Poland joining NATO, Wałęsa’s successor, President Aleksander Kwaśniewski, mentioned Russia and The New York Times. The newspaper published a series of articles highlighting a possible deterioration of the United States’ relations with Russia in the event of NATO’s enlargement. These texts also stressed the unstable political situation in Belarus, Poland’s immediate neighbor, which allegedly created a possible risk of NATO’s involvement in a potential conflict with this country. Thus, The New York Times was strongly lobbying against Polish membership in NATO.
As for Russia, the United States reached an agreement with the successor state of the USSR in 1997. Russia agreed on expanding the Alliance, provided that NATO would not build permanent military bases on the territory of its new members. Thanks to the joint efforts of the authorities of the Third Republic of Poland, notably including the ambassador to the United States, Jerzy Koźmiński, former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzeziński, and the Polish community in the United States, the U.S. Senate on August 30th, 1998, voted 80 to 19 to accept Poland, along with Hungary, and the Czech Republic, as a new NATO member.
Thus, the answer to the question of NATO expansion is a complicated one. Assurances were made but no treaty forbidding NATO’s enlargement was ever signed either with the Soviet Union or with the Russian Federation. Moreover, the countries of the former Soviet Bloc, such as Poland, which fully gained independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union, were trying to join NATO, perhaps more actively than the Alliance was willing to expand.
