Promises come back to haunt Western powers
It was February 1990 when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and United States Secretary of State James Baker met in Moscow for talks on Germany’s future. Baker promised Gorbachev, through his interpreter, Pavel Palazhchenko, that if US troops remained in Germany after reunification, Nato would not expand ‘‘an inch to the east’’.
Three decades later, Vladimir Putin is using the apparent breach of this promise to repeatedly accuse Nato of deliberate deception.
Since 1990, Nato has almost doubled to include 30 member states, including former Warsaw Pact countries or Soviet republics. However, Palazhchenko says that Baker’s comment was related exclusively to Nato expansion into the territory of East Germany, rather than countries in central or eastern Europe.
‘‘Certainly, no promise was made as regards Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary etc. Such a promise could not be made because no-one, including the leaders of those countries, raised the possibility of them becoming members of Nato.‘‘
Although Gorbachev has criticised the US for exploiting Russia’s ‘‘weakness’’ after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he has also said that the topic of Nato expansion was not discussed in 1990.
Apart from Baker, other Western leaders gave Russia more explicit assurances. None of them, however, was ever formally recorded in treaties.
In March 1991, then-British Prime Minister John Major told Moscow that he did not foresee ‘‘circumstances now or in the future where east European countries would become members of Nato’’. Douglas Hurd, his foreign secretary, went even further, saying that there were ‘‘no plans in Nato to include the countries of eastern and central Europe in Nato in one form or another’’.
Palazhchenko says Moscow trusted that these and other verbal pledges by Western officials would be respected, and that Nato’s subsequent expansion violated the ‘‘spirit’’ of the treaty on German reunification signed with Moscow in 1990.
When he came to power, Putin’s view of Nato was initially benign, and he even suggested that Russia could one day join the alliance. By 2007, however, after two waves of Nato expansion, his stance had hardened.
Now, with Nato missile shields in Poland and Romania – which Moscow says can easily and quickly be loaded with Tomahawk cruise missiles, making them an offensive rather than a defensive weapon – Putin is portraying the topic of Nato expansion as a threat to Russia’s very existence.