I got through lunch with the former press baron, with only a tiny side-step into Brexit, which has marked me forever to 47½% of his lunch guests as an idiot, ogre, illiterate and fascist. Inevitably, it started when I tried to express some sympathy in purely factual terms with Farage’s current entanglement.
As an aside, while God knows we need British politics shaken up so that we can restore some decency, literacy, actuality, and common sense to public life, Farage is not, in my personal opinion, the man to do it, nor is Reform the party to achieve it. They are not a party, nor is he a leader, that creates a uniting vision of national common purpose. So, contrary to expectations, my overall view of Reform is negative. However, Farage is largely right on the subject of NATO and Russia, albeit he is merely parroting what many eminent experts from the world of geopolitics have been warning about since the mid-1990s. Where he is wrong is not that Russia attacked Ukraine because of the expansion of NATO, but because Putin had already decided that his legacy would be a new Russian Empire based on the old. He could use the expansion of NATO as his reason for whatever acts needed to achieve that.
I would suggest that Putin’s public position has changed a little from that of the old Politburo in November 1989: “If this is to be the new status quo, so be it – but the position we accept is at stands today not in your dreams of tomorrow.”
But let’s recap and see how we got to this.
Between 1989 and 1991, Europe experienced a massive geopolitical earthquake. The tectonic plate of the USSR fractured along its old fault lines, creating a new, potentially democratic Eastern Europe and a still communist Russia—no longer a Soviet Union—with the West deeply uncertain about the path the remnants of the USSR might take. Two questions dominated European security discussions in the years that followed. The first was about how to integrate Russia into a new world order. There were even serious discussions about inviting Russia into NATO. The second was about how far – if at all – to stretch the boundaries of NATO membership into Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet states to ensure European security after years of an expensive, threatening, and debilitating Cold War.
One wonders whether the USSR might have interpreted this latter question as a move by the pro-federalist Europeans to expand their own ambitions, using NATO as their defensive shield.
However, before all these after-shocks started to unravel large chunks of the Balkans, the Western powers had to agree on the hundreds of issues and questions surrounding the reunification of Germany. This was, of course, within the life experience of a generation that had been directly involved with a global conflict that had seen approximately 75m deaths in just six years – the worst attrition rate of any single event in history. As a daily reminder, parts of Germany were still controlled by the USSR, the USA, France, and the UK, the four victorious powers.
In the Two Plus Four discussions, the foreign ministers of those four powers and their two German colleagues negotiated the question of how to unite the two German states. Finally, at a meeting in the Caucasus in July 1990, Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl received an agreement to German reunification from the Soviet head of state, Michail Gorbachev – the USA and the European Economic Community, the forerunner of the European Union, had already welcomed reunification, prior to this date.
The foreign ministers finally signed the Two Plus Four Treaty on 12 September 1990 in Moscow. It regulated the borders as well as the future status of Germany. Two weeks later, they issued an official statement renouncing their rights and responsibilities for the still-occupied Germany. The Federal Government and the GDR government, freely elected in March 1990, had already signed the Unification Treaty between the two states on 31 August 1990, which specified the domestic political framework. However, the GDR could not formally join the Federal Republic before the Two Plus Four Treaty had clarified the foreign political aspects. A united Germany and the three Western powers quickly ratified the Two Plus Four Treaty. In contrast, Moscow took its time. After a lengthy and controversial debate in the Supreme Soviet, it also ratified the treaty on 4 March 1991. The treaty came into power on 15 March 1991 when the instruments of ratification were handed to Germany’s Federal Foreign Minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher.
This delay is important. It highlights that nothing was certain in Russian politics at that time, and that just because Gorbachev or Yeltsin declared it so didn’t make it so. It had to have approval. The principal concern throughout these negotiations and the delay to the treaty ratification was that the USSR constantly feared that the USA would expand NATO and made that fear known.
Indeed, even as the first fractures appeared across Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, the dominant Russian element of the USSR was deeply concerned about possible domestic and foreign outcomes of these fractures and the opportunistic message that might be sent to the USA. However, President George H.W. Bush had assured Gorbachev during the Malta summit in December 1989, four weeks after the Berlin Wall was taken down, that the U.S. would not take advantage (“I have not jumped up and down on the Berlin Wall”) of the Eastern European revolutions to harm Soviet interests.
Throughout this globe-trotting diplomatic process, the USSR had almost only one objective – to prevent the expansion into the defence void of their former client-states, of NATO. Nearly all the four powers’ diplomatic efforts were bent on assuring the USSR that no expansion was proposed. The first concrete assurances by Western leaders on NATO began on January 31, 1990, when West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher made clear “…that the changes in Eastern Europe and the German unification process must not lead to an ‘impairment of Soviet security interests.” Therefore, NATO should rule out an “expansion of its territory towards the east, i.e. moving it closer to the Soviet borders.” Genscher’s speech also proposed to leave the East German territory out of NATO military structures even in a unified Germany in NATO.
The Two Plus Four foreign ministers codified this latter idea of special status for the GDR territory in the final German unification treaty signed on September 12, 1990. The former notion of “closer to the Soviet borders” is written down not in treaties but in multiple memoranda of conversation between the Soviets and the highest-level Western interlocutors (Genscher, Kohl, Baker, Gates, Bush, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Major, Woerner, and others) offering assurances throughout 1990 and into 1991 about protecting Soviet security interests and including the USSR in new European security structures. On February 10, 1990, there was a meeting in Moscow between Kohl and Gorbachev when the West German leader achieved Soviet assent in principle to German unification in NATO, as long as NATO did not expand to the east. The Soviets would need much more time to work with their domestic opinion (and financial aid from the West Germans) before formally signing the deal in September 1990.
The conversations before Kohl’s assurance involved explicit discussion of NATO expansion, the Central and East European countries, and how to convince the Soviets to accept unification. For example, on February 6, 1990, when Genscher met with British Foreign Minister Douglas Hurd, the British record showed Genscher saying, “The Russians must have some assurance that if, for example, the Polish Government left the Warsaw Pact one day, they would not join NATO the next.”
Having met with Genscher on his way to discussions with the Soviets, Baker repeated the Genscher formulation in his meeting with Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze on February 9, 1990, and, even more importantly, when face-to-face with Gorbachev. Not once, but three times, Baker tried out the “not one inch eastward” formula with Gorbachev in the February 9, 1990, meeting. He agreed with Gorbachev’s statement in response to the assurances that “NATO expansion is unacceptable.” Baker assured Gorbachev that “neither the President nor I intend to extract any unilateral advantages from the processes that are taking place” and that the Americans understood that “not only for the Soviet Union but for other European countries as well it is important to have guarantees that if the United States keeps its presence in Germany within the framework of NATO, not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction.”
Afterwards, Baker wrote to Helmut Kohl, who would meet with the Soviet leader the next day, using much of the same language. Baker reported: “And then I put the following question to him [Gorbachev]. Would you prefer to see a united Germany outside of NATO, independent and with no U.S. forces or would you prefer a unified Germany to be tied to NATO, with assurances that NATO’s jurisdiction would not shift one inch eastward from its present position? He answered that the Soviet leadership was giving real thought to all such options [….] He then added, ‘Certainly any extension of the zone of NATO would be unacceptable.’” Baker added in parentheses, for Kohl’s benefit, “By implication, NATO in its current zone might be acceptable.”
And so it went on. There were reams of further interaction between Western leaders and the president of the USSR, and he was constantly reassured that NATO would not expand. For example, as late as March 1991, according to the diary of the British ambassador to Moscow, the by-then PM John Major personally assured Gorbachev, “We are not talking about the strengthening of NATO.” Subsequently, when Soviet defence minister Marshal Dmitri Yazov asked Major about East European leaders’ interest in NATO membership, the British leader responded, “Nothing of the sort will happen.” When Russian Supreme Soviet deputies came to Brussels to see NATO and meet with NATO secretary-general Manfred Woerner in July 1991, Woerner told the Russians that “We should not allow […] the isolation of the USSR from the European community.” According to the Russian memorandum of conversation, “Woerner stressed that the NATO Council and he are against the expansion of NATO (13 of 16 NATO members support this point of view).”
Thus, in effect, the Russian position has always been that, since 1991, they have consistently been lied to about the expansion of NATO. The West has continued to deny that any deal existed. Yet a huge paper trail of minutes and memoranda exists that says all parties agreed that was to be the case. What also now appears highly probable, is that somewhere in the middle of 1990, the USA had a change of tack and decided that there were too many calls from former USSR satellite states wanting to join NATO. It is also probable that the State Department concluded that a problem shared is a problem halved, and certainly, by October 1990, U.S. policymakers were contemplating whether and when (as a National Security Council memo put it) to “…signal to the new democracies of Eastern Europe, NATO’s readiness to contemplate their future membership.”
By 1993, POTUS was Bill Clinton, and at the inauguration of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in April of that year, Lech Wałeşa, hero of the Solidarity trade union protests in the 1980s and Poland’s first democratically elected president, told Clinton that “…we are all afraid of Russia”. He added that “…if Russia again adopts an aggressive foreign policy, that aggression will be directed against Ukraine and Poland”. President Vaclav Havel of Czechoslovakia made a similar point on the same occasion, expressing his sadness about “…living in a vacuum”. Havel explained: “…That is why we want to join NATO.” Neither Wałeşa nor Havel liked to publicly display their trepidations.
Neither George H.W. Bush nor Clinton needed much persuasion to exploit Russia’s weakness by pushing the boundaries of NATO in an easterly direction. It was not done immediately, and the decision-making process was tortuous because both occupants of the White House needed Russian cooperation to achieve other geopolitical objectives. They especially saw it in the American national interest to sustain Yeltsin in power. The thinking at State possibly being that whilst Communism might have fallen in Moscow in 1991, the potential for a communist resurgence in the new Russian state could not be discounted.
Unsurprisingly, Russia was incensed when Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, the Baltic states and others were ushered into NATO membership in the mid-1990s. Boris Yeltsin, Dmitry Medvedev and Gorbachev himself protested through public and private channels that U.S. leaders had violated the non-expansion arrangement. As NATO began looking even further eastward, to Ukraine and Georgia, Putin’s bellicosity and his incursions into Ukraine, Crimea and earlier, Georgia, were all justified across Russian media by NATO’s widening protective umbrella, which, in Russian eyes, could so easily become aggressive.
What Farage said was wrong when he claimed the Russian invasion of Ukraine was “a consequence of EU and Nato expansion”. It was never a consequence – it was the already decided path based on Putin’s assessment that we would never take a volatile position on Georgia and the Crimea and then later the Donbas region. Farage declared that he had been arguing since the 1990s that “the ever-eastward expansion” of the NATO military alliance and the EU was giving President Putin “a reason to [give to] his Russian people to say they’re coming for us again and to go to war…”
I believe he was correct up to that point in his statement, but then he said, “… we provoked this war. Of course, it’s [President Putin’s] fault.” Again I say the West did not provoke the war, but we were very naive if we didn’t understand the possible consequences of NATO enlargement. NATO’s move eastwards was driven by the US State Department, and that expansion was always going to be viewed as a threat by the USSR at the time and used as an excuse later. The UK did what its principal ally told it to do. When Putin took power in 1999 – remember that only ten years earlier, he had been a young KGB Colonel who had allegedly watched as his office in the Stasi HQ in Dresden was ransacked by the mob – he had already made his views on NATO, Ukraine and the former satellite states known. By failing to prevent the Crimean expansion, the West encouraged Putin’s adventurism and ambitions, and the continued enlargement of both the EU and NATO has provided him with all the PR ammunition he needs.
SOME FURTHER USEFUL READING MATERIAL
Los Angeles Times: NATO Expansion Would Be an Epic ‘Fateful Error’: By EUGENE J. CARROLL Jr July 7, 1997. Eugene J. Carroll Jr., A retired navy rear admiral, is deputy director of the Centre for Defense Information, a defence watchdog group based in Washington.
NBC News Report by Judt Augsburger April 2004